The Inca ran an empire without writing, using knotted strings.
The Inca kept census records, tax accounts and calendars on quipus: bundles of coloured cords tied with knots. Most encode numbers in a base-10 system, with zero shown by an empty space. Some may hold more than numbers, perhaps even words. If so, nobody has fully cracked the code.
A quipu, from the Quechua word for 'knot', is a main cord with pendant strings of cotton or camelid fibre, from a few to several thousand of them. The earliest undisputed examples date from the Wari culture, roughly AD 600 to 1000, though some claim far older precursors. The Inca Empire, which flourished from 1438 until the Spanish conquest in the 1530s, used them to administer a vast state: tracking labour taxes, recording censuses, organising the army and keeping calendars. Specialists called quipucamayocs made and read them.
The numerical system is well understood, thanks largely to the work of Leland Locke and later Marcia and Robert Ascher, who analysed hundreds of quipus. Knots are clustered at set positions down each cord to represent ones, tens, hundreds and so on. Units use distinctive long knots, with the number of turns giving the digit, and a gap with no knot means zero. Colour, the order of cords and how they attach add further categories of information.
Whether quipus can record language is one of archaeology's great open questions. Most scholars long assumed they could not. The anthropologist Gary Urton has suggested their construction amounts to a binary code that could store linguistic data. In 2011 researchers matched six colonial-era quipus from Peru's Santa Valley to a Spanish document from the same area, perhaps the closest thing yet to a Rosetta Stone. Sabine Hyland claims a first phonetic decipherment from quipus used as letters in an 18th-century rebellion, though these may have been influenced by European writing.
Much was lost. After the conquest, many quipus were condemned as idolatrous, and a church council in Lima ordered some burned in 1583. Just under 1,400 pre-Columbian quipus are known to survive. Yet the tradition never quite died: in the 1990s the village of Tupicocha in Peru was still using quipus for official local record-keeping.
Source: Wikipedia — Quipu · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
