Lively Discussion - Part I

During a lively discussion in the comments section of our April 9, 2016, article “Cajamarca: The City of Bountiful – Part I,” several points were raised that seems worth discussing and, in some cases, correcting. Following are those points: 
    Comment #1: The Andes rose at the time of Christ. Right? And that means new mountains, new valleys, changed rivers, etc. Has anyone done a study or computer simulation to try to see how the land was before the Andes rose?
    Response: There are no simulations as far as I have ever seen and I have looked for something along that line for years; however, we know that the eastern portion of the continent was tilted downward (and still is) and that the western side came up in conjunction with the east and we find evidence of that all along the western shore of the continent with mostly cliff faces, while the eastern shore is mostly beaches other than the Guiana, Brazilian and Patagonian Highlands.

A few images of the coastal rise all along the entire west coast of South America, from Colombia southward to southern Chile: In these four images, top to bottom: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile coastlines 
    In fact, though the west coastal shore rises gradually to the Andean foothills of the western or Cordillera Occidental, and then continues to a high elevation across the Andes, including the inter-Andean valleys, to the eastern Cordillera Oriental, the fall off on the eastern side into the Amazon is remarkably direct and steep. At this point, at the edge of the nearly three-million-square-mile basin (sometimes referred to as the Amazon Rainforest or Amazonia, with the Amazon River dropping from its head at 21,768 feet to a basin level of 328-feet near Iquitos, Peru, then dropping ¾ of an inch (two centimeters) per 1/3 of a mile, or about 2.3 inches per mile all across Brazil, a distance of about 2300 river miles to the Atlantic Ocean.         The rivers flowing east off the Andes generally reach the basin through narrow canyons (pongos), with the Amazon flowing eastward at about 1.5 miles per hour, which increases greatly at flood times because of the drop in flow from west to east; and discharging at its mouth about 8 trillion gallons a day, 60 times that of the Nile and 11 times that of the Mississippi, which is about 6,350,000 cubic feet per second, with the mouth over 250 miles in width from a river that averages between 1 and 6 miles in width all along its length.
    According to the World of Earth Science, Gale Group, 2003, the Amazon basin was once an enormous bay, before the Andes were pushed up along the coasts. As the mountain range grew, they held back the ocean and eventually the bay became an inland sea. This sea was finally filled by the erosion of the higher land surrounding it, and finally a huge plain, crisscrossed by countless waterways, was created. Most of this region is still at sea level, and is covered by lush jungle and extensive wetlands. This jungle region contains the largest extant rain forest in the world. Despite the profusion of life that abounds here, the soil is not very rich; the fertile regions are those which receive a fresh layer of river silt when the Amazon floods, which occurs almost every year.

Top: Guiana Highland; Bottom: Brazilian Highlands. Note the sharp rises of the cliffsides where they at one time rose above the ocean surface
    The ancient Guiana and Brazilian highlands—two large stable masses of pre-Cambrian rock (cretons) slope gently to the west—everything other than these two highland shields is a sedimentary basin, suggesting the two islands to the eastern part of the once flooded continent and that the rest of the area was under water, producing the sedimentary basis of the land.
    Beyond the east coast of the continent, the Falkland Islands lie off of Argentina; a group of about 200 islands consisting of rolling hills and peat valleys. The sea around the Falkland Islands is quite shallow, and for this reason they are thought to lie on an extension of the continerntal shelf.
    Comment #2: “My impression of the geology from what I have read seems to indicate that the land-forms simply rose relatively unchanged to a much higher elevation. After-all the earthquake lasted for 3 hours which has no precedent in history.”
    Response: While some of the landforms may have just simply been pushed up, we also know that some mountains (obviously some landforms) will be laid low, like unto a valley, and there shall be many places which are now called valleys which shall become mountains, whose height is great (Helaman 14:23). Nephi tells us that he “saw mountains tumbling into pieces and the plains of the earth were broken up” because of the quaking of the earth” (1 Nephi 12:4).
    Comment #3: “There are today tilted terraces used anciently for farming that are now too high to farm. Indicative of a relatively slow rise”

Response: We really do not know this. If an entire section of mountains rose from, say, 4000 feet, to say 18,000 feet, and it was sudden, taking the inter-valleys with the structure, terraces and valleys both would rise along with the mountain(s) and remain more or less in tact. Since mountains are basically an extension of a sub-block of base rock, this is entirely likely and certainly possible as the surface of the earth is raised.
    Comment #4: “These tilted terraces do not necessarily indicate a slow rise, but does indicate a rise in historic times.”
    Response: Exactly.
    Comment #5: “Typically a fault scarp forms almost instantaneously during an earthquake. There is no precedent for what happened at the time of Christ”
    Response: Fault scarps are created when one side of a fault line falls or rises because of one side moving vertically with the respect to the other and is the topographic expression of faulting attributed to the displacement of the land surface by movement along faults. This, of course, may have well happened in numerous places, however, the raising of mountains is not from displacement of movement along fault tines, but of either volcanic, fold or block formations. 
• Volcanic mountains, of course, are formed when a tectonic plate is pushed beneath another, or when the rising magma solidifies below the surface and forms dome mountains where material is pushed up from the force of the build-up beneath it.
• Fold mountains occur when two tectonic plates collide at a convergent plate boundary, causing the crust to over-thicken, causing the less dense crust to float on top of the denser mantle rocks while a greater volume of material is forced downward into the mantle.
• Block mountains are formed at divergent plate boundaries, with sections left standing beside rift valleys become block mountains, caused when two plates move away from each other, leaving a gap between. Magma rises between them, melts, and lava erupts at the spreading ridge between the plates. Where two continental plate converge the result is an uplift of enormous mountain range.

