Inca Knot Code Partially Detangled

mulufuf writes "It looks like some progress has been made on translating those old Inca knot strings that have baffled everyone for ages now. From the article:'While the Incan empire left nothing that would be considered writing by today's standards, it did produce knotted strings in various colors and arrangements that have long puzzled historians and anthropologists.'"

Comments

thats pretty impressive code reading

[museumpeace]

do you think they would like to take a look at some of this old Ada code I inherited?

Re:thats pretty impressive code reading

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

I think knot.

Code

[xXBondsXx]

I thought my code organization was bad... at least i don't take historians and anthropologists to decipher it

Re:Code

[relaxrelax]

...because even in 2000 years of now, historians and anthropologists couldn't figure out your code despite (or perhaps because of) the code's comments?

Yes I've met programmers like that once in a great while (in the mirror when I do my annual shave).

If I keep this up, in 2000 years my yearly shave might be mistaken for a religious holiday. Which is why *my* incomprehensible code would be more cool to the historians than your incomprehensible code!!!

Re:Code

[Young Master Ploppy]

I thought my code organization was bad... at least i don't take historians and anthropologists to decipher it

You know, I used to think exactly the same, until I had to fix a bug on a system that had been untouched for years - so i'm trawling through the code, saying out loud stuff like "oh my god, this is awful, what muppet wrote this?", until after a couple of hours, I finally checked the logs, and found out who originally wrote it - me. D'oh....

What a Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientist: "Hey, guys, I think I've got a translation here. Let's see -- 'I'm... a... frayed... knot...' Oh, for pete's sake!"

Re:What a Joke

[Arcane_Rhino]

Assistant: Well, sir, I have the rest untied. What do you want me to do now?

Khipu

[DudeTheMath]

The khipu is cool. One of my advisors at Michigan, Tom Storer, demonstrated the Fibonacci sequence to us using one. You knot a string, then tie it to another string, then tie that into another like it . . . wicked. Other combinatorial sequences (Stirling numbers, etc.) can be generated in similar fashion. That must be sixteen or seventeen years ago now--I never thought I'd see these again.

Re:Khipu

[heinousjay]

You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!

Yeah, but you cut the time in half if you go 130. Do the Math!

Re:Khipu

[dschuetz]

Yeah, but you cut the time in half if you go 130.

"Remember. Traffic lights set for 35 are also timed perfectly for 70."

Re:Khipu

[Anonymous Coward]

You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!

When you live in rural areas of a large state like Texas and regularly make trips that are 80-100 miles the time saved by driving an extra 10 mph over the posted limit adds up quick.

Re:Khipu

[Anonymous Coward]

"Remember. Traffic lights set for 35 are also timed perfectly for 70."

Not necessarily. If 35 is a single cycle, then you'll arrive in the middle of the red. You can always go 35/n, but always the other way around.

(Yeah, I know you were just being funny and I'm being pedantic and a kill joy.)

Re:Khipu

[Deideldorfer]

Do you really want the speeding guy yakking on his cell phone while chomping on a Big Mac trying to do division in his head?

Apparently

[GigsVT]

Looks like they decoded just the title of the collection, it's "To Serve Man".

Re:Apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a cookbook! The Perl Cookbook is a cookbook! Auuugh!

Programmers, take note

[3waygeek]

this is the first documented instance of spaghetti code, predating Basic by several centuries.

Re:Programmers, take note

[spagetti_code]

Noted. :-)

The Incans did have library's.

[MrMista_B]

The Incans did have library's.

We know this, because the Catholic priests and missionaries of the time recorded burning them.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[Anonymous Coward]

They also had grammar.

And they WOULDN'T HAVE PUT A FUCKIN' APOSTROPHE in a plural, fer fuxsake!

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just an idiotic troll, the Incas had no written language besides the khipu. The Spanish conquistadors did destroy the khipus as they considered them idolatry, but their records of the time certainly didn't record any "libraries" of khipu. In fact, if they did record such a thing, as the troll claims, there wouldn't be the puzzle of whether or not khipu were narratives or simply abacus like accountings.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[mc6809e]

The Incans did have library's.

We know this, because the Catholic priests and missionaries of the time recorded burning them.

I think you mean the infamous Bishop of Yucatan, who burned all the Maya books that could be located.

Unlike the Maya, the Inca didn't have a written language, which is why these knots are so important a discovery.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[zenyu]

Unlike the Maya, the Inca didn't have a written language, which is why these knots are so important a discovery.

They didn't have a written language, but they did have picture books.

Books and illegal book owners were burned by the Christians. Most herecy laws in Spanish Peru did not apply as harshly to native Americans as to Europeans, the ban on books was an exception to the rule.

