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Khipu / Quipu: Counting With Knots [The Incan Counting System]

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Incan Counting System Decoded?

By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News


Jan. 29, 2004 — The Inca invented a powerful counting system that could be used to make complex calculations without the tiniest mistake, according to an Italian engineer who claims to have cracked the mathematics of this still mysterious ancient population.

Begun in the Andean highlands in about 1200, the Inca ruled the largest empire on Earth by the time their last emperor, Atahualpa, was garroted by Spanish conquistadors in 1533.
Long been considered the only major Bronze Age civilization without a written language, they left mysterious objects that, according to the latest research, would have been used to store units of information.

Recent studies are investigating the hypothesis that elaborated knotted strings known as khipu contain a hidden written language stored following a seven-bit binary code. Nobody, however, had been able to explain the meaning of these geometrical tablets known as yupana.

Different in size and shape, the yupana had been often interpreted as a stylized fortress model. Some scholars also interpreted it as a counting board, but how the abacus would have worked remained a mystery.

"It took me about 40 minutes to solve the riddle. I am not an expert on pre-Columbian civilizations. I simply decoded a 16th century drawing from a book on mathematical enigmas I received as a Christmas present," engineer Nicolino De Pasquale said.

The drawing was found in a 1,179 page letter by the Peruvian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala to the King of Spain. A simple array of cells consisting of five rows and four columns, the drawing showed one circle in the right cell on the bottom row, two circles in the next cell, three circles in the other one and five circles in the last cell of the row. The same pattern applied to the above rows.

According to De Pasquale, the circles in the cells are nothing but the first numbers of the Fibonacci series, in which each number is a sum of two previous: 1, 2, 3, 5.

The abacus would then work on a base 40 numbering system.

"Instead, all scholars based their calculations according to a base 10 counting system. But calculations made to base 40 are quicker, and can be easily reconverted to base 10," Antonio Aimi, curator of the exhibition "Peru, 3,000 Years of Masterpieces" running in Florence, told Discovery News.

"Since we lack definitive archaeological evidence, we tested this claim on 16 yupana from museums across the world. De Pasquale's system works on all of them," Antonio Aimi, curator of the exhibition "Peru, 3,000 years of masterpieces" running in Florence, told Discovery News.

The Inca's calculating system (see an example of how it works in the slide show) does not take into consideration the number zero. Moreover, numbers do not exist as graphic representations.

According to Aimi, in most cases the Inca made their calculations by simply drawing rows and columns on the ground. The unusual counting way is described in an account by the Spanish priest José de Acosta, who lived among the Inca from 1571 to 1586.

"To see them use another kind of calculator, with maize kernels, is a perfect joy... . They place one kernel here, three somewhere else and eight, I do not know where. They move one kernel here and there and the fact is that they are able to complete their computation without making the smallest mistake," Acosta wrote in his book "Historia Natural Moral de las Indias."

The claim has sparked a dispute among scholars.

Gary Urton, professor of Precolumbian studies at Harvard University, an authority on khipu research, told Discovery News: "The fact that an explanation can be constructed for one or even several yupana that conforms to this theory of a base 40 numbering system amongst the Incas is of some modest interest.

"How would one explain the many statements in the Spanish chronicles, both those written by Spaniards and by literate Andeans, who stated quite straightforwardly that the Inca used a base 10 counting system? This system is also attested in a mountain of early colonial documents that describe how the Inca organized their administrative system according to a base 10 counting system."

As Aimi concedes, the claim has the limits of any interpretative system that isn't proven with definitive historical evidence.

"We would need to find a Rosetta yupana, something similar to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta stone. Since we can't have it, I would consider a strong evidence the fact that the system works on all yupana examined," he said.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040126/yupanacount.html
 
Peruvian ‘writing’ system goes back 5,000 years
Ancient culture used knots and strings to convey information


By Jude Webber
Reuters
Updated: 9:34 p.m. ET July 20, 2005

LIMA, Peru - Archaeologists in Peru have found a “quipu” on the site of the oldest city in the Americas, indicating that the device, a sophisticated arrangement of knots and strings used to convey detailed information, was in use thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

Previously the oldest known quipus, often associated with the Incas whose vast South American empire was conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century, dated from about A.D. 650.