Comment #6: “Agricultural terraces which reach to heights of over 18,000 feet are unthinkable. Even the hardy potato will grow only to heights of about 15,000 feet. This fact makes it clear that Tiahuanaco formerly was at least 3,400 feet lower than it is today.”
    Response: Exactly. There is no question that the Andean shelf came up in antiquity many thousands of feet—the question scientists are divided on is when. For a 13,000 year old Earth, it would have been in the time of man. For a 4.55 billion year old Earth, then it was millions of years ago. It is interesting to know that the evolutionist Charles Darwin thought it was in the time of man; and the ruins of a city found beneath Lake Titicaca shows it had to have been in the time of man.
(See the next post, “Lively Discussion – Part II,” for the rest of the comments and responses to the lively discussion that took place in the comments section of the April 9,2016 blog article “Cajamarca: The City of Bountiful – Part I”)

The Jaredite and Adamic Language

Recently we received a comment from a reader regarding the language of the Jaredites. Rather than answer it in a short commnet, we have chosen to delve into this in much more detail since it is a comment received a few other times in the past. 
    Comment: “I believe the ancient Jaradites did speak Hebrew but the language obviously became corrupted over the centuries. The ancient patriarchs spoke Hebrew. I can even prove that Adam spoke Hebrew—that is the language of scripture and that is Adamic language. A Jewish Rabbi friend said that Hebrew is the language of God and it was used to create the earth” Ira T.

Response: The language of Adam, and of Noah, has been of interest and discussed by “experts” for generations without any conclusive decisions of which I am ware—each holding to their own vierwpoint. Obviously, the rabbis and other Hebrew and Jewish hierarchy claim that Hebrew was the original language. While they have a legitimate claim, it is not necessarily a solid one.
    First of all, we need to deal with the Adamic Lanuage. Typically, the Adamic language is, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim (Genesis Rabbah)—which, by the way, did not first occur until the post-Temple era, and taught them by Chazal (Hazal), which is an acronym for the Hebrew Ḥakhameinu Zikhronam Liv'rakha in the period from about 250 B.C. to 625 A.D.) as well as some Christians, the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden. It is variously interpreted as either the language used by God to address Adam (the divine language), or the language invented by Adam or given Adam by God with which he named all things (including Eve), as in Genesis 2:19. At best it is the language used by God to address Adam, but there is no suggestion that it would have been the language of heaven as much as a language used by God to speak to Adam. (It might also be of interest to know that the Kabbalah, or Kabbalism, assumed an “eternal Torah” which was not identical to the Torah written in Hebrew, thus Abulafia in the 13^th century assumed that the language spoken in Paradise had been different from Hebrew).

For Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith declared that the Adamic Language was a “Pure and undefiled” language causing many LDS to believe it meant the language of God. In the early days of Christianity, “glossolalla” was called speaking of tongues, or the “fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any readily comprehended meaning,” which Joseph Smith made it clear that such speaking was the easiest of the gifts to duplicate by Satan, and that unless there was one who could interpret, the practice was without value. In the Church today, it is recognized that “zenoglossy,” which is the speaking in known tongue, that was previously unknown to the speaker and is meant to represent other languages—a gift highly revered and seen frequently in missionary work.
    Apostle Orson Pratt declared that “Ahman,” from “Adam-ondi-Ahman,” was the name of God in the Adamic language (Journal of Discourses 2:342). An 1832 handwritten page from the Joseph Smith Papers, titled "A Sample of the Pure Language," and reportedly dictated by the Prophet to "Br. Johnson," asserts that the name of God is Awmen.
    A temple ordinance is thought to be a translation of the Hebrew פה לאל "mouth to God.” There is also the word “deseret,” which means “honey bee,” that many LDS believe is of the Adamic Language. We also know that Adam kept a Book of Remembrance, which “was kept, in the which was recorded, in the language of Adam” (Moses 6:5,46). As a side-note we ought to recongize that it is called "the language of Adam," not "the language of God."
    The point is, however, in none of these can it be said without a doubt that the one was the other, i.e., that the language of Adam, called the Adamic Language, was the language spoken in heaven in the pre-mortal world, or the language we will all be speaking after the resurrection. This fact is simply not known to us and has never been officially stated. Besides, the fact that God speaks all languages, does not suggest that a language he chooses to teach man is the “language of heaven,” even though it could certainly be said that any language God chooses to speak  is a “pure and undefiled” language since man has not had a chance to change, alter, or defile it when first received.

Secondly, in the Bible, the very first mention of a “language” is found in chapter 10 of Genesis, when it states “By these were the isles of the gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations” (Genesis 10:5); thus we find that in the time of Noah’s sons, Noah’s grandchildren began to spread out in the land, “each after his own tongue,” meaning each had his own language.
    This was a generation before Nimroad, the tower, and the confusing of langauges.
    However, in the following chapter, it states “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (Genesis 11:1). So how are we to correlate these two opposing statements?
    Perhaps we need to consider the context in which they appear. In this chapter (11), the narrative switches from the splitting up of Noah’s children and their families, in which we learned that they had different languages (Genesis 10:5), to zeroing in on one of these families, that of Nimrod, Noah’s great grandson through Ham and Cush (Genesis 10:6,8). By the time Nimrod comes along, Noah’s sons, Ham, Japheth, and Shem, had already divided and their children spread out “every one after his tongue.”
    Thus, as we read of Nimrod, the second generation after Noah’s sons began to spread out, as they were commanded, and there were several languages already among the descendants of Noah. Chapter 11 then begins by following one of those great grandsons, one named Nimrod, who by this time was the head of an extended family and perhaps others that he had persuaded to join him—an overall group that all spoke one language as “they journeyed from the east, and “found a plain in the land of Shinar” where they settled down “and they dwelt there” (Genesis 11:1).
    This extended family, or people, controlled by Nimrod, decided to “build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4). How many years had passed since the ark came to rest is unknown. The Lord blessed them to be fruitful and fill the earth (Genesis 8:17; 9:1,7). Noah not only lived a long life (950), but lived 350 years after the flood, so it is a little difficult to place exact time frames or generational dating during this time from Noah to Nimrod.

