Is this a message from the Incas?
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 14/09/2005 Knotted strings may have helped a South American culture control vast areas... and, today, they could solve a riddle, says Roger Highfield
Scholars call it the "Inca Paradox": how could the Incas run their vast, vibrant and complex empire for hundreds of years without going to the trouble of inventing writing?
Now the first Inca word - a place name - may have been uncovered by two experts studying enigmatic mops of knotted strings, called "khipu" or "quipu" (pronounced "kee-poo"), used by the Inca culture in South America for around 500 years.
Anthropologists are unable to decipher khipu precisely and previous research led Prof Gary Urton of Harvard University to argue that the knotted strings may have been used as calendars: one ancient Peruvian burial site yielded a khipu with 730 strings grouped in 24 sets - exactly equivalent to the number of days and months in two years.
The khipu stored in an urn at the Inca site of Puruchuco also seems to hold quantitative measurements of ancient Inca life, all neatly, and, to date, silently, knotted along each strand.
But there is also anecdotal evidence that these enigmatic mops did much more than this. One third of the 700 or so surviving khipu are not obviously numerical records. The Spanish recorded capturing one Inca native trying to conceal a khipu which, he said, recorded everything done in his homeland "both the good and the evil". He was punished and the khipu burnt.
advertisementThe discovery of the first word in one khipu could mark a step towards revealing what he might have been trying to hide. The word - a place name - was recently described in the journal Science by Prof Urton and Carrie Brezine of Harvard, who were unravelling how khipu were used to weave together the efforts of workers across the far-flung realm of the Inca empire, which, at its peak, stretched around 3,500 miles from Colombia to Chile.
"Every major ancient civilisation - Inca, Chinese, Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec and Mesopotamian - developed sophisticated means of tracking its sprawling empire," said Prof Urton. "In this regard, the discovery that khipu were used as ledger books reveals a new consonance between the Inca and other ancient cultures."
The Spanish, who conquered the Incas in 1532, first observed how streams of khipu were used to issue orders and record the results. But they were bewildered by how the Incas used the mops, read in part by running fingers over their strings to feel the knots.
They condemned them as idolatrous in 1583 and ordered all khipu to be burnt, thus explaining why so few survive. Even today, the role of textiles in early societies of the Andes still seems alien to us, since weaving was first developed among the Incas as an art form before being used for clothing.
Evidence of how the khipu were used as bureaucratic ledgers has now emerged from a searchable computer database developed by Ms Brezine, a mathematician, weaver and database manager. With Prof Urton, she was able to hunt for patterns in data held on nearly half the 650 to 700 surviving examples of khipu.
Among them are three figure-eight knots on three strings, which the researchers believe identify the place of origin of 21 khipu found in a palace in Puruchuco, an ancient administrative centre about seven miles northeast of the centre of modern-day Lima. This, the equivalent of a postal code, could represent the first word to be recognised in khipu writing.
The khipu stored in this house, where the chief khipu keeper probably lived, would have enabled the Inca emperor, the Sapa Inca, to give orders to regional and local branches of government. In turn, the local record keepers used them to report on what had been done by tribute workers within their communities.
Male workers all had to spend some of their time working on government projects, such as farming the lands of the Incas and the gods. Then, the food they produced - say, bushels of corn - was sent back to the government as a form of "tribute" or tax.
Using the database to analyse 21 khipu gathered at a burial site located at Puruchuco, the Harvard team found that seven of the khipu appeared to contain cumulative numerical data, such as that generated as successive officials compiled sums. The values on the khipu appear to sum upward and subdivide downward, suggesting the addition or subtraction of values as the khipu information moved up and down the bureaucracy.
This reflects the Inca state's hierarchy, wherein groups of 10 were run by a Chunka Kamayoq ("organiser of 10"), who in turn were organised into 50 tribute payers led by a Pichqa-Chunka Kuraka ("lord of 50") and so on, forming increasingly large administrative units. In this way the khipu addressed the accounting needs of Inca bureaucrats, who were knotters rather than bean- counters.
"This work gives us some sense of how this complex information was compiled, manipulated, shared and archived in the Inca hierarchy," Prof Urton said. "Instructions of higher-level officials for lower-level ones would have moved, via khipu, from the top of the hierarchy down."
Sceptics have argued that, at most, the knotted skirts of strings may be complicated mnemonic devices that long ago helped oral Inca storytellers to remember their lines, falling short of what one would regard as a written language. Prof Urton hopes the database will reveal even deeper levels of meaning in the knots.
He is also searching Spanish libraries for other clues, fired up by the discovery in northern Peru in 1997 of 32 khipu with exceptionally elaborate and varied types of string patterns.
Stored at a burial site of the Chachapoya culture, rivals of the Incas, the khipu are from the late pre-Columbian to early colonial period, raising the tantalising possibility that some of their encoded messages had been transcribed in Spanish documents. That could provide the much the sought-after Rosetta stone, or even mop, of Inca writings.
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