The khipu were much more numerous and not considered dangerous until later on, so a few survive. But there probably are not enough known khipu to left to decipher them. However, there may be caches of them buried somewhere. There too many unexplored archeological sites in Peru to count. The last remnants of the Inca state set up camp in the Amazon jungle, where any Khipu would have rotted quickly, but there may have been loyal subjects elsewhere in the Kingdom that thought to bury some of their documents.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[funzel]

Books and illegal book owners were burned by the Christians

I thought they were burned by the RIAA.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[jd]

Now you know where the RIAA came from. They're all former Conquistadors and Missionaries.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[jd]

Caches of hidden texts are not unknown. Many "heretical" Gnostic texts are known from such caches, as indeed were the so-called "Dead Sea Scrolls".

The main problem with South America is that the climate is not conducive to the long-term survival of organic material. However, that does not make it impossible such material has survived. It just means that we don't have the luxury of time in looking for it. If it exists today, that does not guarantee it'll survive into next week.

More likely to be found will be tablets or other fairly substantial carvings in undiscovered sites (or undiscovered locations within known sites). These generally survive better, which would have been useful to them as well as us, as it would mean they could put more effort into survival while in hiding rather than replacing old records.

South America is also very bad when it comes to using modern archaeological tools. GPR works badly in damp soil or where there are lots of underground features such as roots. Not good in a rainforest-type environment! To do quality work in South America, you'd need to first invent a whole range of new tools designed for those kinds of conditions.

For example, finding a "lost city" that is completely covered in undergrowth is hard, for example. You can be 5 feet from it and not know it was there. Quite possibly, sites built after the Spanish invasion might even have made use of this to escape detection. Some may have become covered by the ground by now.

Now, if you have a high-energy accelerator handy, this is no problem. Just pick an energy that will cause X-Ray fluorescence in a mineral common in the local rock, and you should be able to scan for anything hidden. The energy would need to be high enough to allow you to detect the emissions through all the intermediate material and over a reasonable distance, but it is not completely impossible. Totally, hopelessly and utterly impractical, sure, but not impossible.

Other than that, I know of no technique currently in any kind of wide enough use for there to be a good base of knowledge on it that would allow you to find such structures.

The reason we'd need such tools should be obvious from what I said earlier - we don't have the luxury of time. Anything still out there will be decaying and probably rapidly. South America is big and highly dangerous in many regions. The idea of simply combing the continent until you find things, under those conditions, is absurd.

You need to be able to do fast scans for structures and areas that have a high probability of being used by ancient cultures. This allows you to get a team of archaeologists to a relatively small area, which you can then safeguard against loggers, gold-hunters and slavers.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[zenyu]

The main problem with South America is that the climate is not conducive to the long-term survival of organic material. However, that does not make it impossible such material has survived. It just means that we don't have the luxury of time in looking for it. If it exists today, that does not guarantee it'll survive into next week.


This is more true of Mesoamerican rather than South American cultures. But, much of Peru is a desert which gets less than a centimeter of rain per decade. Unless that land is irrigated it is very dry. The post-colonial Peru has never been able to irrigate anywhere near as much land as the cultures that thrived there over the last few thousand years.

There is no lack of 'discovered' ancient cities in Peru, but there is a lack of money to dig any of them up.

This allows you to get a team of archaeologists to a relatively small area, which you can then safeguard against loggers, gold-hunters and slavers.

Ridiculous in Peru, there are no loggers where there are archeological sites, there are no slavers, and the gold-miners are harmless. What there are as a problem is an army of well financed looters from the USA and Europe, these people would probably have access to any such technology years before any archeologist could obtain it. In fact should such a technology exist their makers should cough up a few million dollars per machine to guard sites in Mexico, Peru and Iraq where most of the world's advanced ancient cultures developed.

Re:The Incans did have library's.

[bcrowell]

Most herecy laws in Spanish Peru did not apply as harshly to native Americans as to Europeans, the ban on books was an exception to the rule.
I may be wrong, but I don't think heresy laws applied to non-Christians at all. Before Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain or forced to convert, they were immune from heresy charges. So unless that changed drastically by the time of the colonial period...

It's only a matter of time...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Before someone writes an RFQ "Data Transmission over Linear Unidimentional Media via Knotted Bits"

I decoded this years ago

[thegrassyknowl]

I don't know what the big fuss is about... I decoded the Inca knot code years ago. It's really quite simple.

You hang the ropes from the wall so that the knots and colours form an aesthetically pleasing pattern.

When pattern becomes boring, rinse, repeat hanging procedure.

What is so difficult for these people to understand about evolving art? They always want it to have some hidden meaning..

To Serve Man

[waynegoode]

Good one. Now, for the 99% of the rest of the world who don't have a clue, see a description.

The Inca's last message to mankind...

[monsterX]

"We apologize for the inconvenience"

Re:The Inca's last message to mankind...

[dheltzel]

I think it might translate to:

Goodbye, and thanks for the fish!