In this area of settlement in Shinar, which was called Babel, the first of Nimrod’s kingdom. It would appear from the wording in verses 9 thru 14, that several cities had been built by the time the tower was under or near completion, i.e., that is, as far completed as it was to become.
    At this time we read the intervention of the Lord when he “came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded," i.e., Nimrod and his people built. It should not be confused by the language used that Noah, Shem or even Ham were involved in the building of the tower that went against God's Plan.  Certainly, the Jaredites at the time were not involved in that building, though they lived nearby and knew of it (Ether 1:33-35).
    At this time, whatever amount of people were involved in the tower, we may be talking 100 years or more (because of the longevity of the people at this time) of population increase. The Lord, being displeased with those who were building the tower in Shinar said “Behold the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genersis 11:6).
    Thus, we learn that when people work together and can communicate easily with one another, speaking one language, and being willing to work together for a common purpose, that they can accomplish whatever it is they desire. Obviously, at this time in the Earth’s development, that was not part of the Plan, and the Lord “scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth, and they left off to build the city” (Genesis 11:8).

So we see that Shem, Japheth and Ham’s children already started to speak different tongues (Genesis 10:5), and the one group, under Nimrod, who were trying to thwart the development Plan of the Lord, by working together under one unrighteous man who convinced the people they did not need God, but could protect themselves by building a tower to reach the heavens and avoid any future calamity the Lord might cause, were a threat to that Plan—so the Lord intervened. Now, in addition, the entire clan of Nimroad were broken up into small groups, each speaking a different tongue (Genesis 11:9).
    From this limited but specific information, it seems difficult to claim that a specific language was spoken by all at one time and up to the confounding of the language. That the immediate prophets within the Priesthood of Noah did for a short time (second generation) does not tell us what the Jaredites spoke at the time of the confounding of the language, certainly they were well past the point in time of Noah's son's children who spoke different tongues (Genesis 10:5).

Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part VII

Continuing with the previous posts on the original Peruvian and even Incan script writing and its demise and disappearance that left little record of its existence. 
    It should also be noted that that fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europeans (the Spanish invaders and even the well educated friars, priests, and chroniclers) were ill-equipped to identify a pre-alphabetic system of writing among the Incas because it was not until 1822 that Champollion began to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and only after that time did nonalphabetic semantic systems began to be taken seriously.
    Victoria de la Jara cites Father Joseph de Acosta in 1590 who, with great lucidity, was able to discern the ideographic nature of the tocapu designs and point out that the Inca “made up for the lack of writing and letters, partly with paintings…though those of Peru were very crude and rough; and in greater part with qipus.”

It was Sarmiento de Gamboa in his Historia de los Incas, who wrote in 1572, “a very great diligence is attributed to the Pachacuti Inga Yupangui, ninth Inca, who made a general call to all the old historians of all the provinces he had conquered and even of many more of all those kingdoms, and had them in the city of Cuzco a great while examining them on antiquities origin and notable things of their past kingdoms. And after, he made them paint by his order on large boards and set aside in the House of the Sun a great wall where the boards were kept, and were embellished with gold, they were like our libraries, and he constituted doctors who knew how to understand and declare them.”
    De la Jara maintains that these boards were painted with the geometric designs of the logographic signs, in the manner of the painted ceremonial vases called keros, which she believed were transcriptions of the content of the boards. Whether geometric designs, such as the tocapu, or some other form of painted objects, people or glyphs, it is obvious that the doctors (camayoc) who “knew how to understand and declare them” were needed that the paintings could be read and narrated so the people could understand what was written on the boards. These boards were eventually sent to Spain by order of the Viceroy Toledo and have subsequently disappeared—only the woven symbols and the kero remain.

It is also of interest that the very critique of the experts on the Peruvian textile designs as being “familiar,” “lacking freshness or originality,” “mass-produced art,” “designs almost mechanically imprinted,” are the very cause of an understanding as to their not being art in the traditional sense, but that, according to John Alden Mason (The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, Penguin, New York, 1991) their deliberate repetition gives rise to the understanding that they are, in fact, geometric symbols that form a system of signs that have interpretive meaning to those who understand them.
    In a Compendium of World History, Vol 2, a Dissertation presented to the faculty of the Ambassador College Graduate School of Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy, Herman L. Hoeh in 1969, wrote: “Modern scholars have done little to acquaint us with the true history of early Peru. In the early centuries following the Spanish conquest of Peru and neighboring regions, many native records came into the possession of the conquerors. The assumption that the Incas knew only how to tie knots in a string to remind them of the past is absurd.”
    According to Hoeh, The modern view of Peruvian history is that it cannot be established more than a century before the commencement of the Spanish colonial period. Archaeologists have done amazingly well in recovering cultural artifacts buried in the ground, but they have thus far been unwilling to associate what they find with early Peruvian history found in the authentic Indian records by the conquerors. The slightest study of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa's 'History of the Incas' would have confirmed the accuracy of his outline. Archaeology everywhere substantiates the written record wherever it has been carefully preserved.