But Ruth Shady, an archaeologist leading investigations into the Peruvian coastal city of Caral, said quipus were among a treasure trove of articles discovered at the site, which is about 5,000 years old.

“This is the oldest quipu, and it shows us that this society ... also had a system of ‘writing’ (which) would continue down the ages until the Inca empire and would last some 4,500 years,” Shady said.

She was speaking before the opening in Lima Tuesday of an exhibition of the artifacts which shed light on Caral, which she called one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

Found among offerings
The quipu, with its well-preserved, brown cotton strings wound around thin sticks, was found with a series of offerings including mysterious fiber balls of different sizes wrapped in ”nets” and pristine reed baskets.

“We are sure it corresponds to the period of Caral because it was found in a public building,” Shady said. “It was an offering placed on a stairway when they decided to bury this and put down a floor to build another structure on top.”

Pyramid-shaped public buildings were being built at Caral, a planned coastal city 115 miles (185 kilometers) north of Lima, at the same time that the Saqqara pyramid, the oldest in Egypt, was going up. They were were already being revamped when Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu) was under construction, Shady said.

“Man only began living in an organized way 5,000 years ago in five points of the globe — Mesopotamia (roughly comprising modern Iraq and part of Syria), Egypt, India, China and Peru,” Shady said. Caral was 3,200 years older than cities of another ancient American civilization, the Maya, she added.

Caral ‘advanced alone’
Shady said no equivalent of the “Rosetta Stone” that deciphered the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt had yet been found to fully unlock the language of the quipus, but said their existence pointed to a sophisticated, organized society where such information as production, taxes and debts were recorded.

“They came up with their own system becausem unlike cities in the Old World which had contact with each other and exchanged knowledge and experiences, this (city) in Peru was isolated in the Americas, and advanced alone.”

Caral’s arid location at an altitude of 11,500 feet (3,500 meters) has helped preserve its treasures, such as piles of raw cotton — still uncombed and containing seeds, though turned a dirty brown by the ages — and a ball of cotton thread.

The exhibition includes some of the 25 huge whale bones fashioned into chairs found at the site, as well as a cotton-soled sandal and flutes and pipes made from animal horns, pelican or condor bones or reeds.

The remains of jungle fruits, cactus fiber and shells revealed trade with distant regions and a block of salt the size of a small laptop computer was found in Caral’s main temple, suggesting salt may have had religious as well as commercial value.

Shady said representations on clay figurines had helped show that nobles wore their hair in two long ponytails each side of the face, with a fringe at the front and the hair on the top of the head cropped close to the skull.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
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Link is dead. The MIA webpage (quoted in full above) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
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Computer analysis provides Incan string theory

The mystery surrounding a cryptic string-based communication system used by ancient Incan administrators may at last be unravelling, thanks to computer analysis of hundreds of different knotted bundles.

The discovery provides a tantalising glimpse of bureaucracy in the Andean empire and may, for the first time, also reveal an Incan word written in string.

Woven from cotton, llama or alpaca wool, the mysterious string bundles - known as Khipu - consist of a single strand from which dangle up to thousands of subsidiary strings, each featuring a bewildering array of knots. Of the 600 or so Khipu that have been found, most date from between 1400 AD and 1500 AD. However, a few are thought to be about 1000 years old.

Spanish colonial documents suggest that Khipu were in some way used to keep records and communicate messages. Yet how the cords were used to convey useful information has puzzled generations of experts.

Unpicking the knots
Now, anthropologist Gary Urton and mathematician Carrie Brezine at Harvard University, Massachusetts, US, think they may have begun unravelling the knotty code. The pair built a searchable database containing key information about Khipu strings, such as the number and position of subsidiary strings and the number and position of knots tied in them.

The pair then used this database to search for similarities between 21 Khipus discovered in 1956 at the key Incan administrative base of Puruchuco, near modern day Lima in Peru. Superficial similarities suggested that the Khipu could be connected but the database revealed a crucial mathematical bond - the data represented by subsidiary strands on some of Khipu could be combined to create the strands found on more complex ones.

This suggests the Khipu were used to collate information from different parts of the empire, which stretched for more than 5500 kilometres. Brezine used the mathematical software package Mathematica to scour the database for other mathematical links – and found several.

