Early the next year in a public lecture at one of Peru’s major scholarly associations, Burns, currently a professor at Allas University outside of Lima, presented his findings. At first the feedback devastated him: “Just about everyone was saying that I just made it up—that I really didn’t have anything to go on. I predicted that it would take 25 years before people accepted that I had discovered a system of writing for the Incas.”

   Nineteen years have passed since Burns announced his work and, by in large, scholars remain skeptical. His 1990 book Legado de Los Amautas (Legacy of the Wise Men), which discusses his findings, remains unpublished in English.

   But when Chicago concrete engineer Jaime Moreno met Burns while in Peru on business, Moreno, who has had a lifelong interest in Quechua, the language of the Incas, found that Burns’ research blew him away. “I went to see him speak because I knew that the Incas did not have a system of writing. I walked away convinced they did,” he said. Moreno has since become an informal American agent for Burns. In 1995 he arranged for Burns a speaking tour of the United States. Currently, Moreno is searching for an English language publisher for Legado de Los Amautas and trying to get national science magazines interested in the story.

   Moreno attributes some of the public skepticism about Burns to Burns’ background. While Burns has become an acknowledged master of Quechua, his academic background is in textile engineering and management rather than anthropology or linguistics. This complication has led some scholars to dismiss him as an arrogant amateur.

The Inca Civilization
   At the height of their empire in 15th and 16th centuries, the Incas controlled a wide swath of South America’s west coast. Before Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro destroyed the empire, it was one of the world’s largest. Aggressive conquerors of many nearby peoples, the Incas’ monarch and a small group of noblemen developed a rigid, quasi-socialist political system. The Incas built impressive roads, made developments in astronomy, and were at least the equals of 16th-century Europeans in many of the sciences.

   Popular thought, however, has it that alone amongst the world’s great civilizations, the Incas never developed a system of writing. Elementary school textbooks flatly state that the Incas never formed such a system. Encyclopedia articles and even college-level Latin American history textbooks tend to say the same things, often tinged with a bit of authorial wonder at how a great empire existed without a writing system.

   But many who have studied the Incas in depth tend to disagree. Indeed, for all the current controversy around the shape and form of the Incas’ writing system, most scholars of Incan culture agree that one must have existed. Aside from whatever logical arguments one chooses to make about the need for a system of writing, 16th-century chroniclers make reference to an Incan system of writing in several places. Furthermore, Quechua (which today makes use of a modified version of the Roman alphabet and pronunciation rules obtained mostly from Spanish) has always contained a verb meaning “to write”—a concept which would be alien to a non-literate society.

   “I have no doubt that the Incas had a writing system, I just doubt that [Burns] has figured it out. I don’t know if it is ever going to be figured out. It might just be too difficult,” said Luis Morato-Pena, who teaches Quechua at Cornell and has written several Quechua textbooks for English and Spanish speakers. Morato-Pena said he was familiar with Burns’ work but had not actually read Legado de Los Amautas. Other American experts on Quechua and Inca civilization have expressed similar sentiments.

   While Americans have largely ignored his work, Burns indicates that a number of academics, particularly in Peru, have come to believe his theories after periods of initial skepticism. “People just need time before they come to understand,” he said.

   Moreno related an “awakening” incident that took place during a lecture Burns gave at the University of Illinois: “[Burns] went on for about an hour and a half talking about the system of writing. After he asked for questions, nobody said anything. Finally a student stood up and said, ‘If what you say is correct, it changes a lot of what I have been studying.’”

Above: A textile sample in which Burns found symbols similar to those in Waman Puma's document.

   The student may have understated her point a bit. If Burns can prove its existence, a writing system would usher in the anthropological, historical, and linguistic equivalent of what science historian Thomas Kuhn has called a paradigm shift—a quantum leap in knowledge rather than slow, stately development. Nearly all discussions of the Inca empire have revolved around the idea that there was no system of writing—or at least a writing system we know nothing about. If an Incan written language existed, researchers will have to change the entire way in which they look at the empire.

A Linguistic Obsession?
   Even his harshest critics have never accused Burns of seeking personal gain or fame through his work. Burns arrived in Peru in 1956 and married a Peruvian woman four years later. Over time he developed a fascination with Peruvian culture. “I had gotten a lot out of being in Peru and I wanted to give something back to the people,” said Burns. “[My research] was what I gave back.”

   Burns’ interest in searching for an Incan writing system began sometime in the 1960s when he overheard his third grade daughter talking with her brother about the Incas’ lack of written language. He didn’t believe it and asked his wife about it. “Yes,” she said, “there was no Incan writing system.”

   To Burns the search for the writing system became an obsession because he could not understand how a huge, sophisticated empire could exist without one. “From the standpoint of someone who has studied management, I just knew that it couldn’t have worked that way,” Burns said. “Take the telephone game: twenty people with a message of twenty words pass it around a room. It will develop errors. Now, think about playing that game in an empire of ten million people. You aren’t going to get interpretations that are 100 percent correct.”

   Spanish chronicler Cieza de León, for example, describes a system by which Incas used messengers to transmit spoken messages throughout the empire. Due to terrain which prohibited the use of wheeled vehicles, messengers had to travel on foot. Conveying a message over the entire length of South America thus required hundreds of individuals. Cieza de León and other chroniclers say that imperial rulers insured accuracy of the messages by executing those who made errors in transmitting the messages. Burns points out a huge flaw in this system: if so many individuals handled each message, how would an administrator know which messenger to execute for a mistake in a message’s transmission? Either the mortality rate amongst messengers was unimaginably high or leaders rarely found the guilty messenger. Although there is little doubt that the Incas used sophisticated messenger systems, as did nearly all far-flung ancient empires, it also seems likely that writing supplemented the system.