Sir Clements Markham (left) has contributed heavily toward Inca and Pre-Inca studies by his two books 'The Incas of Peru' and 'History of the Incas.' The former contains the list of kings from the beginning as preserved by Montesinos. It gives just over 100 names out of which nearly 80% have the lengths of reign preserved. Montesinos did not give sufficient information to establish every reign, but the list is so nearly complete that it is not at all difficult to determine contemporary events between Peru and the rest of the world. The latter volume preserves an invaluable outline of the Inca period.
    Once again, the idea that the early Spaniards would have recognized such a writing system is beyond credibility, no more than they thought the Aztecs or Mayan had a written language from what they first saw. And once accepted by search and failure over time, becomes an accepted “fact.” Thus, the Inca had no written language of the type the invaders would have  understood, and, in fact, they did not at that time. Whether or not there were those who knew about the written script of the pre-Inca period at the time of the Spanish arrival, is unknown, though surely there would have been some information somewhere since Montesinos was able to uncover it though it took many years of hard research among the Inca themselves, at least some of which heard the stories or knew the legends.
    As an example, one of those legends was that Titu Yupanqui Pachacuti fought a bloody battle, but was defeated and died shortly afterwards. His soldiers took his body secretly to Tamputoco. Cusco was uninhabited and was forgetting the secret of writing guarded by amautas. Four centuries later, the Inca Tupac Pachacuti Cauri one day consulted the oracle of God Illatici Huira Cocha, in order to restore the use of writing. But he revealed that the cause of a major disaster that had once affected the Empire "were the lyrics, since then no one had dared to resurrect because its use had indeed been a great misfortune."
    Tupac Cauri then ordered by a law "under penalty of death, was no longer yo use 'quilca' or vegetable leaves that were used to write or use in any way the letters."

The famed Pusharo Wall with his many glyphs inscrived upon it, none of which have yet to be interpreted

 Another legend, based on a partial interpretation of some of the glyphs on the Pusharo rock, which is believed by some that they are almost related to a conventional and phonetic writing system, is that many centuries before the Incas a writing system emerged and was used for some time as discussed numerous chronicles and based on painted sticks and batons—a system that implicated an original form of pictograms or qilcas. However, during the period of Tawantinsuyo era, it was lost; that is, when the Inca came to power, the system disappeared.

    Another stems from the well-known Peruvian archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle, who was the first studying pre-Inca signs to interpret them as a class of alphabetic signs. He preferably explored and studied the archeological Mochica sites of Northern Peru, and thus discovered that the Andeans often used little painted sticks obviously covered with ideographic signs: straight or uneven lines, circles, stripe; in short, all the thematic of the glyphs covering the Pusharo wall! The latter could therefore be remote memories of an ancient alphabetic language. On ancient Mochica sculptured pottery artifacts, Larco Hoyle identified Chaski figures, the official messengers that precisely delivered those painted batons that were always surrounded with stick representations. Some of their wooden bags were found later containing batons, quartz gravers to incise them and a white powder to make the inscriptions stand out.
    Another is that Luis Valcarcel advanced the theory that the holy scripture of the Incas was called: kellka, or quilca. It became popular and, abandoning his esotericism, it was banned under the influence of the priestly class or did not survive the catastrophes that caused it to become forgotten. Valcarcel considers that the term kellka must necessarily refer to a hieroglyphic writing system.
    There is also a very strong belief among some researchers that focus on the quellqa writing system, and the reasons why the Incas preferred the quipu to a more flexible system of writing. Montesinos used data from the chronicles of the period of Spanish conquest and the views of modern researchers is that probably the use of quellqa was banned by the order of Inca Pachacutec Yupanqui or Inca Tupac Yupanqui around 1470 in connection with the subjugation of the powerful Chimú state in northern Peru and among its allies. The aim of the Incas was to prevent a wider spread of this system of information exchange, which was readily available and convenient to use. In its stead, the Incas favored the use of the traditional mnemotechnical device quipu, which was known to the previous civilizations in Peru, because its practical uses were limited. The teaching, learning, and use of the quipu were subjected to the strict control of a special organ of government. This served the political interests of the early totalitarian state.
    In addition, According to John Denison Baldwin (Pre-Historic Nations, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1872), both Montesinos and archaeologist Charles Etienne Brsseur de Bourbourg (who published the Popol Vuh in 1861) say the Peruvians had an accurate measure of the solar year and a knowledge of the art of writing together with paper made of banana leaves at least 1800 years before our era. 

It might also be of interest to know that at Chincan there was an image resembling a form of writing. At first  it was perceived as ordinary vandalism by the tourists who thought it was done with white paint. However, having performed a more thorough examination and especially after pouring water on this part of the rock, it appeared that the writing was quite old and although made in a rather careless way it looked like equations written on a blackboard with white chalk. It was a surprise to unveil that white paint had nothing to do with the writing since the inscription was accomplished with an unknown method similar to etching. It was found that the writing, in fact, was represented with the whitish crystalin formation incorporated into the stone structure. Unfortunately it was impossible either to get a scraping or a sample of the writing since it would lead to the partial destruction of the inscription.