First word
"Local accountants would forward information on accomplished tasks upward through the hierarchy, with information at each successive level representing the summation of accounts from the levels below," Urton says. "This communication was used to record the information deemed most important to the state, which often included accounting and other data related to censuses, finances and the military."

And Urton and Brezine go a step further. Given that the Puruchuco strings may represent collations of data different regions, they suggest that a characteristic figure-of-eight knot found on all of the 21 Puruchuco strings may represent the place itself. If so, it would be the first word to ever be extracted from an Incan Khipu.

Completely deciphering the Khipu may never be possible, Urton says, but further analysis of the Khipu database might reveal other details of life. New archaeological discoveries could also throw up some more surprises, Urton told New Scientist.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7835
 
Untangling the Mystery of the Inca

The ancient Andean empire built great cities but left no written records – except perhaps in mysterious knotted strings called khipu. Can an anthropologist and some mathematicians crack the code?
By Gareth Cook


Incan civilization was a technological marvel. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532, they found an empire that spanned nearly 3,000 miles, from present-day Ecuador to Chile, all served by a high-altitude road system that included 200-foot suspension bridges built of woven reeds. It was the Inca who constructed Machu Picchu, a cloud city terraced into a precarious stretch of earth hanging between two Andean peaks. They even put together a kind of Bronze Age Internet, a system of messenger posts along the major roads. In one day, Incan runners amped on coca leaves could relay news some 150 miles down the network.

Yet, if centuries of scholarship are to be believed, the Inca, whose rule began 2,000 years after Homer, never figured out how to write. It's an enigma known as the Inca paradox, and for nearly 500 years it has stood as one of the great historical puzzles of the Americas. But now a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton may be close to untangling the mystery.

His quest revolves around strange, once-colorful bundles of knotted strings called khipu (pronounced KEY-poo). The Spanish invaders noticed the khipu soon after arriving but never understood their significance – or how they worked.

Once, at the beginning of the 17th century, a group of Spaniards traveling in the central Peruvian highlands east of modern-day Lima encountered an old Indian carrying khipu that he insisted held a record of "all [the Spanish] had done, both the good and the bad." Angered, the Spanish burned the man's khipu, as they did countless others over the years.

Some of the knots did survive, though, and for centuries people wondered if the old man had been speaking the truth. Then, in 1923, an anthropologist named Leland Locke provided an answer: The khipu were files. Each knot represented a different number, arranged in a decimal system, and each bundle likely held census data or summarized the contents of storehouses. Roughly a third of the existing khipu don't follow the rules Locke identified, but he speculated that these "anomalous" khipu served some ceremonial or other function. The mystery was considered more or less solved.

Then, in the early 1990s, Urton, one of the world's leading Inca scholars, spotted several details that convinced him the khipu contained much more than tallies of llama sales. For example, some knots are tied right over left, others left over right. Urton came to think that this information must signal something. Could the knotted strings also be a form of writing? In 2003, Urton wrote a book outlining his theory, and in 2005 he published a paper in Science that showed how even khipu that follow Locke's rules could include place-names as well as numbers.

Urton knew that these findings were a tiny part of cracking the code and that he needed the help of people with different skills. So, early last year, he and a graduate student, Carrie Brezine, unveiled a computerized khipu database – a vast electronic repository that describes every knot on some 300 khipu in intricate detail. Then Urton and Brezine brought in outside researchers who knew little about anthropology but a lot about mathematics. Led by Belgian cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater, they are now trying to shake meaning from the knots with a variety of pattern-finding algorithms, one based on a tool used to analyze long strings of DNA, the other similar to Google's PageRank algorithm. They've already identified thousands of repeated knot sequences that suggest words or phrases.

Now the team is closing in on what might be a writing system so unusual that it remained hidden for centuries in plain sight. If successful, the effort will rank with the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics and will let Urton's team rewrite history. But how do you decipher something when it looks completely unlike any known written language – when you're not even sure it has meaning at all?

URTON WORKS A FEW MINUTES' WALK from Harvard Yard, in a redbrick building with dark wooden doors and copper gutters that also serves as the university's Museum of Natural History. But his fifth-floor office is more Lima than Cambridge. Behind his modest desk hangs a Peruvian pan flute. Spanish-language posters adorn the walls. The space is awash in earthy browns – straw-colored carpet, a darker shade for the faux-clay clock face – offset by colorful weavings hung from every wall. Each object is a memento from his many trips to South America to track down khipu.

