Contador maior i texzorero
In Felipe Guamám Poma de Ayala. Nueva corónica y buen gobierno [facsimile of early seventeenth- century manuscript]. Paris, 1936.
To keep an account of the numbers of men, cattle, and goods, the Inca of the Andean region employed quipucamayoc, experts who used a decimal system to collect data of interest to the state; the data were maintained on stringed devices called quipus. Guamán Poma de Ayala illustrates such a civil servant. Each expert passed on his information to his superior, who in turn did the same, until finally all the information came together in Cuzco. Poma de Ayala, a chronicler of the Inca, was a descendant of Túpac Inca Yupanqui, one of the Inca rulers. His manuscript, which was not uncovered until 1908 and only reproduced in a limited edition in 1936, was completed in 1587, when it was presented to the King of Spain. The work provides valuable ethnographic and social information about the Incan society and its relations, after conquest, with the Spanish administration.
