Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu

Inka Writing

Inka Writing F I V E Robert Ascher Within the company of civilizations, the Inka have, for too long, been set apart as the one civilization without writing. Here I show that the Inka did indeed have a writing system.To begin, I retell the story of the first major confrontation between Spaniards and the Inka—an encounter in which a book played a key role. W R I T I N G S Y S T E M S If one had to choose a place and a time to mark the start of the downfall of the Inka state, it would surely be the plaza in the town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. Let us follow Prescott’s (1900: 378–412) version of what happened there on that day. Early in the morning, Atahuallpa, the head of the Inka state, and his entourage were on the outskirts of town. The Spaniards , led by Francisco Pizarro, were in the town’s triangular plaza. Through a messenger, Atahuallpa informed Pizarro that he would meet him in the plaza. Having already decided the previous day to take Atahuallpa prisoner, Pizarro stationed his army, with its guns and horses, in the large wide-doored hallways of the plaza’s buildings. Late in the afternoon, Atahuallpa, elevated on a litter and surrounded by his supporters, entered the plaza. With the stage thus set, Vicente de Valverde, a Dominican friar, stepped forward with a Bible in his hand and addressed Atahuallpa. He talked about the death and resurrection of Jesus, the authority of the pope over all earthly powers, the Spanish monarch whom the pope had commissioned to convert 1 0 4 Robert Ascher native peoples, and Francisco Pizarro who was here now to execute that mission . Atahuallpa replied that he was the subject of no man, that the pope must be insane to think that he could give away the land of others, and pointing toward the west, Atahuallpa exclaimed that his God, the Sun, was still alive. Atahuallpa then demanded to know by what authority the Dominican spoke. Atahuallpa was handed the Bible, and after turning some pages, he threw it to the ground. Pizarro then waved a white scarf, the prearranged signal to attack. A massacre followed: within an hour, Atahuallpa was taken prisoner and hundreds of his followers were everywhere dying on the plaza’s ground. In watching Atahuallpa throw the Bible to the ground, the Spaniards witnessed what they took to be an insult to their religion. In fact, Vicente de Valverde said as much while Pizarro was preparing to wave his scarf. Beyond the presumed insult, the Spaniards saw the act of a person of the highest rank within his own community who, in their eyes, could not read or write. Then and now, literacy together with differences in technology and biology has been the wedge used to separate the ‘‘them’’ from the ‘‘us,’’ with the clear connotation that the ‘‘them’’ are inferior (Pattanayak 1991). The literacy section of the wedge swelled in prominence during the waning years of the twentieth century. It is likely that the Cajamarca Bible was a Gutenberg type-printed book. Just seventy-five years prior to the confrontation, the so-called Latin Bible, the first book printed in Europe with movable type, was issued in Mainz, Germany . By 1474, this way to make books in large numbers had reached Spain (Jennett 1967: 24–25), where it was put to good use (McLuhan 1962: 225– 227). It seems that the plaza confrontation took place at a moment in history —and with a prime symbol of that moment in hand—that, according to some (Eisenstein 1979; Havelock 1986; McLuhan 1962; Ong 1982), would signal a division in the world’s cultures. In this newly divided world, people who used alphabetic print would be placed to one side; everybody else would be on the far side. The alphabetic-print people are supposed to think differently , and presumably better, than other people. The notion that human cognition changes with the introduction of writing , and then changes even more dramatically after the advent of alphabeticprint media, at first reinforced entrenched views of a nonliterate/literate divide . But recently, and for the first time, ideas based on the presumed divide were put to the test. Evidence gathered from anthropological, linguistic, and psychological perspectives, and accumulated from around the world, now suggests that the differences that separate oral and literate peoples are some- [3.141.27...