Today at least 750 khipu survive, scattered about in museums and private collections. Each one has a long primary cord, typically about a quarter-inch in diameter, from which hang smaller "pendant" cords – sometimes just a couple, sometimes many hundred. The pendant cords are tied in a series of neat, small knots. Originally dyed in rich colors, the average khipu has now faded so much it resembles a dirty brown mop head.

How could the Inca have used strings to write? In a sense, any written text is just a record of physical actions. You put a pen to paper and then choose from a prescribed set of options how to move and when to lift up. Each decision is preserved in ink. The same can be done with string. The writer makes a series of decisions, recorded as a knot that can then be read by anyone who knows the rules.

Back in the '20s, Locke began with the observation that the Inca tied their khipu with three types of knots. There is a "figure-eight" knot, which represents one of something. There are "long" knots, with two to nine turns, representing those numbers. And there are "single" knots, which represent tens, hundreds, thousands, or ten thousands, depending on where they fall on the string. When a khipu is placed flat on the ground, the bottom row is the ones place and successively higher rows stand for higher places. So, the number 327 would have three single knots in the hundreds place. A little lower would be two single knots. Lower still would be a long knot with seven turns.

Most anthropologists assumed that was all there was to it – until 1992. That's when Urton spent a day looking at khipu in the American Museum of Natural History in New York with his friend Bill Conklin, an architect and textile expert. As he studied the cords, Conklin had an isn't-that-funny insight: The knots that connect the small pendant strings to the primary cord are always tied the same way, but sometimes they face forward and sometimes backward. Startled, Urton soon noticed additional construction details – such as whether a fiber had been dyed to have a bluish or a reddish tint. All told, Urton has found seven additional bits of binary information that might signal something. Perhaps one means "read this as a word, not a number." Perhaps the binary code served as a kind of markup language, allowing the Inca to make notes on top of Locke's number-recording system. And perhaps the 200 or so anomalous khipu don't follow Locke's rules because they've transcended them.

Most Incan scholars are intrigued by Urton's ideas, though a few skeptics have noted that he has not produced any proof that his binary code carries meaning, much less that the khipu contain narratives. The Harvard professor concedes that some of the information he's looking at may not signal anything. But he is convinced the khipu have stories to tell, and he has some history on his side. José de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary sometimes called the Pliny of the New World, wrote a description of the khipu at the end of the 16th century. In it, he describes how the "woven reckonings" were used to record financial transactions involving hens, eggs, and hay. But he also noted that the native people considered the khipu to be "witnesses and authentic writing." "I saw a bundle of these strings," he wrote, "on which a woman had brought a written confession of her whole life and used it to confess just as I would have done with words written on paper."

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS, LINEAR B, ancient Mayan writing – all of the great decipherments have been accomplished by a combination of logic and intuition, persistence and flexibility. Decoding scripts is not like looking for a combination that will open a lock. It's more like rock climbing: You find a foothold, push up, and hope another presents itself.

Jean-Jacques Quisquater – a tall man with a thin crown of wispy white hair – would like to join the pantheon of puzzle solvers. Quisquater directs a large cryptography laboratory at Belgium's historic Catholic University of Louvain, where he is known for his work on securing smartcards. In the fall of 2003, he came to MIT for a yearlong academic sabbatical. At the time, he had been thinking nostalgically of a trip to Greece 40 years before when he saw the famous undeciphered Phaistos Disc, a small red-brown disc from deep in the second millennium BC covered on either side with a spiral of glyphs – a fish, a shield, an olive branch. Quisquater hoped to find something equally romantic and challenging to work on.

When he heard about the mystery of the khipu, he was immediately enthralled. He soon met Urton, and they teamed up with a father-son pair of MIT computer scientists, Martin and Erik Demaine. The group began chatting, with the mathematicians offering detailed plans about how to sort the data.

The team agreed that one of Quisquater's graduate students, Vincent Castus, would first try an analysis known as a suffix tree. The method uses a computer to identify all the blocks of characters in a text that repeat themselves. Thus, the word Mississippi would yield several repeated blocks, including issi, iss, and ss. Suffix trees are used in genetic analysis to find the shortest unique pattern in a sample of DNA.

