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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.'"
Scientist: "Hey, guys, I think I've got a translation here. Let's see -- 'I'm... a... frayed... knot...' Oh, for pete's sake!"
Looks like they decoded just the title of the collection, it's "To Serve Man".
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I think knot.
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.
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.