You've jumped to a reasonable but incorrect conclusion: that only colonial writers wrote about the Incans. In fact, we know that Incans did write in khipus about other Incans, including in the colonial era after the conquest, because Spanish-speaking writers tell us so. So why can't we just read the Incans' own accounts, including from before the conquest? There are two major reasons:

1. We don't know how to read khipus except for numbers. Even that knowledge was rediscovered rather than being preserved and passed down to current archæologists. There's debate over whether there was even a systematic written language encoded in the non-arithmetic khipus at all. Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. And maybe the features of khipu such as fiber colors that aren't known to encode any information actually don't encode any information.

2. The Spanish eventually banned khipu making as a form of idolatry and burned all the khipu they could find. So the surviving khipu corpus is very small, about 1400 texts.

So, a great deal of detailed historical information about the late Inca empire and early colonial era was definitely recorded in khipu, but most of it was burned, and we will probably never be able to read the rest; possibly nobody ever could have.

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IAmBroom 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else.

That is the sort of things linguaphiles do, like JRR Tolkien, and certain highly neurodivergent people, but in general that's not something a general population would do.

By definition, it still wouldn't make them literate even if true: "I can only read and write my own writing."

	▲	kragen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's actually very common in our own society for children to make up "secret codes" for their own use or to communicate with a single friend, and notation systems limited to a small affinity group are fairly common even in societies like ours where they have to compete with a standard written language: baseball game records, knitting notation, cross-stitch notation, chess notations, mechanical dimensioning and tolerancing, electronic schematics, shorthands, cement chemist notation, Perl, hobo signs, and so on. If you've ever worked in a company that is more than a few years old, even something as small as a diner, you can probably think of two or three notational systems used only within that company. In our society, at least, it's not just highly neurodivergent people. I don't agree that being literate in a writing system nobody else uses is equivalent to not being literate.

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WalterBright 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A couple things argue against widespread literacy.

1. The khipu appear to be slow and complex to make. It seems unlikely they'd be used to jot down thoughts, and so there wouldn't be that many. Compare with clay tablets, that clearly could be inscribed quickly and easily with a stick.

2. Easily erasing all knowledge of them argues against widespread literacy.

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edmundsauto 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t see how point 2 follows, given the context. Anywhere from 30-95% of the population was dead from disease and warfare - literacy becomes a luxury in those situations.

Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests or 70% and for everyone?

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kragen 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, also, 120 years after the conquest, 100% of everyone who was alive before the conquest was dead. Transmission of complex systems of knowledge between generations generally requires organized training programs, which were labeled idolatrous, and the penalty for failing to report them to the village priest was to burn in Hell for eternity. Nevertheless, we have khipu that were made centuries later, and the article claims that in some remote areas the art did not die out until the 20th century.

I agree that knotting a khipu looks significantly slower than writing with reeds on clay tablets or with pens on papyrus, vellum, or paper. You can knit or crochet at around 5 Hz, but nålbinding, hand-sewing, and macramé are significantly slower, and the khipu looks like it would be more similar to those techniques. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFeYJ2uukrQ you can see Karin Byom making 7 nålbinding stitches in 30 seconds, about 250mHz, 20× slower than knitting or crochet. At that speed you could write about four digits per minute (250 millibits per second), compared to about 60 (4 bits per second) with west Arabic numerals and a pencil.

But there are Chinese and cuneiform characters with dozens of strokes; medieval scriptoria wrote fairly slowly, both because blackletter is fairly elaborate (especially Fraktur) and in order not to waste precious vellum; and a fair bit of the Egyptian hieroglyph corpus is literally carved into stone.

So, while slow writing systems are at a real disadvantage when it comes to producing large corpora, it's not clear that that factor alone dooms you to having a total surviving corpus that you could lift in one hand. And it certainly doesn't argue against widespread literacy, since a khipu once knotted can be read any number of times.

To be quantitative about it, the simplest wordwise probability model of English (assuming the probability that each word is independent of previous words) is about 10 bits per word, so even using the known inefficient numeric khipu encoding, you could write about 20-30 English words per hour in khipu just by assigning a number to each one. You could write down the 271 words of the Gettysburg Address in a day. This is not useful for a shopping list, but certainly for recording historical events, propaganda, contracts, proverbs, laws, or hymns.

Some of the postcolonial khipu epistles do encode spoken language, possibly inspired by Spanish writing with Latin letters, but I don't know anything about the encoding.

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IAmBroom 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests

Sure, if you completely redefine "widespread" to mean "very highly limited", your statement is true.

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WalterBright 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> from 30-95% of the population was dead from disease and warfare - literacy becomes a luxury in those situations.

Such a wide range means they have no idea.

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kragen 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, we really have very little idea indeed of what the immediate pre-Columbian population of America was. There was an academic consensus for generations that it was pretty sparse, but there's some strong new evidence that it wasn't, so there's a whole big debate going on now. Of course it's a highly politicized issue!

I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_In... isn't up to date, but it is a decent introduction to the debate.

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WalterBright 2 days ago | parent [-]

The estimates I've seen, just for North America, range from 12m to 120m, though the latter number is absurd.

	▲	kragen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, both ends of that range are way too high for North America, but about right for America as a whole. You could imagine a civilization that fed 100 million or even 600 million people on food raised on North American arable land, and in fact such a civilization actually exists today, feeding about 600 million people; North America is a net exporter of food, and its population is about 592 million. Currently that's being done with industrial agriculture mining phosphate rock and fixing most of its nitrogen with the Haber–Bosch process because that is far less labor-intensive than the alternatives, but some varieties of biointensive cultivation are actually almost competitive with current industrial agriculture when you measure by yield per acre instead of yield per hour of work. However, biointensive agriculture didn't exist 500 years ago any more than the Haber–Bosch process did, there's no archæological evidence there for such dense populations, and as far as I know no mainstream archæologist suggests a pre-Columbian population of North America anywhere close to 100 million.