Writing of the INCAS

The writing of the Incas is the quipus or the tocapu, two traditional systems that were used to write and tell their history. The incas were one of the most important towns of the American continent before the European colonization, being so relevant that the only people outside the Mesoamerican culture that had influence in their own region after the conquest.

One of the most interesting elements of the Incas is their writing, since through this we have been able to discover many of the main sources that tell us about them. For all these reasons, in this lesson from a Teacher we are going to offer a summary of the writing of the incas.

Index

1. The problem of Inca writing
2. What writing did the Incas have? Theory 1: The Quipu
3. The tocapu, the second theory about Inca writing
4. Who were the Incas?

Inca writing is one of the most complicated to analyze throughout history, since we hardly have texts that help us to know what his type of writing was. This lack of accounts makes it almost impossible to know the Inca script as such, and many scholars even consider that It is possible that the Incas did not have writing as such, since they consider it very strange that no text will reach our time.

Other historians consider, on the other hand, that the Incas had to have writing, since they were a highly developed culture and that they must have some way of recording their history in an written. That is why many of these researchers have tried to find in the inca sources some kind of writing, looking for something that might help a future understand how his writing worked.

Historians have spent decades investigating about the types of writing that the Incas would have, being for now two theories that have the greatest possibilities of being related to the writing of this South American people. These theories are related to the quipus and the tocapus.

Of all the theories that speak of a possible Inca writing, the best known and most important of all of them is that of the quipu. Today it is considered that the most possible writing for the Incas was the quipu, being a information storage system that met the requirements of writing in Inca society.

The quipu were an instrument information storage consisting of a series of cotton or wool ropes, generally with a great variety of colors, provided with knots. Of the quipu we know for sure that they were used for various tasks such as accounting or the story of ancient Inca citizens that had some relevance. But some authors also consider that it could have been used as a writing or graphic system.

We must understand that the quipu were not a system that was in the hands of the entire population, but that the inca administrators they were the only ones capable of deciphering them, making it impossible for the common people to understand the messages of these fabrics.

Currently, it is considered that the quipus may be comparable to Inca writing, since by using the ropes you can achieve more than 8 million combinations, since depending on the color, the distance, the type of rope or even the position, the meaning could be very different, thus achieving a huge variety of possible meanings. Some authors even consider that each one could mean a consonant of the Quechua, thereby forming a writing system different from the usual one.

He used the quipus It disappeared after the arrival of the Spanish to the American continent, causing many of the most relevant elements of these to have disappeared over time, and we can never have information about them.

In unProfesor we discover what were the languages ​​of the incas.

Image: Peru Travel

To continue with this lesson on writing of the incas, we must talk about the second most common theory that exists about the possible writing of the Incas, being the so-called tocapus or tocapos.

The tocapo or tocapo are a set of squares with geometric decoration that appear in different elements of the Inca empire, such as in vessels, glasses or textile elements. The presence of the tocapu in these elements has led many authors to consider that it could be a kind of lost writing of the Incas, being possible that it was used for a form of graphic communication.

Nowadays there are many historians who are studying the tocapus to try to decipher their symbols, since they think that by deciphering it completely they will be able to find out how the writing of the incas. The idea is that each tocapu symbol could define a letter, something similar to what happens with Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the sources are so limited that it seems impossible to decipher all this possible writing.

The lesser presence of the tocapu has led them to be considered a possible source of writing. less relevant than the quipu, although from what we currently know it would be a system more similar to those we currently know in other cultures than the quipu system.

He Inca empire, also known as the Inca Empire, was the largest empire in the entire American continent before the arrival of the European colonizers, occupying for centuries a large part of most of the South American nations that we know today, but having its main headquarters and cultural center in the Peruvian zone and in the Andes, the latter being an important part of their culture.

The origin of the Inca people can be traced during the thirteenth century, being when it began to have a great expansion in the South American area, since until then they had been a series of small cultures with little relevance. From that moment is when it began to be a powerful empire.

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• Silverman, G. (2011). Inca writing: the geometric representation of Pre-Columbian Quechua. Ex novo: magazine d'historia i humanitats, 37-49.
• De la Jara, V. (1970). The solution of the problem of Peruvian writing. archeology and society, (2), 25-35.
• Ramirez Fierro, M. d. R. (2012). The Inca writing system. The being and the weather forecast. Philosophy without autopilot.