In the area of Myumarca tower at Sacsahuaman, the archaeologists found an Andesite stone block with an ornament on it, with the writing structure and style reminding them of the crystalin writing in Chincan. Whether any of this can eventually be shown as a written script, as the Mayan writing glyps eventually were, remains to be seen. The Inca destroyed the records of those they conquered, the Spanish destroyed the records of the Inca, and we are left today with a spattering of early chroniclers who may or may not have had their own agendas to feather during the occupation and their working to secure their own places in that movement. Montesinos was certainly not one of them—his works show an entirely different capability of the early Peruvians and the first Incas.

Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part VI

Continuing with the previous posts on the original Peruvian and even Incan script writing and its demise and disappearance that left no record of its existence.

“I write this epistle unto you, Lachoneus, and I hope that ye will deliver up your lands and your possessions, without the shedding of blood, that this my people may recover their rights and government, who have dissented away from you because of your wickedness in retaining from them their rights of government, and except ye do this, I will avenge their wrongs. I am Giddianhi”

Giddianhi, Governor

Gaddianton Robbers

AD16 

(3 Nephi 3:10)

As we started out in this series, at one time with the fact that the Inca and pre-Inca had a written script language. This would not have been the Nephite language, since the Lamanites would have destroyed all things that were Nephite in order to justify their “ownership” of the land through the birthright. Again, while this is not an important thing to us today, it certainly was a point of immense concern in the time of Lehi and his descendants, even to the time of Giddianhi, the governor of the Gaddianton Robbers 600 years later. In fact, even today, it is a bone of contention between the Arabs and the Jews as to who “owns” the land and the status of Jews among Arabs.
    We know, of course, that the Nephites had two languages, Hebrew and Reformed Egyptian. How many others, if any, besides the sacred recorders and the prophets knew the Reformed Egyptian is unknown. It seems clear that prophets made sure their children, at least their sons, were taught Reformed Egyptian, as Mosiah shows when “he caused [his sons] that they should be taught in all the language of his fathers, that thereby they might become men of understanding; and that they might know concerning the prophecies which had been spoken by the mouths of their fathers, which were delivered them by the hand of the Lord” (Mosiah 1:2) obviously referring to the Reformed Egyptian since, “having been taught in the language of the Egyptians therefore he could read these engravings, and teach them to his children, that thereby they could teach them to their children, and so fulfilling the commandments of God, even down to this present time” (Mosiah 1:4). It appears from this, that even Laman and Lemuel at one time knew Egyptian, and could read the scriptures on the Brass Plates.
    However, over time, the Lamanite language veered far from that of the common Hebrew spoken by the Nephites, for about 500 years after Nephi left them with the records, they had to be retaught the language of the Nephites (Mosiah 24:4,6). Sometimes after the demise of the Nephites, and toward the end or after the civil wars between the Lamanites drew to a close, a group or tribe arose within several valleys along the northern coastal region of Peru that modern archaeologists have called the Chimú, who built or moved into a capital city today called Chan Chan (below), near Moche and Trujillo, which is considered to have been the hub of a vast trade and tribute network with no fewer than 26,000 craftsmen and women residing there.

Basically, an agricultural society, they built an irrigation system using canals, though their military prowess later insured them of wealth from extracting tributes from other tribes. Before them was the Moche, though even modern archaeologists cannot be certain these were just not early Chimú (Proto-Chimú), meaning, a continuation of the same people. They are credited with a rich iconographic and monumental architecture that survives today in their huacas and irrigation systems. 

While archaeologists insist that various cultures were independent of one another and that they were separate cultures with no interactive involvement, one chronologically following the other, it is interesting that their pottery, which archaeologists use to determine these separate cultures, are all so very similar in design and purpose as shown here that it would be difficult to separate their styles. Note the odd type of stirrup handled vases that were found all over ancient Peru. These are considered by archaeologists, from left to right top to bottom: Salinar culture, Cupisnique culture, Moche culture, Chancay-Chimu culture, Mochica culture, and the Huari culture

Before the Chimú, archaeologists claim were the Salinar culture and the Cupisnique before that. Except for the improving designs of weapons and ceramics, murals and artwork, there are few distinguishing factors that would separate any of these groups from a continuing, growing society to anyone but archaeologists and anthropologists. In fact, even the professionals claim there are “considerable parallelism between Moche and Cupisnique iconography and ceramic designed, including the iconogrpahy of the so-called “Spider god.”
    The point is, among this period of developing people, dated from about 200 B.C. through to the time of their conquest by the Inca in 1470, certain events are said in legend to have happened that have a direct bearing on our subject matter. And that is at one point among these people, they possessed signs that represented the pictographic writing system of the civilization of the so-called classic period, the pre-Incan age, in Peru. During this first millennium A.D., the pictographs were written on earthenware or tablets, later during the Chimu state, they were written on palm leaves, a material that was readily available according to Montesinos’s history. 

Unfortunately, such organic material could not long survive in the humid climate of the coastal valleys of Peru, such as the burial grounds of the Vicus civilization not even human remains or textiles have been found there. It should be noted, in fact, that the climate of the coastal strip of Peru is quite varied, it being a desert split by some fifty river valleys that are rainless and very dry in the south (Nazca to Paracas) and in the north regions they are very humid (Moche, Vicus).
    When the Inca conquered this coastal region in 1470, and encountered this script writing, which was an extremely comfortable means of disseminating verbal information, it was looked upon suspiciously by the Inca since it did not fit into their way of governing domestic policy, because with this script, they feared the people could be encouraged to free thinking and the pluralism of ideas among the population and endanger the embryonic totalitarian regime and control of the Inca. Obviously, it seemed politically more prudent simply to ban the use of such an easily learnable script altogether and promote instead the mnemotechnical statistics device quipu, which was more suited to the needs of the Inca hierarchy anyway since it was more a record keeping system than a free-thinking method.

