education
October 6, 2020
PROJECT ONE: VISUAL ANALYSIS RHETORICAL PAPER
October 6, 2020
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Account of the Use of Quipus

Read the attached document and answer the following questions:
1. What were the quipus? What functions in society did they serve? What were the limitations?
2. What role did the quipucamayus serve in society?

Introduction:
Garcilaso de la Vega, also known as El Inca, was a mestizo born in Cuzco in 1539 to a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess. At the age of twenty-one, he traveled to Spain to claim the inheritance his late father had left him, and remained there for the rest of his life. He claimed to have learned how to read the quipus as a child, and he describes their use in his monumental history of the Incas, published in the early seventeenth century. In this passage, he argues that these devices served primarily to record quantifiable dataperhaps because, as some modern researchers theorize, he only knew how to read this type of quipu, having observed its use in recording amounts of tribute that native peoples rendered to his Spanish father. Elsewhere in his chronicle, however, he notes that they also recorded fables and verses.

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