[antiraza]

I'm not sure I'm (I'll speak only for myself in this thread) am 'playing down literacy'. It's great, we should have more of it. No questions asked.

Maybe there's a tone interpretation issue in the thread... 'How did the Incas do this' -- is that asking for the detailed specifics of their management culture and systems (mostly unknowable -- likely the subject of a many past and future academic careers), or is it a statement of incredulity. I think myself and most of the other commenters have interpreted the latter, whether that was your intention or not.

What I'm pointing out is that, if you've seen much of the developing world, or lived anywhere except the fully formed bubble of a 'modern developed society,' you will have had the opportunity to observe that 'life... (and by extension, civilization)... find a way.'

The Egyptian pharoahs ruled for over 3000 years. That number is unfathomable in the context of modern society. Yes they had a written language, but the vast majority of that empire very likely did not know how to read it.

The millions that lived through that era integrated, obeyed and functioned into that power structure for more than 1.5x the time since we all agreed on a numbering structure for 'years since some arbitrary point in the past.'

Christianity, and Hinduism, and Islam, and frankly every major religion spread, and brought most of humanity into their fold without most of its adherents being able to read. There wasn't a formal written bible until hundreds of years after the religion itself was formed. It passed through dozens of generations before being formalized.

All this is to say: I don't know how the Incas did it, in terms of the granular specifics of their culture and systems, but that they did it, somehow, and using methods quite normal for most of history, is far from implausible.

[mmooss]

> 'How did the Incas do this' -- is that asking for the detailed specifics of their management culture and systems (mostly unknowable -- likely the subject of a many past and future academic careers), or is it a statement of incredulity. I think myself and most of the other commenters have interpreted the latter, whether that was your intention or not.

I understand now. No, not incredulity at all, but serious questions. It's an exceptional, very rare achievement. I was hoping for some research out there already that someone was aware of.

[alephnerd]

> I was hoping for some research out there already that someone was aware of

I think this thread got very heated, but fundamentally

1. Oral transmission via an apprentice system - a common method used throughout much of history, as mass illiteracy was the norm for most societies at the local level until the 18th-19th century

2. Quipus as a form of proto-writing - we know the Inca were able to codify and communicate categorical and numerical data using quipus. Hypothetically, they might have even been able to use quipu knots to represent an alphabet.

We simply wouldn't know because the Spanish burnt most Quipus during the inquisition and the aftermath of the conquest of the Neo-Inca State in the late 16th century and the failure of Tupac Amaru II's rebellion against the Spanish at the end of the 18th century.

The Spanish conquest of the Andes was heavily genocidal compared to their other conquests (that's saying something). It almost compared to the ferocity with which the Moriscos (Iberian Muslims) and Sephardim (Iberian Jews) were genocided in the 16th century.

To this day the Quechua homeland in Bolivia and Peru remain the least developed regions of South America, with HDIs comparable to those found in poorer states of India and China, compared to much of South America's (excluding Venezuela due to their collapse) HDI converging around 0.800-0.850.

[mmooss]

Thanks. Are you summarizing the thread or is that based on evidence and research? I don't see the explanatory power of those theories.

> Oral transmission via an apprentice system

Oral transmission has probably existed everywhere (apprenticeship is a matter of definition, but I get the idea), but very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

> Quipus as a form of proto-writing

Quipus are just numbers, as far as I know. They are great, but don't explain how the enormous amount of other necessary information is transmitted and updated across such a vast geography.

With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence, not Internet comments (I'm not offering any theories myself!).

[krisoft]

> With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence

I recommend “Tinkuqchaka: A Suspension Bridge over the Upper Pampas River, Ayacucho, Peru” from Lidio M. Valdez, and Cirilo Vivanco. Published in the Journal of Anthropological Research, 2021.

It has its limitations of course. It describes present day rope bridge building practices and there is no guarantee that those practices are the same as in days of old. But given that the bridges themselves rot away and the ancients are not around to interview this is likely the best description you will ever get.

[mmooss]

Thank you. I am not wondering how to build rope bridges; lots of cultures figure out some interesting local technologies.

