amauta

Updated: May 23, 2025

It was proscribed now, even in the little state of Tambotoco, for we read that the fourteenth of its twenty-six rulers “prohibited, under the severest penalties, the use of quellca for writing, and forbade, also, the invention of letters. Quellca was a kind of parchment made of plantain leaves.” It is added that an amauta, who sought to restore the art of writing was put to death.

John D. (John Denison) Baldwin - Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology

The story, once treasured up in the mind, was indelibly impressed there by frequent repetition. It was repeated by the amauta to his pupils, and in this way history, conveyed partly by oral tradition, and partly by arbitrary signs, was handed down from generation to generation, with sufficient discrepancy of details, but with a general conformity of outline to the truth.

William Hickling Prescott - History of the Conquest of Peru