   Burns stepped up his studies of Quechua, read just about everything he could find, and finally sat down to ponder the system of writing. During the Spanish conquest of South America, Waman Puma, an Andean writer known in Spanish as Guamán Poma de Ayala, wrote a 1,200-page treatise on Incan culture in the form of a letter to Phillip III of Spain. This work represented an obvious starting place for Burns’ research.

Above: Incan Leader Inca Roca in a drawing by Waman Puma

   While Burns then worked as a professor of textile engineering and business, teaching some Quechua classes on the side, his research was strictly non-professional. “It was a pastime. I could leave it for months and go back to it and pick up where I had left off. Sometimes I even got bored with it,” he said.

   Particularly intriguing to Burns was Waman Puma’s inclusion of 400 pages of pen and ink drawings along with the letter’s text. In 1978, Burns noticed some symbols in the robes of Waman Puma’s pictures of two leaders. The names of the leaders were above the pictures in Spanish. Reading from the Spanish and comparing the names of the two leaders, Burns was able to decode some of the symbols as letters. Examinations of more and more drawings and textiles from the Incan empire allowed him to interpret more and more of the cryptic symbols. Recalling his initial breakthrough, Burns said, “I can’t remember a specific moment; it was a gradual process, breaking a code little by little.”

   According to Burns, the ancient writing system consists of twelve letters and ten numbers, with numbers doubling as letters. As in Hebrew, scribes leave out vowels. The individual letters represent sounds a good deal longer than those represented by single letters in most Indo-European languages; in most cases, letters signify entire syllables. Depending on their context within a word, the sounds of individual letters change. Sometimes they are silent. From time to time the reader has to create letters’ sounds based on the context of the word.

A Deficit of Evidence
   In a way, the possibility of an Incan writing system creates a mystery greater than the one it solves: if a written language existed, why can’t we find more displays of it? To answer this question, one might consider the well-known destructiveness of the Spanish conquerors. After conquering the Aztecs of Mexico, the Spanish made a concerted effort to round up all available books and destroy them. Although nobody has located a record of a concerted Spanish effort to destroy books in the language of the Incas, it is possible that their literary records met a similar fate.

   Still, while dozens of Aztecan books escaped destruction, there does not exist even a record of Incan books. Though anthropologists have found plenty of quepas, knotted strings used to perform mathematical operations, Burns has not discovered any long documents, letters, prose treatises, or anything which indicates the existence of libraries or a common practice of letter writing.

   Of course, the absence of evidence of a written language may point to the idea that the Incas simply didn’t use their system of writing all that much. In a society where only a very small group of nobles had a definite need for a system of communication, the common people had no reason to learn how to write. With a system of writing limited to only a few individuals and literacy rather rare, it does not prove surprising that only a few documents exist.

   Without any books, letters, or any other writings of great length, it is difficult to put full confidence into Burns’ system: only a small amount of data exists. This lack of hard evidence for anything other than a very primitive system of letters has kept many skeptical.

   In a SciTech interview, Burns compared himself to Galileo. “People always said that the earth was at the center of the solar system; those who spoke the truth were persecuted. It took years and years for people to believe the truth,” he said.

   Looking at Burns’ proposed system one cannot help but think of Galileo’s intellectual adversaries: proponents of the Ptolemaic system. Under the Ptolemaic system, the earth, an immoble object, serves as the center of the solar system with the sun and planets revolving around it. The Ptolemaic system “worked” inthe sense that it explained most phenomena and could predict the locations of celestial objects. On the other hand, the Ptolemaic system was obscenely complex. Its fundamental model failed in dozens of cases and needed all sorts of amendments to explain even the most routine events.

   Many scientists and students of logic use Occam’s razor to evaluate the likely accuracy of a hypothesis. This philosophic rule states that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, or more simply, the least complex hypothesis is the most likely to be correct.

Above: William Burns Glynn at work in his study.

   Complexity is a matter of degree, and no scientist has devised an objective scale to judge the complexity of language. Even highly unusual features like the lack of vowels in Burns’ Incan writing system are not without precedent. Nonetheless, like the Ptolemaic universe model, the rules of Burns’ writing system always seem to be changing. In Legado de Los Amatuas, where a reader might expect Burns’ strongest examples, the evidence seems inconclusive. Sometimes symbols do match up but, nearly all of the symbols shown make multiple sounds; in several dozen cases, a symbol makes the same sound only once. The vowels are responsible for this variation, but since they are only a matter of speculation, the entire system is difficult to figure out. Burns says that he has multiple, as yet unpublished examples for many of the sounds, but admits there are some cases in which there is only one extant example of a symbol making a particular sound. English’s twenty-six letters come together to make about sixty phonemes, or sounds, that make up the language. Burns’ letters also make more than one sound but if his strongest examples show such a large degree of variation, his theory suddenly seems a lot weaker.

   Like any complex theory, particularly one based on a small data set, finding absolute proof for or against Burns’ theory becomes difficult. For now, nobody can disprove his writing system. If Burns is entirely or partly wrong, his theories are surely ingenious.

   Yet if Burns’ symbols are not writing, then what are they? With nearly half a millennium gone since the Spanish destroyed the Incas’ empire, researchers may never manage to resolve this enigma. Burns’ work promises to become perhaps the most frustrating of scientific hypotheses: one which scientists can neither prove nor disprove.