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By Root 1941 0

In textbooks the Roman emperors, heroic custodians of Greco-Roman civilization, are always fighting off the “barbarian chiefs” of the “Germanic tribes.” But these “tribes” had rulers who lived in big palaces, held sway over sizable domains, and had to abide by written codes of law. The Burgundian “tribe” even conquered Rome and set up its own puppet Roman emperor in the fifth century. (He was killed by another “tribe,” which installed its own emperor.)

Maps of fifth- and sixth-century Europe usually depict the “Celtic kingdoms,” “Kingdom of the Lombards,” and so on, their borders marked by the solid lines we associate with national frontiers. But entities of equal or greater size and technological sophistication in the Western Hemisphere are routinely called “chiefdoms” and “tribes,” implying they are somehow different and of smaller scale. And fuzzy lines mark their borders, as if to indicate the looseness with which they were organized and defined. “‘Tribe’ and ‘chiefdom’ are not neutral scientific terms,” archaeologist Alice Beck Kehoe has declared. “They are politically loaded.” I have mostly avoided them.

In general, I have tried to use the terms that historians of Europe or Asia would use to describe social and political entities of similar size and complexity. This approach risks obliterating the real differences between, to cite one example, the court in Qosqo and the court in Madrid. But it supports one of the larger aims of this book: to explain in lay terms researchers’ increasing recognition that the Western Hemisphere played a role in the human story just as interesting and important as that of the Eastern Hemisphere.

A final note: throughout the text, I use the European terminology of B.C. and A.D. Many researchers object to them as ethnically bound. In truth, it is a little odd to be talking about “years before Christ” in reference to people whose cultural traditions have nothing to do with Christianity. But no plausible substitutes are available. Some historians use B.C.E. to mean “before the Common era,” but because the Common Era calendar is just a renamed Christian calendar that still places past events in reference to Christianity, the main objection. One could switch to a neutral calendar, like the Julian calendar used by astronomers (the latter at least doesn’t get tripped up by zero—it is the first European calendar as sophisticated as the Mesoamerican Long Count). This doesn’t seem useful; to discharge their informational content, readers will have to translate Julian dates back into what they know, the familiar A.D. and B.C. It seems only kind to save them the bother.

APPENDIX B

Talking Knots

All known written accounts of the Inka were set down after the conquest, most by Spaniards who had, of course, never experienced the empire in its heyday. Because many of the chroniclers tried to do their job conscientiously, most scholars use their reports, despite their deficiencies, as I do in this book. For obvious reasons historians of the Inka have never liked being forced to rely exclusively on post-conquest, non-native written sources, but there seemed to be no avoiding it.

Recently, though, some researchers have come to believe that the Inka did have a written language—indeed, that Inka texts are displayed in museums around the world, but that they have generally not been recognized as such. Here I am referring to the bunches of knotted strings known as khipu (or quipu, as the term is often spelled). Among the most fascinating artifacts of Tawantinsuyu, they consist of a primary cord, usually a third to a half an inch in diameter, from which dangle thinner “pendant” strings—typically more than a hundred, but on occasion as many as 1,500. The pendant strings, which sometimes have subsidiary strings attached, bear clusters of knots, each tied in one of three ways. The result, in the dry summary of George Gheverghese Joseph, a University of Manchester mathematics historian, “resembles a mop that has seen better days.”

According to colonial accounts, khipukamayuq—“knot keepers,” in Ruma