With the khipu database loaded onto his iMac, Castus worked to build a suffix tree from the knots, leaving aside the more complicated binary data on this first pass. He began in May 2006. By October he had worked out all the details and found an astonishing number of repeats: 3,000 different groups of repeated five-knot sequences. Shorter patterns appeared even more often. He found several pairs of khipu linked by large numbers of matches, suggesting that they could be related.

None of this tells us whether the khipu contain words or stories. It's possible the researchers have found khipu that just happen to include repeated number sequences that are not interesting for any particular reason, or that some khipu are deliberate copies of others.

But Urton suspects there's more to it than that. He knows repetition is the code-breaker's great friend. A Cold War sleuth noticing an oft-used sequence might guess it stood for Moscow or Khrushchev. Recognizing repeated place-names was one of the first steps in deciphering the ancient Mycenaean script Linear B. Now the team has a key for all the khipu in the database, allowing them to instantly identify whenever a particular sequence appears. They also have a list of common short sequences – the most obvious candidates for words.

The team had previously made one breakthrough in identifying connections between knots, thanks to Brezine, who has a background in mathematics and just happens to be a weaver on the side. The master of the khipu database, she wanted to find examples of strings with numbers that added up to sums on another khipu. So she developed a simple algorithm and combed through the data.

Her efforts identified a handful of interlinked khipu that had been uncovered together in a cache in Puruchuco, an archaeological site near Lima. The khipu looked like records kept by three successively higher levels of Incan administrators. Add the numbers on one khipu and the sum is found on another, with that sum in turn found on a third. Imagine, for example, that they depict the results of a census. The village counts up its people and then forwards the total to the district. The district records the numbers from several villages and then forwards the results up to the provincial head. Urton and Brezine do not know what is being counted (people? llamas?), but their 2005 Science paper showed for the first time that information flowed between the khipu.

They have also identified what may be the first word. The two higher-level khipu in the census example use an introductory sequence of three figure-eight knots (1-1-1) that does not appear on what they assume is the village-level khipu. Perhaps only the upper layers have the sequence because it is a label for a particular place, used when compiling information from many locations. Maybe, they suggest, the first symbol to be read off a khipu means this: Puruchuco.

Quisquater's team, meanwhile, is now working on another, even more ambitious way of extracting clues. It depends on thinking of each knot as a node and each khipu as a network and the links being lengths of string.

One of the surprises from the burgeoning new field of network theory is that the role of a particular node can be summarized – in a deep and meaningful way – by a single number. A good example of this is Google's PageRank algorithm. The power of the company's search engine comes from its ability to rank Web pages by relevance. On the Web, a link runs from one page to another, like an arrow. The algorithm interprets that as the first page voting for the second one. Votes flow from across the Internet, like streams joining rivers, eventually pooling at the eBays of the world.

The analysis that the team plans for these khipu networks doesn't exactly mimic PageRank. After all, the string links between knots aren't unidirectional like arrows; one knot doesn't point to another. But the concept is the same: If you think about a big mass of information as a network, and analyze it as a network, looking for the thousands of small and big ways that different piles of information relate to one another, you can see things that you wouldn't notice otherwise.

Vincent Blondel, a Belgian mathematics professor who is a friend of Quisquater's, recently helped work out the math behind an approach that allows a computer to calculate degrees of similarity between nodes in two separate networks. Like PageRank, the procedure uses voting, but it assigns each node many scores instead of one and employs a more complex scheme for calculating the totals. Type "baseball" into Google and its spiders will race over the Internet, look at links, and spit back that yankees.com is the 11th most useful site for you and seattlemariners.com is the 22nd. If Quisquater's algorithm were used on the Web, it would return a slew of numbers, some of which would show similarities between different nodes – or knots. So you'd see that the Yankees and Mariners sites are similar because both receive feeds from majorleaguebaseball.com and have outgoing links to the homepages for 29 teams.

When Quisquater's algorithm is used on khipu, it will reveal knots or groups of knots that always play a certain role in relationship to others. These might be labels or formatting signs. For example, it may turn out that some of the khipu start with sets of knots that say something like "read this as a calendar." Or collections of khipu may have similar networks of closely related knots, perhaps signaling that they originate from the same geographic area. Or it could even turn out that the anomalous khipu will all have some pattern that signifies "read this as a story." The results from this technique should come in sometime later this year, and they will provide valuable clues, even if they don't immediately crack the Inca paradox.

