The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.
I’ve been loosely following developments in research about khipus since reading about them in an obscure paragraph in the back of my high school history textbook and every time I read more about them, it’s more and more exciting.
The full article is fascinating. Here’s another excerpt:
Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders.
She took a gamble and assumed that the ribbons referred to a person known as Alluka, pronounced “Ay-ew-ka”. She also guessed that the writer of this letter might have signed their name at the end, meaning that the last three pendant cords could well represent the syllables “ay”, “ew” and “ka”.
Assuming that was true, she looked for cords on the second khipu that had the same colour and were tied with the same knot as the ones she had tentatively identified on the first khipu. It turned out that the first two of the last three cords matched, which gave “A-ka”. The last was unknown. It was a golden-brown fibre made from the hair of a vicuna, an alpaca-like animal. Hyland realised that the term for this hue in the local Quechua language is “paru”. And trying this alongside the other syllables gave, with a little wiggle room, “Yakapar”. That, it turned out, was the name of another of the lineages involved in the revolt that these khipus recorded.
“We know from the written testimony that one of the khipus was made by a member of the Yakapar clan and sent to Collata, and we think this is it,” she says. Hyland claims that the Collata khipus show that the cords really do hold narratives.
Yet even if she is right, it is possible these later khipus were influenced by contact with Spanish writing. “My feeling is that the phoneticisation, if it’s there, is a reinvention of khipus,” says Urton. Equally, the Collata khipus might be a regional variation. Possibly even a one-off.
Hyland is the first to admit that we don’t understand the link between these khipus and those dating from before the Spanish arrived. That doesn’t make them any less interesting though. “Even if these later khipus were influenced by the alphabet, I still think it’s mind-blowing that these people developed this tactile system of writing,” she says.
She will spend the next two years doing more fieldwork in Peru, attempting to decipher the Collata khipus and looking for similar examples elsewhere.
We thought the Incas couldn’t write. These knots change everything
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