Deep in the heart of an Andean village, hidden in a wooden box in a secret chamber under the altar of the colonial church, lie two quipus, the knotted and coloured cords used as ‘writing’ and regarded as sacred by the villagers who guard them today. These mysterious cords are not the precolonial creations of the Incas that may be encountered in museums. Instead, they were created in the 1780s as revolutionary epistles sent from one community to another, calling for a revolt in the name of ‘the Inca emperor’, the recently executed José Gabriel Condorcanqui, known as Túpac Amaru II. In these two colourful and sensuous texts, we see the ancient and modern Andean art of quipu-making united with the worldwide revolutionary fervour of the late 18th century, making them in effect a pair of historical documents that testify to the regional and global dimensions of knowledge in a small Peruvian village. This piece will focus on one of these two epistles – the Yacapar quipu, created during the festival of Corpus Christi in 1782 and signed with the lineage (ayllu) name of its creator, Ciriaco Flores of the neighbouring hamlet of San Mateo de Otao.

Quipus have long occupied a central place in the European imagination concerning ‘ancient’ South American forms of knowledge. In the 16th century, for example, the Jesuit scholar José de Acosta argued that the Andean knotted texts were a defective form of writing, inferior to Mexican hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, not to mention alphabetic scripts. In Françoise de Graffigny’s wildly successful novel Lettres d’une péruvienne (Letters from a Peruvian Woman), published in 1747, quipu missives were the means by which the heroine, Zilia, communicated with her beloved fiancé Aza.¹ Later in the 18th century, the inventor Raimondo di Sangro, prince of Sansevero, asserted that quipus represented the original mark of Cain in the Bible and thus were the oldest form of writing, corresponding to the common human language spoken before the fall of the Tower of Babel.² Yet while writers such as Sansevero and Graffigny popularised romantic views of quipus in Europe, the knotted cords continued to be used in the Andean highlands, in some places until the 20th century. Throughout the Spanish colonial period and beyond, quipus could be integrated into a chain of record-keeping that included written ledgers and account books. In the case of the Yacapar quipu, the corded text provided a means for rebels to communicate secretly.

The community leader, Mercedes Moreyra Orozco, along with other authorities in San Juan de Collata, the village where the quipus have been treasured for over two centuries, invited us to study the two objects. In 2015, funded by a grant from the National Geographic Society, we made the hair-raising journey through the mountains to arrive at Collata, located at an elevation of 3,416 metres in Huarochirí Province, Peru. We were permitted to examine the quipus over the course of two days, under the watchful eyes of two experienced herders, Huber Brañes Mateo and Javier Núñez Torres. The secret box containing the quipus also holds 37 specially prepared goat-hide folders with over a hundred manuscripts, the earliest dating from 1645. Most of the colonial documents are correspondence between the community authorities and the viceregal government; there are also reports of local administrators, inventories of church property and protracted lawsuits against neighbouring communities over land rights. Many Andean communities maintain village archives of 19th- and 20th-century documents, but the manuscripts in Collata’s sacred archive are unusually old and plentiful. Indeed, Collata is one of the few remaining villages in the Andes where colonial manuscripts and quipus are known to be preserved together.

Quipus are twisted cord devices that were used for communication and recording information in the Andes during the Inca Empire (c.AD 1400–1532), throughout the early modern or Spanish colonial period and even into the 20th century. During the Inca period, quipus were employed for recording numerical data, such as tribute amounts and demographic information; however, Spanish chroniclers wrote that these cords also encoded narratives, such as royal biographies, and were sent as letters from one leader to another. While we can read the numbers on about two-thirds of the quipus known to exist and have gained some understanding of accounting quipus, Andean narrative quipus remain a mystery. Notably, the Collata examples are, as far as we know, the first ever identified as narrative letters by the descendants of their creators.

Both Collata quipus have a traditional Inca format: a top cord from which hang multicoloured pendants. In the Yacapar quipu, the top cord is about two feet long and has 288 pendants in shimmering shades of yellow, red, blue, green, white, black, grey, purple, pink, orange, golden brown, light brown and dark brown, with combinations of up to four colours together in a single pendant. Huber and Javier identified the animal fibres used to make the pendants (in order of decreasing frequency): vicuña, alpaca, guanaco, llama, deer and an Andean rodent known as a vizcacha. Huber insisted that the difference in animal fibre was meaningful, and he referred to the quipus as ‘a language of animals’. In many cases, the only way to distinguish the type of fibre was by touch, and the herders insisted that we remove our gloves to handle the quipus with our bare hands. The pendants are differentiated not only by colour and fibre type but also by the direction of their final twist – 58 per cent are twisted to the right (S ply), while 42 per cent are twisted to the left (Z ply). Ply direction is known to be meaningful in quipus and this ratio is nearly identical to that of Inca-period animal-fibre quipus: 59 per cent to 41 per cent.

In Collata, when a man first accepts a major communal responsibility, such as sponsoring the festival in honour of the Virgin of the Assumption, he is shown the contents of the hidden archive. Senior men inform the younger ones that native leaders made the quipus as epistles (cartas) about their wars on behalf of the Inca emperor in the 18th century. They say that the quipus were created around the time of a legendary local chief, Pedro Cajayauri, whose signed letter to colonial authorities, dated 1757, is kept with the other manuscripts.

Led by Felipe Velasco Túpac Inca Yupanqui, a cousin of José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II, in 1783 the people of Collata joined an insurrection that had convulsed the Southern Andes. Túpac Amaru’s capture and execution in May 1782 had seemed to signal the end of the unrest, but Felipe Túpac Inca nevertheless encouraged his followers by telling them that Túpac Amaru’s execution or quartering in the plaza at Cusco had been a fiction. The Inca emperor, he claimed, had escaped and was living in the lowland kingdom of Paititi with over four thousand jungle warriors at his command.

