Andean

The Andean proverb traditions belong to Quechua and Aymara, the two largest indigenous language families of the Andes, and to the high country of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador where they are spoken. They are among the least covered in English-language scholarship. The one Andean essay in the archive so far pins its wording not to English sources but to bilingual Quechua–Spanish collections of sayings, Crescencio Ramos Mendoza’s and J. M. B. Farfán’s among them.

That essay is ama suwa, ama llulla, ama qhilla: do not steal, do not lie, do not be idle. Each clause opens with ama, the Quechua particle that forbids, so the line scans like three drumbeats. It names the three people you must not become — the thief, the liar, the idle one — and leaves the virtues unspoken. In communities that run on reciprocal labor, where the shirker is the neighbor who breaks the ayni, idleness is as much an offense against others as theft is.

The proverb also carries an argument about its own age. It is almost always introduced as the moral code of the Inca, and colonial chroniclers, Garcilaso de la Vega among them, do describe an Inca order that punished theft, falsehood, and idleness severely. Whether the compact formula itself is pre-Columbian is less certain: in places it reads like a catechism, and it may have been fixed in colonial or republican times. Either way it now does civic work in three countries. It is stamped over the lintels of municipal offices, sprayed on school walls, and painted over doorways in Cusco.