Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> Some researchers had speculated that literacy might have been widespread in Inca society, but Hyland’s discovery is the first physical evidence. Previously, “We had to rely on written documents by colonial era writers after the Spanish conquest,”

If literacy were widespread, why did only colonial writers write about them?

View on HN

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.

> 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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

The conquistadors burned most native writings they could find, and didn't necessarily write down what they were burning. They also killed a lot of people, along with European disease, there were not many people left who were able to write, and writing carried risks.

I didn't think the Incas had a writing system at all? That's why they used the ropes.

Literacy can mean being able to read but not write, which seems to have been pretty common in the past.

In this context, literacy would probably be constrained to accounting or similar forms of record keeping, rather than literature as we know it nowadays.

Or at least that's the mainstream theory about quipus today, although their content is still being disputed today.

Do we normally say Europeans or Chinese were literate 400 years ago, even with woodblocks and printing presses? Some people knew how to read and write and do math, sure, but would we call them literate societies? Even at 10% proficiency we don't tend to call societies literate.

400 years ago China was a literate society with mass printing of pornographic novels written in the vernacular and literacy rates probably approaching 50%. Parts of Europe were similar.

As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.

It's estimated that even during the Q'ing dynasty, literacy rates were at or below 10%. Over 90% of people were rural four centuries ago. No way you had country bumpkins being able to read and write. Same for Europe. You may have had 30% literacy in the few towns/cities, but those were by and large a small proportion of the populations --most people lived in rural areas doing farming and related activities.

Your incredulity is due to Whig history and imagining late medieval and early modern China as being the same as Europe, but in fact they were quite different.

The Qing dynasty (or Ch'ing in Wade-Giles, but never Qing) caused a disastrous collapse in literacy rates, as a matter of intentional policy, bringing the literacy rate well below 1% by the end of the dynasty. But we were talking about 400 years ago, which was the Ming dynasty, when literacy was indeed widespread even among "country bumpkins", though still far from universal. Many authors writing in vernacular Chinese at the time included prefaces explaining that their work was directed at all of the "four classes", one of which (though not the lowest) was those rural farmers.

There was a lot of variation even within Europe; literacy in medieval rural shtetls was nominally a prerequisite for adulthood for men, for example, and universal primary education dates back to the Talmudic period. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_me... for more details.

About medieval Europe more generally, https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... and https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-litera... look plausibly informative.

Literacy among "country bumpkins" was nearly universal 300 years ago among the New England colonists, fueled by movable-type printing and the Protestant rejection of priestly intermediaries, despite lacking the Imperial civil service examination system or the rabbinate as an incentive to study.

> but never Qing

This should read "but never Q'ing". As written it is nonsense.

Sweden became literate during the 1600s with most people being able to read at the end of the century and the elite were certainly literate before then.

Khipu literacy doesn't produce permanent documents like European writing - it's a tactile recording system using knots that would degrade over time, and Spanish colonizers systematically destroyed khipus as part of their cultural suppression campaigns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com