An Empire Without Its Own Script

The Inca Empire administered an enormous territory across the Andes without a writing system comparable to Mesoamerican hieroglyphics, relying instead on the khipu, a system of knotted cords now understood to have encoded numerical and possibly some narrative information, whose full capabilities remain an active subject of ongoing scholarly research and are not yet fully understood even today, meaning virtually no Inca religious prayer survives in a form directly recorded by the Inca themselves in anything resembling a textual liturgy.

Everything known about Inca prayer, including material such as the prayers to Viracocha and Inti catalogued elsewhere in this atlas, instead comes through Spanish colonial-era transcription, undertaken by chroniclers, missionaries and administrators working sometimes decades after the conquest and often relying on Quechua-speaking informants whose own memory and interpretation shaped what was eventually written down. This absence of any pre-conquest Inca textual religious record, distinguishing the Inca case from Maya and to a lesser extent Aztec traditions discussed elsewhere in this atlas, both of which left at least some pre-conquest written material, makes Inca religious prayer among the most heavily colonial-era-mediated corpora catalogued anywhere in this atlas.