Fw: Questioning the Inca Paradox

----- Original Message -----
From: "Portside Moderator" <moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG>
To: <PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG>
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2011 12:36 AM
Subject: Questioning the Inca Paradox

> Questioning the Inca Paradox
> Did the civilization behind Machu Picchu really fail
> to develop a written language?
> By Mark Adams
> Slate
> July 12, 2011
> http://www.slate.com/id/2298567/
>
> Historic Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, PeruWhen the Yale
> University history lecturer Hiram Bingham III
> encountered the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru 100 years
> ago, on July 24, 1911, archaeologists and explorers
> around the world (including Bingham himself) were
> stunned, having never come across a written reference to
> the imperial stone city. Of course, the absence of such
> historical records was in itself no great surprise. The
> Inca, a technologically sophisticated culture that
> assembled the largest empire in the Western Hemisphere,
> have long been considered the only major Bronze Age
> civilization that failed to develop a system of writing-
> a puzzling shortcoming that nowadays is called the "Inca
> Paradox."
>
> The Incas never developed the arch, either-another
> common hallmark of civilization-yet the temples of Machu
> Picchu, built on a rainy mountain ridge atop two fault
> lines, still stand after more than 500 years while the
> nearby city of Cusco has been leveled twice by
> earthquakes. The Inca equivalent of the arch was a
> trapezoidal shape tailored to meet the engineering needs
> of their seismically unstable homeland. Likewise, the
> Incas developed a unique way to record information, a
> system of knotted cords called khipus (sometimes spelled
> quipus). In recent years, the question of whether these
> khipus were actually a method of three-dimensional
> writing that met the Incas' specific needs has become
> one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Andes.
>
> No one disputes that the Incas were great collectors of
> information. When a battalion of Spanish conquistadors,
> led by the ruthless Francisco Pizarro, arrived in 1532,
> the invaders were awed by the Inca state's organization.
> Years' worth of food and textiles were carefully
> stockpiled in storehouses. To keep track of all this
> stuff, the empire employed khipucamayocs, a specially
> trained caste of khipu readers. The great 16th-century
> Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León recalled that
> these men were so skilled that "not even a pair of
> sandals" escaped their annual tallies. The Spaniards,
> who were no slouches themselves in the bureaucracy
> department-Pizarro's landing party included 12 notaries-
> observed that the Incas were remarkably skilled with
> numbers. For many years during the 16th century, says
> Frank Salomon, a professor of anthropology at the
> University of Wisconsin, Inca khipucamayocs and Spanish
> accountants would square off in court during lawsuits,
> with the khipu numbers usually deemed more accurate.
>
> Detail of an Inca-era khipu Individual khipus seem to
> have varied widely in color and complexity; most of the
> surviving examples generally consist of a pencil-thick
> primary cord, from which hang multiple "pendant" cords.
> From those pendants hang ancillary cords called
> "subsidiaries." One khipu has more than a thousand
> subsidiary cords. Sixteenth-century eyewitness accounts
> describe khipucamayocs studying their khipus intensely
> to access whatever details had been recorded on them.
> According to Spanish chronicles of the 1560s and 1570s,
> some khipus appeared to contain information of the sort
> that other cultures have typically preserved in writing,
> such as genealogies and songs that praised the king. One
> Jesuit missionary told of a woman who brought him a
> khipu on which she had "written a confession of her
> whole life."
>
> The Spaniards' institutional response to this singular
> accounting system, originally benign, shifted in 1583,
> when Peru's nascent Roman Catholic church decreed that
> khipus were the devil's work and ordered the destruction
> of every khipu in the former Inca empire. (This was the
> heyday of the Spanish Inquisition, and the church was
> making a major push to convert natives from their
> pantheistic state religion.) By the middle of the 17th
> century, Spanish accounts, the only historical sources
> available from that time, began to cast doubt on the
> idea that the khipus had ever been "read" like texts.
> Instead, the knots on khipus came to be viewed as
> mnemonic prompts analogous to the beads on Catholic
> rosaries, cues that supposedly had helped the
> khipucamayocs recall information that they had already
> memorized. Some scholars argued that a khipu could have
> only been understood by the same khipucamayoc who'd made
> it. Andean cultures secretly continued to use knotted
> cords to record information well into the 20th century,
> but the links between modern cords and Inca khipus
> aren't clear. What's certain is that no one in recent
> history has been able to fully interpret an Inca khipu.
>
> The conquerors' mnemonic theory held sway for three
> centuries, and was buttressed in 1923, when the
> anthropologist L. Leland Locke analyzed 42 khipus at the
> American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
> Locke demonstrated how the knots represented the results
> of tabulations. These figures were grounded in the
> base-10 decimal system (tens, hundreds, thousands), and
> so were analogous to the beads on an abacus. Despite the
> evidence from 16th-century eyewitness accounts, the
> academic community accepted the hypothesis that the
> Inca, who had built the world's largest highway system
> and eradicated hunger in an empire of more than 10
> million people, never managed to express their thoughts
> in written form.