URTON'S GREAT INSIGHT has been to treat the khipu not just as a textile or a simple abacus but as an advanced, alien technology. Sitting on a poncho draped over the couch in his office, Urton describes a formative trip to a remote Bolivian village where he worked with traditional weavers. Observing these women spin and ply yarn into multicolored tapestries with elaborate symmetries, he caught a glimpse of the Incan mind at work. For an expert weaver, fabric is a record of many choices, a dance of twists, turns, and pulls that leads to the final product. They would have seen a fabric – be it cloth or knotted strings – a bit like a chess master views a game in progress. Yes, they see a pattern of pieces on a board, but they also have a feel for the moves that led there.

"You can see inside of it," Urton says.

It would be all too easy to dismiss the khipu as the work of a less advanced civilization, one that didn't develop guns, iron, or wheels. But for more than a decade, Urton has assumed that the khipu are evidence of Incan sophistication in ways we have still not grasped.

Acosta, the 16th-century Jesuit missionary, believed this. He traveled throughout the Americas and recorded several observations of khipu in use. He described religious converts memorizing prayers using khipu-like devices made of small stones or kernels of corn. He also described people in a churchyard completing difficult calculations "without making the slightest error … Whoever wants may judge whether this is clever or if these people are brutish," he wrote, "but I judge it is certain that, in that which they here apply themselves, they get the better of us."

Gareth Cook ([email protected]) is a science reporter at The Boston Globe. He won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on stem cells.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/khipu_pr.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/khipu_pr.html
 
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Hey, this is cool---looks like the Inca outfoxed us all!

Here we were thinking the poor things never learned to read or write--and all the time it might have been staring us right in the face!!

I can't wait to see the results!!

I bet some of those knots read:

"Boy, are these conquistadors stupid!!" LOL! :lol:
 
Village high in the Andes protects ancient Inca puzzle



SAN CRISTÓBAL DE RAPAZ, Peru — The route to San Cristóbal de Rapaz, a village 13,000 feet above sea level, runs from the desert coast up hairpin bends, delivering the mix of exaltation and terror that Andean roads often provide. Condors soar above mist-shrouded crags. Quechua-speaking herders squint at strangers who arrive gasping in the thin air.

Rapaz's isolation has allowed it to guard an enduring archaeological mystery: a collection of khipus, the cryptic woven knots that may explain how the Incas — in contrast to contemporaries in the Ottoman Empire and China's Ming dynasty — ruled a vast, administratively complex empire without a written language.

Archaeologists say the Incas, brought down by the Spanish conquest, used khipus — strands of cords made from the hair of animals such as llamas or alpacas — as an alternative to writing. The practice may have allowed them to share information from what is now southern Colombia to northern Chile.

Few of the world's so-called lost writings have proved as daunting to decipher as khipus, scholars say, with chroniclers from the outset of colonial rule bewildered by their inability to crack the code. Researchers at Harvard have been using databases and mathematical models in recent efforts to understand the khipu (KEE-poo), which means "knot" in Quechua, the Inca language still spoken by millions in the Andes.

Only about 600 khipus are thought to survive. Collectors spirited many away from Peru decades ago, including about 300 held at Berlin's Ethnological Museum. Most were thought to have been destroyed after Spanish officials decreed them to be idolatrous in 1583.

But Rapaz, home to about 500 people who subsist by herding llamas and cattle and farming crops such as rye, offers a rare glimpse into the role of khipus during the Inca Empire and long afterward. The village houses one of the last known khipu collections still in ritual use.

Mystery, ritual persist

Even here, no one claims to understand the knowledge encoded in the village's khipus, which are guarded in a ceremonial house called a Kaha Wayi. The khipus' intricate braids are decorated with knots and tiny figurines, some of which hold even tinier bags filled with coca leaves.

The ability of Rapacinos, as the villagers are called, to decipher their khipus seems to have faded with elders who died long ago, though scholars say the village's use of khipus may have continued into the 19th century. Testing tends to show dates for Rapaz's khipus that are well beyond the vanquishing of the Incas, and experts say they differ greatly from Inca-designed khipus.