It would also have been prudent for the Inca to consult with the well-known oracle at Pachacamac, which had been incorporated into the Inca state only recently. Obviously, the situation of the local priesthood was still insecure under Inca control and apparently they were forced to show loyalty with the answer that was expected from them by the presence of Tupack’s occupying troops. 
    The fact that several Inca legends passed down over the years and repeated to the Spanish, at least in Montesinos investigations, shows that the rationale used by the Inca in their oral histories is that a serious calamity and reversal of Inca fortunes, some surrounding a massive battlefield defeat, others involving weather calamities, the gods told the oracles that the disasters had occurred as a result of the written script, which the gods found most offensive and demanded it be banned under penalty of death.
    It also might be of interest to note, according to Cesar Paternosto (The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, University Texas Press, 1996, p169), that when the Spanish arrived, the Inca had never seen paper—any earlier writing had been on leaves of certain trees, so the papers the Spaniards carried, were of extreme interest to the Inca, since they would have been so different from what any of the older Inca might have known. They “concluded that their Iberian lords possessed a magical means of “communication.”

In fact, to a large degree, the chronicles written by the Spaniards bespoke the derision with which they referred to the Andean peoples’ lack of script—at least one the Spaniards could identify as such. Later, according to Regina Harrison, native testimonies “revealed a prolonged curiosity regarding the Spanish writing system…the alphabet, seen through the indigenous eyes, assumed magical properties” (Signs, Songs and Memory in the Andes, Translating Quechua language and Culture, University of Texas, 1989 pp55-56; also Anthropological Linguistics, Vol 31 No 3/4, 1989, pp 299-301).
    In addition, the Quechua language, as it turned out, had a word “quellcca, which primarily meant “drawing” or “painting,” from the root word “quellccani,” which meant “to write.” Quellccani, also had a meaning of “embroidery,” which also suggested that the textile weaving of t’oqapu (tocapu) designs, as well as the tocapu on cups and other surfaces, was more than adornments.
    In fact, the Andean narratives of Tito Cusi Yupanqui (1570) of the Inca nobility, that have been cited and translated by Harrison claims the Spanish could “speak by looking at the cloth in front of them and to name several of us [Inca] by name without anyone having told anyone, and can do this merely by looking at the cloth in front of them.” Thus, this ethnohistoric source provides us with irresistible evidence that “cloth” (weaving) was in Inca society a most suitable means of transmitting information.
(See the next and last post in this series, “Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part VI,” on the demise and disappearance of the Peruvian and Inca script writing)

Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part V

Continuing from the previous posts regarding the so-called secret written language of the early Peruvians. 
    As stated in the last post, this brings us to the second point of there being a written language, and finding that written language in Peru. And that is why there is such a resistance to thinking that somewhere in the Andean past there was a written language in Peru since all the visual evidence of the accomplishments of an early civilization accomplished so many things that rival our world’s accomplishments of today.
    It also might be asked why the Inca, whose known existence (not their own claims of history), was just under 100 years (beginning in 1438 to 1533, according to the Spanish chronicles based on Quechua oral traditions), were the builders of construction techniques unrivaled even today, roads that rivaled  those of ancient Rome, irrigation canals and terraced planting systems beyond most things in Europe, textiles and metallurgy that were as good as Europe’s, while at the same time conquering all of Peru, large portions of modern Ecuador, western and south central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, north and central Chile, and a small part of southern Colombia, a territory of 300,000 square miles, comparable to the historical empires of Eurasia, with a central government that controlled some 12-million people and more than 100 ethnic groups, reaching its peak between 1493 and 1527 (a period of 55 to 89 years), and stretching along the continental coast for 2485 miles.

It might also be considered how long it took to march entire armies some thousand to two thousand miles on foot from one point of the empire to another, to move the resettlement of conquered peoples, to carry supplies from one conquered area to another in support of the military juggernaut, to put down possible revolts, and continually be overseeing hundreds of conquered cultures.
    Since they were at war their entire expansionist period, leaving manned military garrisons in all lands and areas conquered and forcing the resettlement of many conquered peoples, at the same time governing their conquered states and people from Cuzco, one might wonder in those 55+years, how and when they could find the time to build hundreds of unparalleled fortresses, temples, and huge cities along with some 24,000 miles (about 3 times the diameter of the Earth) of mostly paved roads, a hundred rope bridges spanning deep chasms (which had to be rebuilt every two years), cutting numerous tunnels through sheer mountain rock and steps up sheer stone mountains.
    It might also be wondered how this once tiny pastoral tribe in Cuzco that formed the small city-state Kingdom of Cuzco (Qusqu’ or Qosqo), which was little more than a tiny community of connected family members that were not even considered important by their neighbors until they defeated the Chanca (Apurìmac) in 1438, and whose domain did not extend many miles around their capital city, Cuzco, were able to build the likes of Sacsahuaman, Ollantaytambo, Macchu Picchu, Tiahuanaku, Llactapata, Pisac, Kuelap, etc., some of the most beautiful and technically amazing structures on the planet.

