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Updated: May 23, 2025
Other functionaries of a higher character, usually the amautas, were intrusted with the history of the empire, and were selected to chronicle the great deeds of the reigning Inca, or of his ancestors.6 The narrative, thus concocted, could be communicated only by oral tradition; but the quipus served the chronicler to arrange the incidents with method, and to refresh his memory.
Montesinos says further that Tupac Cauri established in Tampu-tocco a kind of university where boys were taught the use of quipus, the method of counting and the significance of the different colored strings, while their fathers and older brothers were trained in military exercises in other words, practiced with the sling, the bolas and the war-club; perhaps also with bows and arrows.
The peculiar knot or color, in this way, suggested what it could not venture to represent; in the same manner-to borrow the homely illustration of an old writer as the number of the Commandment calls to mind the Commandment itself. The quipus, thus used, might be regarded as the Peruvian system of mnemonics.
We must not hold the invention of the quipus too lightly, when we reflect that they supplied the means of calculation demanded for the affairs of a great nation, and that, however insufficient, they afforded no little help to what aspired to the credit of literary composition. The office of recording the national annals was not wholly confined to the amautas.
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