It's the Inca's scale that is what sets them apart - doing these things, at a very high level and with great success, over enormous distances and populations.

A few civilizations achieve these things, the great majority don't; what is the difference?

It is a common question asked by scholars for generations about all sorts of places - for example, see the popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

[krisoft]

> I am not wondering how to build rope bridges

You were just a few comments ago. You were specifically asking how bridge construction and maintenance is communicated over great distances and time. Let me quote your very own words to you: “how do you communicate, for example, rope bridge construction and maintenance information over great distances and time”

This is the only thing i have answered because your wider “how do the inca do?” question is not specific enough to be answerable.

And the answer to that specific question is that no maintenance information needs to be transmitted and the construction information is spread as folk tradition. Bridges are usefull enough that local villages want them to be built, and they are perfectly manageable as a local effort. And then the next village sees that a bridge was built, they also want one and find someone who knows how to build one and they do. You repeat that a bunch of times and you have a bunch of rope bridges all around. There is no mystery there.

This idea was so alien and unbelievable to you that you accused me of promulgating some sort of conspiracy of playing down the importance of literacy. Not cool.

[antiraza]

> very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

Can you be more specific?

I understand they were a vibrant, far reaching empire, but I'm not sure I understand how they were so exponentially further advanced than many other past civilizations, that have each has their share of remarkable 'how the hell did they do that's.'

Taken in sum, I find them all remarkable in their own ways -- but it also proves the earlier point, that human ingenuity has found ways to express itself innumerably across the eras.

[mmooss]

Two ways they are extraordinary:

First, the great majority of 'civilizations' [1] do not achieve anything like what the Incas did. Perhaps your perspective is distorted by survivorship bias - you know about the biggest successes, not the 99.999% that you've never heard of, like someone who thinks FAANG are typical of computer businesses. There are (or were until recently) societies in the Amazon, for example, no larger than a village and living in neolithic conditions. That is how far they made it. So there is the common question - why do some 'succeed' on such a large scale and some don't? Jared Diamond's famous book, for example, looks at this issue.

Second, the Inca did it with unique limitations: "Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools, draft animals capable of ploughing fields or even a written language." That's from the OP.

It's mysterious to me that the OP spells out this question, but nobody in the discussion seems to understand it.

[1] I'm not sure that's the right word, but I'm not going to define it to precisely

[antiraza]

Perhaps you have something profound to communicate here, but you're not doing a great job of getting it across.

As an example, in response to "very few have achieved anything like the Incas," I asked for something specific to establish a frame of reference, and you replied with something that can be summarized more or less as "very few have achieved something like the Incas."

As to your second point, this is remarkable. Nobody has disagreed. But it's not extraordinary. Not every culture has to be agrarian. Not every culture has to be written. Draft animals, arches, wheels. These are one way to solve specific projects problems. They aren't the only solution. The Incas, through remarkable ingenuity and effort, solved those problems differently. Again, remarkable but but extraordinary.

It feels to me like you've asked and been answered, and for myself at least, it sounds like you've sort of dug in and want to be found on this hill of Incan exceptionalism. I personally find their exceptionalism exceptional, as exceptional as the many other exceptions that have been discussed in the thread so far.

[krisoft]

> Perhaps your perspective is distorted by survivorship bias

Have you considered that perhaps it is your viewpoint who is suffering from survivorship bias? For a civilisation to be considered “great” many many things has to go just right. A wide variety of things can and do go wrong to curtail human societies. Prolonged bad weather can ruin the harvest, and the resulting unrest break up the “civilisation”. Random sparks of religuous fervour can catch and destabilise the region. The ruling class can be wrecked by succession wars. Outside threats can conquer all of them. Their civilisation can fail due to economic or demographic changes.

Is it possible that when you are asking how they succeed on such a large scale while others did not you are just observing that they were lucky in many aspects until one day they were no longer lucky? And then wondering what their secret of success was is indeed just survivorship bias.

Obviously it is still an interesting question to study how did they operate, how did they live and so on and so on. But searching for their “secret sauce” might be a fools errand. Because they very possibly didn’t had one.