According to Anthropologist and Andean scholar Gordon McEwan of Wagner College on Staten Island, the “Inca cities were as large as those of Europe, but more orderly and by all accounts much cleaner and more pleasant places in which to live” (The Incas: New Perspectives, Norton, 2008). McEwan, has spent twenty-six years working with archeologists in the Cuzco Valley studying the Pikillacta and Chokepukio, who built their civilization on the cultural foundations of the Wari, Tiwanaku, and Pukara civilizations of the Lake Titicaca regon, covering more than a 2000 year history, dating back to 200 B.C. (about the date Mosiah left the city of Nephi)
    In attempting to push their empire further north, east and south, the Inca were pushed back by stronger tribes, including the Shuar, an indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru and members of the Jivaroan, called the jívaros or jíbaros (meaning “savage”) by the Spanish. These peoples were Amazonian tribes living at the headwaters of the Marañò River—an area between the Andes Occidental Cordillera and the tropical rainforest and savannas. It was the Muraiya Shuar that put up a strong resistance to the Inca (who they called inkis) penetration along the eastern foothills, aided by the Achu Shuar from the lowlands. Later, these Shuar, who became famous for their elaborate shrinking of heads of defeated foes, drove the Spanish out of their lands in 1599.

Upon ascending to the throne in 1471, Topa Inca Yupanqui pushed the southern border of the empire to the Maule River in modern-day Chile, defeating the Diaguitas and Promaucae (Picunches) and to the Quillota in Aconcagua Valley to Mapuche territory and instituted a tribute system in which each province provided women to serve as temple maidens or brides for celebrated soldiers. His successor, Huayna Capac, embarked on successful northern campaigns that carried to the Ancasmayo River, the current boundary between Ecuador and Colombia. However, both in the north and the south, as the had in the east, the Inca juggernaut met extremely strong resistance that stopped their expansion in its tracks.
    While the Inca would not have had time during these few, short years to accomplish the military expansion they did plus build all that is foolishly credited to them, it is obvious that someone before them actually built the buildings and the roads and developed the Andean culture whose ruins we see everywhere today. And reason alone tells us that they certainly would have had some type of written language to have designed and built the magnificent edifices they did that rival the ability in many ways of the construction experts of today. 
    Every modern engineer and builder who has weighed in on the subject agrees with this single point—a written language would have been absolutely necessary to have built Sacsahuaman, Cuzco, and other such edifices. While the Quipu is a marvelous recording instrument the Inca used to keep track of their vast empire, supplies, taxes, tributes, populations, etc., it was not a design tool, which, as any engineer will tell you, would have been an absolute necessity to have designed and built the walls we seen in and Cuzco, and all the Peruvian constructions throughout the land, since they were so well planned and thought out before being constructed.
    As an example, according to one engineer “At Machu Picchu, the whole system is a marvel—not just the water system or the most beautiful wall—but how everything fits together, ranging from the foundations, which would be geo-technical engineering, to site layout, which would be city planning, to trails that deliver people from one location to another without interfering with someone's privacy, to the huge plaza which provided the space for celebrations. When you look at Machu Picchu as a whole, complete with the temples and the solar observatories, you realize that it is a site that's well designed, well balanced, and somewhat of an engineering marvel” (Ken Write, a hydrologist and civil engineer has studied the waterworks and other engineering achievements of Machu Picchu since 1994, on National Graphic Television via NOVA on line, 2009).

Still the quipus were quite versatile, using over one hundred individual strings of different colors, which were held together by one main string. Where the knots were found, told the reader who was called a quipucamayoc (whose job was no easy task) what was being said. The knotted system was very sophisticated, and it involved the reading of hundreds of colors. Eyewitnesses claim that some of the knots stood for words, and that some quipus actually contained poetry. Unfortunately, but typical of the Spanish Inquisition invaders and their religious prejudices and superstitions who viewed the quipo as dangerous heresy, most of teh stringed marvels were destroyed by the Catholic clergy who believed that they were the product of the devil. 
    Today, there are only about 300 original quipus remaining out of many thousands.
    And, today, no one even has the remotest idea what the tocapu means, nor what happened to the written script writing of the early Peruvian, though Montesinos left us his record of it.
(See the next post in this series, “Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part VI,” on the demise and disappearance of the Peruvian and Inca script writing)

Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part IV

Continuing from the previous posts regarding the so-called secret written language of the early Peruvians. In past articles we have written extensively about the importance Mormon and Moroni felt regarding the hiding of the sacred Nephite records for fear that if they fell into Lamanite hands, they would be destroyed. In fact, to believe that anything Nephite that would be associated with their sacred writing, would have survived the final annihilation of the Nephite Nation in 385 A.D., is to misunderstand the reasoning behind the Lamanites’ hatred for their Nephite brethren.