Even now, Rapacinos conduct rituals in the Kaha Wayi beside their khipus, as described by Frank Salomon, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who led a recent project to help Rapaz protect its khipus in an earthquake-resistant casing.

One tradition requires the villagers to murmur invocations during the bone-chilling night to the deified mountains surrounding Rapaz, asking for the clouds to let forth rain. Then they peer into burning llama fat and read how its sparks fly, before sacrificing a guinea pig and nestling it in a hole with flowers and coca.

Rapacinos have faced serious challenges. A government of leftist military officers in the 1970s created economic havoc with nationalization, sowing chaos exploited by the Maoist guerrillas of the Shining Path, who terrorized Rapaz into the 1990s, effectively shutting it off from significant contact with the rest of Peru.

Throughout, perhaps because of the village's high level of cohesion and communal ownership of land and herds, Rapacinos preserved their khipus in their Kaha Wayi.

"They feel that they must protect the khipu collection for the same reason we feel that we have to defend the physical original of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution," said Salomon.

Modern life intrudes

Despite Rapaz's forbidding geography, changes in the rhythm of village life are emerging that may alter the way Rapacinos relate to their khipus.

About a year ago, villagers say, a loudspeaker replaced the town crier. And a new cellphone tower enables Rapacinos to communicate more easily with the outside world. Those changes are largely welcome. More menacing are the rustlers in pickup trucks who steal llamas, cattle and vicuñas, Andean members of the camel family prized for their wool.

The most immediate threat to the khipus may be from Rapaz's tilt toward Protestantism, a trend witnessed in communities large and small throughout Latin America. Some 20 percent of Rapacino families already belong to new Protestant congregations, which view rituals near the khipus as pagan sacrilege.

Far from Rapaz, the pursuit to decipher khipus faces its own challenges, even as new discoveries suggest they were used in Andean societies long before the Inca Empire emerged as a power in the 15th century.

In Rapaz, villagers guard their khipus the way descendants of those in the West might someday protect shreds of the Bible or other documents if today's civilizations were to crumble.

"They must remain here, because they belong to our people," said Fidencio Alejo Falcon, 42. "We will never surrender them."

Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... ret22.html
 
Urton and a new associate - Manny Medrano - have claimed a breakthrough in understanding how the khipu system worked to record information. They've found correlations between a specific set of khipus discovered in one place and Spanish census records for that same area.

If this claim holds up, it will mark the first demonstrable decipherment of any khipus.

Voices from the Incas’ past
Undergrad deciphers meaning of knots, giving native South American people a chance to speak

For centuries, Diego couldn’t be heard. A peasant who had lived in a remote village in the Inca Empire in the late 1600s, he existed only as a nameless number recorded in a khipu, a knotted rope system kept for census counting and bookkeeping.

But a discovery by Manny Medrano, a College junior who lives in Eliot House, has begun to reveal Diego’s secrets, details about not only the man’s identity and class status in his village, but also his way of life.

“It’s giving the Incas their own voice,” said Gary Urton, chair of the Anthropology Department and Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies, who guided Medrano in his research. “I could never figure out the hidden meanings in these devices. Manny figured them out, focusing on their color, and on their recto or verso (right-hand and left-hand) construction. This was the only case we have discovered so far in which one or more (in this case six) khipus and a census record matches.” ...

FULL STORY: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/a-students-mines-voices-from-the-incan-past/
 
Here's another account of the latest from the Boston Globe ...

Harvard student helps crack mystery of Inca code
It’s a mystery that has left many scholars flummoxed.

For all the achievements of the Inca Empire, including a massive roadway system, sophisticated farming methods, and jaw-dropping architecture, it was the only pre-Columbian state that did not invent a system of writing.

Instead, the Inca, whose civilization originated in Peru and grew to include peoples and cultures all along the west coast of South America from 1400 to 1532, relied on knotted strings to encode information, a system so complex that scholars still struggle to make sense of it.

Which is what makes the work of Harvard student Manny Medrano all the more remarkable. The young student provided new insight into how the Inca recorded information by analyzing the colors and the direction of the knots placed on the strings, known as khipus. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/m...y-inca-code/asr6ifIpLoFXNQHA3AQdwO/story.html
 
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