Felipe Túpac Inca, the leader of the 1783 uprising, was born in Cusco around 1753, the son of Don Juan Velasco Túpac Inca Yupanqui and Doña Gregoria Túpac Amaru. His parents were both natives of Cusco and members of the indigenous elite of the former Inca capital. Through his father, Felipe claimed descent from the emperor Túpac Inca Yupanqui; through his mother he was related to Túpac Amaru II. At the age of seven, Felipe moved to Moquegua to live with relatives before relocating to Lima, where he eventually began a relationship with the widowed mestiza Manuela Marticorena.

In Lima, Felipe lived with Manuela, her children from her former marriage and their daughter Lorencita, next to Manuela’s store on the Plaza de la Buena Muerte, located in the historic centre of Lima in what is today the neighbourhood of Barrios Altos. Manuela sold religious items, including statues, paintings and prints of Christ and the saints, along with wooden crucifixes. Felipe had a workshop in the store where he painted and decorated religious objects, creating many of the pieces for sale in Manuela’s shop. One of his specialities was cutting mirrors to use as decorations on shrines and holy images, earning him the nickname ‘Mirror Maker’ (‘Espejero’).

For years prior to the 1783 rebellion, Felipe travelled throughout the northern Huarochirí region, in Collata and elsewhere, hawking his religious wares and repairing shrines and sacred artefacts. According to witnesses, he openly began to organise the rebellion in Huarochirí in the latter half of 1782. Felipe preached that the Indians of the land must free themselves of their oppression by the viceroys, corregidores de indios, and the secular priests, creating a new kingdom in which all men are ‘brothers … those of [our] nation as well as Spaniards, Blacks, sambos and all castes without any inequality of persons’ (‘hermanos … asi de su nación como españoles, negros, sambos y todas castas sin desigualdad de persona’).³ His declarations of the equality of men resonate with similar declarations of other revolutionaries across the Americas and Europe at this time. Felipe proclaimed himself the royal representative of his cousin, Túpac Amaru II, demanding that he be treated with the same respect and obedience owed to the Inca monarch in the jungle. Elegantly attired in a lilac blue silk frock coat, with mauve frills, black velvet breeches, silk hose, white boots, a tricornered hat and a steel sword strapped to his waist, Felipe must have cut an impressive figure.

The actual revolt began on 30 May 1783, when Felipe read out his proclamation of independence, commanded his followers to destroy all the bridges on the roads to Lima and captured and tried several Spanish loyalists. However, one of his captains betrayed him, imprisoning Felipe and sending word of the uprising to the local corregidor. The men of Collata, along with those of neighbouring Chaclla and Jicamarca fought to free their Inca leader, but to no avail. Felipe and other rebel leaders were brought back to Lima, where they were interrogated and tried. Felipe and his captain-general, Ciriaco Flores, were executed, while other leaders were flogged and exiled to Africa.

From the over one thousand pages of testimony from the Spanish interrogations of the prisoners, we can ascertain when the Yacapar quipu was probably created, by whom and what it said. Spanish authorities questioned the prisoners relentlessly about the messages sent in the revolt, allowing us a glimpse into the quipu letters as well as the alphabetic ones. During the festival of Corpus Christi in 1782, Felipe and Ciriaco holed up in Ciriaco’s farm outside of San Mateo de Otao, an annex of the village of Casta, which is adjacent to Collata. Ciriaco was a prosperous farmer and member of the Yacapar clan who had first met Felipe when the latter was repairing a saint’s canopy in the Otao church. The two men had discussed revolution for years, but during this week in late June they planned their uprising, with Ciriaco swearing an oath of loyalty as captain-general of Felipe’s army. Ciriaco was alphabetically illiterate, unable to read or write in Spanish, yet he created physical letters for the leaders of neighbouring towns, calling on them to revolt. It is apparent that the Yacapar quipu, signed with the name of Ciriaco’s clan or ayllu affiliation, is one of the quipu letters that Ciriaco created at this time.

It is instructive to see in Collata how the quipu form may have been used to mobilise villagers and convey ideals of equality and justice common to the Age of Revolution in Europe and the Americas. Likewise, and although extremely rare, it is heartening to know how carefully the villagers in Collata have actively preserved these two precious emissaries from that age.

FURTHER READING

Brokaw, G. (2010) A History of the Khipu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Hyland, S. (2003) The Jesuit and the Inca (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press).

Hyland, S. (2017) ‘Writing with twisted cords: the inscriptive capacity of Andean khipu texts’, Current Anthropology, 58 (3): 412–19.

Platt, T. (2015) ‘Un archivo campesino como acontecimiento de terreno: los nuevos papeles del Curaca de Macha’, Americania, vol. 2, 158–85.

Rappaport, J., and T. Cummins (2011) Beyond the Lettered City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Sala i Vila, N. (1995) ‘La rebelión de Huarochirí de 1783’, in Entre la retórica y la insurgencia, edited by C. Walker, 273–308 (Cusco: CBC).

Salomon, F., and M. Niño-Murcia (2011) The Lettered Mountain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Serulnikov, S. (2013) Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Walker, C. (2014) The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

¹ F. de Graffigny, Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747).

² R. di Sangro, Lettera apologetica (1751).

³ Archivo General de Indias, 1047, Uprising of Topa Inca Yupanqui in Huarochiri, 1783. Testimony of Thomas Palomino, June 11, 1783, frv. 285.