>
> In 1981, however, the husband-and-wife, archeologist-
> and-mathematician team of Robert and Marcia Ascher put
> the Inca Paradox into doubt. By closely analyzing the
> position, size, and color of the knots in 200 khipus,
> they demonstrated that about 20 percent of them showed
> "non-arithmetical" properties. These cords, the Aschers
> argued, seemed to have been encoded with numbers that
> might also represent other information-possibly some
> form of narrative.
>
> A khipu maker's work box, Inca eraThe question that Inca
> scholars have grappled with since is whether or not the
> khipus constitute what linguists call a glottographic or
> "true writing" system. In true writing, a set of signs
> (for example, the letters C-A-T) matches the sound of
> speech (the spoken word "cat.") These signs must be
> easily decoded not just by the person who writes them,
> but by anyone who possesses the ability to read in that
> language. No such link has yet been found between a
> khipu and a single syllable of Quechua, the native
> language of the Peruvian Andes.
>
> But what if the khipus don't fit neatly into the precise
> criteria established for true writing? It's possible,
> says Wisconsin's Salomon, that khipus were actually
> examples of semasiography, a system of representative
> symbols-such as numerals or musical notation-that
> conveys information but isn't tied to the speech sounds
> of a single language, in this instance Quechua. (By
> contrast, logographic languages such as Chinese and
> Japanese are phonetic as well as character-based.) The
> Incas conquered a huge number of neighboring peoples in
> a short time span, between 1438 and 1532; each of these
> groups had its own language or dialect, and the Incas
> wanted to integrate those new territories into their
> hyperefficient organizational network quickly. "It makes
> sense that they'd use a system that could transcend
> languages," Salomon says.
>
> If khipus are examples of semasiography, the obvious
> next step is to break their code. Nearly a decade ago,
> Gary Urton, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at
> Harvard, began the Khipu Database project (KDB), a
> digitized repository of 520 khipus. (831 khipus are
> known to exist worldwide.) Urton has argued that khipus
> contain vastly more information than once believed-a
> rich trove of data encoded in each cord's colors,
> materials, and type of knot. The KDB may have already
> decoded the first word from a khipu-the name of a
> village, Puruchuco, which Urton believes was represented
> by a three-number sequence much like an Inca ZIP code.
> If he's correct, the system employed to encode
> information in the khipus is the only known example of a
> complex language recorded in a 3-D system. Khipus may
> turn out to be something like bar codes that could be
> "scanned" by anyone with the proper training.
>
> The easiest way to know for certain if the khipus were a
> form of writing would be to find the Inca equivalent of
> the Rosetta Stone: a khipu paired with its written
> Spanish translation. Because of the limited number of
> khipus-only a fraction of the amount of material
> available to the researchers who decoded the Egyptian
> and Maya hieroglyphs-this has long been thought
> improbable. It's not impossible, though. A couple of
> decades ago, a 1568 real-estate document turned up in a
> Cusco archive that showed that Machu Picchu had once
> been a royal estate belonging to Pachacutec, the
> greatest Inca emperor. In the 1990s an Italian
> noblewoman claimed to have discovered a khipu with its
> translation among her family papers in Naples. Thus far,
> these controversial "Naples documents," initially a hot
> topic of speculation among historians, have turned out
> to be a dead end.
>
> Then just last year, what may prove to be the most
> important evidence yet turned up in a tiny mountain
> village in Peru. Sabine Hyland, a professor of
> anthropology at St. Norbert College, found a "khipu
> board," a device Mercederian missionaries used to keep
> track of information such as attendance of natives at
> mass. The board, which dates from the 19th century,
> lists 282 names. Next to 177 of them is a hole with a
> corresponding khipu cord. While the board was created
> centuries after the Spanish conquest, its cords' various
> color patterns are similar to those found in khipus from
> the Inca period. Hyland has since located a second khipu
> board and plans to study both in depth later this year.
>
> This is probably not an Inca Rosetta Stone. Hyland's
> early guess is that the strings don't represent the
> names exactly, but instead record mundane details like
> which residents of the village played a role in a
> holiday pageant or donated a sheep to the local fiesta.
> But if they do resemble 16th-century khipus as closely
> as she thinks they might, their decoding could at the
> very least be proof that the Incas used a semasiographic
> system. Such a breakthrough could begin to rewrite the
> narrative of a civilization whose history has been told
> almost entirely by the very conquerors who set out to
> erase it. It would also serve as a reminder to future
> researchers: Don't mistake your own lack of imagination
> for deficiencies in the cultures you study.
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
> on the left that will help them to interpret the world
> and to change it.
>
> Submit via email: portside@portside.org
>
> Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3
>
> Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq
>
> Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe
>
> Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive
>
> Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3772 - Release Date: 07/18/11
06:34:00