Fascinating

[hcdejong]

This is one of a number of languages/scripts we can't read. Studying them requires disciplines as diverse as archaeology, linguistics, and cryptology.
Definitely a job for The Librarian

Re:Fascinating

[jd]

Cryptography is proving to be less useful than had been hoped, partly as the messages aren't intended to be hidden and partly because we don't know either syntax OR semantics, making most decryption methods rather futile. We don't know what is actually important and contains information. As such, it can be likened to using strong cryptography and then using strong stenography to hide the message within and around symbols.

Easy Answer?

[Evil W1zard]

I don't know about everyone else but from the picture in the article it looks like they have discovered the first weave.

Not a single one...

[Anonymous Coward]

...of these lame jokes is funny

problems reading

[Reddog0176]

If reseachers are having such problems deciphering these knots... wouldn't it be easier just to untie them?

hmm,

[zxnos]

i have a vauge recollection of an old cartoon where the girl used knotted strings - as a written language.

Knot Write

[Doc Ruby]

The article mentions that Spanish conquerors, upon finding out that quipu recorded history, the Spanish "destroyed many of them". In fact, the Spanish destroyed as many as they could find, like many thousands, amounting to all the records of history and administration of the Inca empire. Then they tortured anyone who could read them to death. The fact that any survive is a testament to the Inca tenacity, and some Spanish incompetence at exterminating what was clearly a culture superior to them. Superior, except for ocean-going ships, horses, gunpowder, and biological warfare like the smallpox that is better known for killing North American tribespeople.

Another facile comment in the article is the certainty with which the writer regards the decimal encoding of slightly-decoded quipu as proof that they're just accounting records. Well, every letter in their web article is encoded in binary - it's hardly a grocery bill. Though perhaps the writer could be described as an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to deliver a bag of spaghetti. Which arrived all twisted into knots.

Re:Knot Write

[jd]

There are a number of articles in the news about the partial decryption. The consensus seems to be that some MAY have been accounting records (but that this is unproven) but that the recently deciphered components are literary in nature.

This suggests that the strings were multi-function, which in turn suggests that they are a "true" writing system, which I don't think is seriously contended anyway.

The Incas had other writing methods, but I'm unclear on whether the string method was used before, after or together with the other methods. If used together, it may have been used for messages that had to be highly portable and/or highly concealable. As such, their decryption may lead to an understanding of Inca society (and other cultures in the general vicinity) below the surface, below the level that was generally advertised.

Re:Knot Write

[Doc Ruby]

One of the best insights into the quipu's format that I've heard is that they're messages. They were carried around the necks of runners, traveling the vast roadways of the empire (more extensive than Rome's). These "location codes" are a header that even "semiliterate" runners, or their coordinators, used for routing the messages. Which is why there would be several "layers" of info, summarizing their routing - layers target a person's "need to know".

I've also heard that the Maya, hundreds of miles North in the "Greater Isthmus", used an intense psychedelic ritual to transfer the old records to the new king. The initiate was loaded with frogskin, mushroom, woody vine and other transformative psychedelics, inside a temple under the tutelege of certain priests. They were accompanied by scribes and vast "reams" of hieroglyphic records, encoding the gestalt of the state as incarnated by the passed king. Through the ritual, the priests would respark the old king's "psyche" into the young new king, immersing them in the records in their sensitive state. I believe that some aspects of this process probably also operated in the Inca governance. Though the Inca seem a lot more "square" than the Maya, the 3 major empires (including the Aztec) shared a lot of symbolic institutions, like the "Aztec" sun disk, believed to be Mayan in origin, but universal - though with different referents for its single set of encoded references.

We are ourselves now reaching a level of sophistication and complexity which lets us relate to these ancient civilizations. I think quipu research, especially, has been too "bottom up": experts looking at quipu in terms of other Inca artifacts and partial knowledge of the society which the Inca encoded. Rather than our current advantages in looking at them "top down": considering how these packages would be used, and how they'd be produced, codec'ed and transmitted. Arriving at our own society's development of messages, encoded for functional reasons (rather than mere secrecy), lets us relate to a culture that had their own function encoding needs.

We've been stuck at the crude level of "envelope" writers for the centuries since our forebears torched the Incas. Now that we've got all kinds of insights into a distributed messaging culture, with specialized codes for sequences of the messaging, we've got a better chance to understand the few messages we've still got. If only there were a Quecha mode to Babelfish, we might even coax some young Andean, whose grandma is leaving them a fancy old "wedding vest" they're sworn never to show to an outsider, into thinking more about decoding grandma's garment. Then we might see these messages emerge from a half-millennium of illiteracy, and perhaps even benefit from some of the wisdom that held Inca society together for so long, including in its centuries of eclipse.

Inca Physics

[Greg@UF]

This is the first article I've understood on String Theory research.

And no doubt SCOX claims...

[dyfet]

...that the knots contain "infringing code"!

The first partially translated knot!

[MikeTwo]

It says "H-ll- W-rld!", what do you suppose that means?