Practice question · Multiple choice
Inca administration ran an empire of ten million people with no writing as Eurasia understood it. What does that force us to separate?
Hints
- Ask what a tax system actually needs to record.
- The khipu stored numbers and categories. Is that writing? Does it matter for governing?
Show the answer
A. Record-keeping from writing: a census run without a script
Why
A census and a labour roster need quantities and categories, and knotted cord supplied both, so the checklist item 'writing' was standing in for a capacity it is not identical with. Whether narrative khipu existed is still open; the administrative ones demonstrably worked.
Practise The Americas: Mesoamerica and the Andes
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More questions on The Americas: Mesoamerica and the Andes
- How did the Inca economy work without money or markets?
- The Maya independently developed both a full writing system and the concept of zero.
- Complete the causal chain behind the collapse.
- Sort each civilization: Mesoamerica or the Andes?
- What is the deepest lesson of the American civilizations for how we define "civilization"?
- Within a century of contact, roughly what percentage of the Americas’ population died, mostly of disease? Set…
- The American civilizations built cities and empires while lacking which "standard" technologies?
- What was the khipu, and why does it matter?