Not unlike the animosity the Arab nations have for the Jewish state of Israel today, believing Isaac stole the birthright from Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, and demanding Issrael’s complete annihilation, the Lamanites long held the fervent belief that Nephi stole the birthright (bechora) and right of primogeniture from his older brother, and Lehi’s firstborn son, Laman. Today, Rabbinic commentators explain that having the birthright affects the firstborn's position and role in the family, imposes on him certain spiritual obligations and entitles him to special monetary benefits. It was even of greater importance anciently, when the first born son took on himself the feeding and care of all the women of the family, held a leadership hand much like a Shiek or minor king, within his own family circle, and was the accepted decision-making of all things pertaining to the family as a whole.
     To the Jew and Arab, this is no small thing, and anciently, was paramount in their daily lives. This birthright established the firstborn as being the head of the family, and entitled him to inherit the position and authority of his father, which afforded him greater honor and prestige than his younger siblings, and receiving a greater share or double portion of the family’s estate. Thus his younger brothers and sisters were expected to honor and respect him, much as children must honor and respect their parents.
    In turn, the oldest son assumes responsibility for the family's welfare,and the birthright obligated the firstborn to preserve the sacred traditions of the family by fulfilling specific spiritual responsibilities, such as bringing sacrifices on behalf of the family, and to serve as the family's spiritual representative.
     In fact, originally, bringing sacrifices to the altar was the privilege of the first born and until the Tabernacle was establish private altars were permitted, and the service was done by the Bechorot (first-born). Thus the “birthright” of the first-born in every family was to be its representative at the altar, to bring sacrifices for the family. It is as if every single family could have their own “cohen,” serving Hashem, which did happen, right around Matan Torah (the giving of the Torah). Thus, the fulfilling of these spiritual duties for the family was a sacred privilege, but also quite risky—improper service could result in death. It was simply something not to be trifled with, but here was Nephi, usurping it as far as Laman and Lemuel were concerned, who taught their children to hate the Nephites in turn (Mosiah 10:16-17).

As a result, when Nephi rose in prominence in the family among his siblings, built the ship, guided them to the Land of Promise, took over control of the new colony as second in command beneath his father, though the fourth son, and had his father’s blessing in doing so, and were constantly reminded of their shortcomings and Nephi’s spiritual greatness (2 Nephi 1:24-27), the brothers rebelled (2 Nephi 5:3) and sought his life.
    When Nephi was commanded to flee their presence (2 Nephi 5:5), and took all those with him that were willing to follow him, he also took those few artifacts the colony would have held in great esteem, such as the sword of Laban, the Liahona, and the brass plates (2 Nephi 5:12,14). He even built a temple like unto Solomon’s (2 Nephi 5:16), which must have been the final blow to Laman and Lemuel in his usurpation of the rights of the bechora (בְּכוֹרָה).
    As a result of this 1000-year-long-hatred of the Lamanites toward the Nephites, we can understand how important it was for the Lamanties to eliminate and remove all semblence of Nephite existence in order to justify their right to finally rule. Nephite writing, the sacred records, and whatever symbols or icons the Nephites might have had would have been destroyed. This is seen when the Lamanites were driving Mormon and his armies deeper and deeper into the north country and though they were in hot pursuit, the Lamanites took the time to destroy and burn to the ground all Nephite towns, villages and cities (Mormon 5:5), killing all Nephties who could not escape their pursuit (Mormon 5:7).

Obviously, as we have suggested before, anything Nephite, especially Nephite writing since it represented all that the Lamanites had to eliminate, had to be destroyed if the Lamanites were going to claim the rights they sought. That is not to say, however, that the Lamanites did not have a written language. It was Amulon who taught the Lamanites the Nephite written language so that they could write one another (Mosiah 24:6-7). During the 200 years of peace and tranquility where there were no –ites among them, and then as late as 385 A.D., Mormon is corresponding with the Lamanite king (Mormon 3:4; 6:2). Obviously, the Lamanites had a written language, as well.
    So what happened to that Lamanite written language? Why was it not being used 1000 years later when the Spanish arrived?
    Which brings us back to the t’oqapu (tocapu) and also to another event in Incan history. First, the tocapu is a considered a type of signage—a language that, in addition to its characteristic form, some tocapu are enrolled in a quadrangular, simple and normal frame, which both art and semiotics, indicates that what is inside this graph limit has semiotic status.
    Note also that, as a form of marking, is a trait that can also be seen on many objects non-Andean intended to communicate a story through graphics and text, for example, in "boxes sanctuary" and in some pictorial votive offerings, all products of the sixteenth century onwards, characteristic of European and churches present in Andean culture. One of the differences between the pictorial votive offerings and tocapu was that while it did not contain scenes; it took into account the shape (square, rectangular) that is assumed in the framework graphically limited tocapu to a drawing that said something.
    Which brings us to an understanding of semiotic, which is a word derived from the Greek sēmeiōtikos, meaning the observation of signs, which comes from sēmeiousthai, the interpretation of signs, and from sēmeion meaning sign (sēma), dates to about 1880. This is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification and communication.
    It is in brief, a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deal especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. If one is going to make sense out of a group of signs, symbols or even unrecognized hieroglyphs, one should be at least acquainted with the science of semiotics.

    According to Gary Shank in Semiotics and Qualitative Research in Education: the Third Crossroad,” Semiotic theory can help expand the conceptual and practical domain of qualitative research by serving as a philosophical foundation for the discipline, thereby allowing qualitative researchers to build upon a set of ideas that powerfully extend the aims and goals of their research.”
    He also believes that qualitative research in education can help expand semiotics by serving as a source of empirical research and findings, thereby helping move semiotics away from its current nearly total preoccupation with theory and into a state where empirically determined issues play a more important and visible role.
It should also be noted that since qualitative research in education and semiotics have developed independently of each other, there are few people who understand the issues and ideas of both fields. However, once these definitions have been laid out, it is believed that the potential link between the two areas will be established by presenting an examination of its current state in the history of qualitative thinking, which can then be used to situate the comparisons between the two domains.

How many researchers, historians, archaeologists and anthropologists are also semioticians? Very few to none. Is it important? It seems so in the case of the Peruvian Tocapu language of patterned signage that many researchers claim have written meaning.
    This, then, leads us to the second point.
(See the next post, “Quellqa: Ancient Written Language of Peru – Part V,” for more information on how the sciences are possibly changing and looking at new insights into an early Peruvian writing system and also why the Inca had no writing system when the Spanish arrived)