The Inca empire covered over 2000 miles and is estimated to have contained 10 million people. Sounds like a management headache, especially with no computers or even a written language. Well some times an ancient people will come up with a work around, or in this case a run around. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Waterlow and Sons had some fun with the design of this exotic stamp from far off Peru. The presentation of the ancient Inca courier is straight forward and at first glance appropriately regal. Notice however how playfully they presented the surrounding designs. Specifically the figurehead at the top center. He made me laugh.
Todays stamp is issue A143, a 10 Centavo stamp issued by Peru in 1936. It was an 18 stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 30 cents used.
With such a spread out Inca empire. there was a need to have a system of communications. They developed a profession of road running mailmen who worked along regular chain routes throughout the empire. In addition to the skill of fast road running, the mailmen also had to be adept at quick memorization as remember the empire had no written language.
There was a sort of exception to the all verbal communication for the road runners were sometimes tasked with carrying Quipu. The Quipu was a series of strings and knots. The shape, shape, and distance apart of the knots conveyed the meaning. You of course had to understand the code and be able to make the knots. This was a skill passed from father to son using much repetition. The knots were supposedly also able to keep a record of numbers.
In the way of the modern historian, there is a a way of making romantic this backward work around as an equivalent of the modern binary code of computer languages. It seems to me to be an awfully labor intensive substitute for the talking drum method of long distance communications used in old days west Africa, see https://the-philatelist.com/2020/06/16/the-gold-coast-1954-listening-out-for-the-talking-drum/ . The Africans also had the problem of no written language to work around.
Sometimes even today simple people condemn as evil old systems they do not take the time to understand. After the Spanish Empire’s conquest of Latin America, the Catholic Church declared quipu knots the work of Satan and that they should be destroyed on sight. This might not have been just ignorance. The few in number conqueror will not want the masses to have a form of communication that they don’t understand. A little like Josef Stalin banning the Esperanto language during his 1930s purges. In any case it was the end of the use of Quipu knots and today we have only uncovered a few examples of the old system.
Well my drink is empty. Come again soon when there will be another story to be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2021.