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

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: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.