One of the most enlightened rulers of Tampu-tocco was a king called Tupac Cauri, or Pachacuti VII.  In his day people began to write on the leaves of trees.  He sent messengers to the various parts of the highlands, asking the tribes to stop worshiping idols and animals, to cease practicing evil customs which had grown up since the fall of the Amautas, and to return to the ways of their ancestors.  He met with little encouragement.  On the contrary, his ambassadors were killed and little or no change took place.  Discouraged by the failure of his attempts at reformation and desirous of learning its cause, Tupac Cauri was told by his soothsayers that the matter which most displeased the gods was the invention of writing.  Thereupon he forbade anybody to practice writing, under penalty of death.  This mandate was observed with such strictness that the ancient folk never again used letters.  Instead, they used quipus, strings and knots.  It was supposed that the gods were appeased, and every one breathed easier.  No one realized how near the Peruvians as a race had come to taking a most momentous step.

This curious and interesting tradition relates to an event supposed to have occurred many centuries before the Spanish Conquest.  We have no ocular evidence to support it.  The skeptic may brush it aside as a story intended to appeal to the vanity of persons with Inca blood in their veins; yet it is not told by the half-caste Garcilasso, who wanted Europeans to admire his maternal ancestors and wrote his book accordingly, but is in the pages of that careful investigator Montesinos, a pure-blooded Spaniard.  As a matter of fact, to students of Sumner’s “Folkways,” the story rings true.  Some young fellow, brighter than the rest, developed a system of ideographs which he scratched on broad, smooth leaves.  It worked.  People were beginning to adopt it.  The conservative priests of Tampu-tocco did not like it.  There was danger lest some of the precious secrets, heretofore handed down orally to the neophytes, might become public property.  Nevertheless, the invention was so useful that it began to spread.  There followed some extremely unlucky event—­the ambassadors were killed, the king’s plans miscarried.  What more natural than that the newly discovered ideographs should be blamed for it?  As a result, the king of Tampu-tocco, instigated thereto by the priests, determined to abolish this new thing.  Its usefulness had not yet been firmly established.  In fact it was inconvenient; the leaves withered, dried, and cracked, or blew away, and the writings were lost.  Had the new invention been permitted to exist a little longer, some one would have commenced to scratch ideographs on rocks.  Then it would have persisted.  The rulers and priests, however, found that the important records of tribute and taxes could be kept perfectly well by means of the quipus.  And the “job” of those whose duty it was to remember what each string stood for was assured.  After all there is nothing unusual about Montesinos’ story.  One has only to look at the history of Spain itself to realize that royal bigotry and priestly intolerance have often crushed new ideas and kept great nations from making important advances.