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

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.

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: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.