History, certified and then mislaid

Claim (verbatim)

The Inca state kept a pictorial dynastic archive alongside the khipu: Cristóbal de Molina of Cuzco describes a house of the Sun called Poquen Cancha, near the city, holding the painted lives of each ruler, and Sarmiento de Gamboa describes Pachacuti's historical commission and the painted boards kept in a great hall — two independent chroniclers attesting one institution. The colonial state then performed a complete extraction of it. Viceroy Toledo had Sarmiento's Historia Índica read aloud in Cuzco in 1572 to the assembled descendants of the twelve royal ayllus, their corrections and assent recorded in a formal probanza that names them individually — history certified against the custodians of the archive — and shipped Philip II the manuscript together with four painted cloths of the Inca dynasty made by native painters: the copy meant to stand for the originals. Every physical term of the transaction then vanished. The boards and cloths of the Poquen Cancha tradition survive in zero exemplars; the four paños have no securely identified trace after their dispatch; and Sarmiento's certified text itself disappeared for more than three centuries until Richard Pietschmann found the manuscript in the Göttingen university library and published it in 1906. We hold the certification paperwork for an archive we do not hold, transmitted by a copy that was itself lost and found — the bureaucratic receipt outliving both the record and its replacement. Prediction: the documentary trail will show the four paños attested in at least two independent 1572 records (Toledo's remissions and the Cuzco certification file) and in no published inventory of the Spanish royal collections after 1600, while catalogued museum holdings worldwide show zero surviving pre-1572 Andean dynastic paintings on board or cloth (primary clause: the zero-surviving-exemplars census of the attested state genre; the verdict follows it). Kill: Sarmiento's Historia Índica with its probanza (the Göttingen manuscript, ed. Pietschmann, 1906), Molina's Relación de las fábulas y ritos, and Toledo's dispatches in Levillier's editions; the post-1600 sweep of the published inventarios of the Spanish royal collections is not yet built as a single dataset.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: the documentary trail will show the four paños attested in at least two independent 1572 records (Toledo's remissions and the Cuzco certification file) and in no published inventory of the Spanish royal collections after 1600, while catalogued museum holdings worldwide show zero surviving pre-1572 Andean dynastic paintings on board or cloth (primary clause: the zero-surviving-exemplars census of the attested state genre; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Sarmiento's Historia Índica with its probanza (the Göttingen manuscript, ed. Pietschmann, 1906), Molina's Relación de las fábulas y ritos, and Toledo's dispatches in Levillier's editions; the post-1600 sweep of the published inventarios of the Spanish royal collections is not yet built as a single dataset.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary clause is the zero-surviving-exemplars census of the attested Inca dynastic painting genre, and that negative is stated as fact in the Andean historical literature: the Poquen Cancha painted boards described by Molina and the painted boards and four cloths of the Sarmiento-Toledo transaction of 1572 are treated as wholly lost, with no securely identified survivor, by Julien and others who reconstruct the Inca historical genres. Sarmiento's own certified text, lost until Pietschmann found it at Gottingen and published it in 1906, is likewise documented. A competent reader already knows no pre-1572 Andean dynastic painting on board or cloth survives; only the exhaustive post-1600 inventory sweep for the paños (the kill's own 'not yet built' element) remains, and it bears on tracing, not on the zero-survivors answer.

• Catherine Julien, Reading Inca History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000)
• Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Geschichte des Inkareiches, ed. Richard Pietschmann (Abhandlungen der Koeniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Goettingen, Berlin: Weidmann, 1906)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.