Reddit mentions of Inca

I'm on a smartphone, so I'll be brief for now and flesh this out at great length and with citations when I get home.

First, the Inca had a pretty amazing network of trained relay running couriers called chaskis who were spread out about the distance of one long run from each other along the royal highways. This post system was capable of getting a verbally relayed message or small package (i.e. A coca bag full of quipus.) from the coast to Cuzco in three days, a feat it took the Spanish two weeks to duplicate with horses after the conquest.

Second (and more controversially, but I can do some documentation), just because the conquistadores didn't record the existence of phonetic record keeping quipus doesn't mean they didn't exist.

Expanded post in a few hours.

EDIT:

So I'm going to have to ask everyone's forgiveness and thank you all for your patience. I appreciate AskHistorians is not a subreddit to be taken lightly. Rather than edit my original post (which was very generously supported with upvotes while I was otherwise engaged in a social function), I'll just post a more detailed account below.

As I mentioned earlier, the Inca held together Tahuantinsuyu (The Four Quarters of the World) through a substantial and generally standardized system of post couriers called chaskis. Chaski huts dotted the Capac Nan (Royal Roads) spaced about as far as a fit young man could run at full speed before becoming winded. Chaskis were equipped with conch shell trumpets (or ceramic copies), and they would signal the next chaski station of an incoming message from several hundred paces out so the next relay could rendezvous and receive the incoming message in midstride, much as relay runners today pass a baton. Chaski huts were typically manned day and night by shifts of two chaskis facing in opposite directions, and the huts were roofed but not completely enclosed so the runners could see each direction of the road. Each courier was expected to be able to memorize a message of several hundred words on a single recitation while running. It was a system that the Spaniards admired a great deal, although they could not maintain it after the fall of the Inca Empire (between the Quitu Rebellion, the smallpox epidemic, The War Between the Brothers, The Spanish Conquest, Manco's Rebellion, and the further war between the original conquistadores and the newly arriving Spaniards --who then re-subjugated most of the purics (commoners)-- there really wasn't much left of the Inca postal system still functioning).

Sources for all of this are fairly extensive, although it's worth noting that none of the original literate conquistadores survived to write memoirs, as was common among Cortez's men with the Aztecs. Instead, after a new wave of Spaniards reasserted the King's authority, chroniclers went around interviewing the natives many years after the conquest. Their accounts differ in many particulars based on who they were talking to and where they traveled: Keep in mind that they were interviewing aged participants on opposite sides of a couple of civil wars from several social strata, and most of the actual Intip Churi --the Children of the Sun-- had fled into the Amazon jungle to establish a rump state that would last several more generations. That said, almost all the 16th Century literature mentions the chaskis in some way. Some of the best primary documents can be found in the public domain by looking up Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (who illustrated many scenes from Inca daily life), Pedro Sarmiento De Gamboa, Bernabé Cobo, etc. If you're looking for secondary sources, I can't praise "History Of The Conquest Of Peru, With A Preliminary View Of The Civilization Of The Incas" by William Prescott enough. I could go on and on when it comes to secondary sources. Just ask.

My second point was on the idea of a phonetic version of quipus. Admittedly, we're on much shakier ground there, but there is definitely a growing body of academic work supporting the idea that there may have been knots that recorded sound, instead of just numbers. We don't have surviving examples, unfortunately, but there is a fascinating manuscript called the Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum written around the time of Shakespeare that was discovered in Naples, Italy, in 1996. That's the one that grabbed my attention, but there are other (admitted divergent) theories and essays out there. An argument can definitely be made that we've lost much of what quipus actually recorded, and the idea that some form of an alphabet in knotted string isn't outside the realm of possibility, although no one seems to be arguing that a string-based literacy was widespread.

If you've read this far, I want to make an unabashed plug: I've written a work of historical fiction about the Inca, and it's been fairly well received.