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By Root 1791 0

Suni—parsed the knots both by inspecting them visually and by running their fingers along them, Braille-style, sometimes accompanying this by manipulating black and white stones. For example, to assemble a history of the Inka empire the Spanish governor Cristóbal Vaca de Castro summoned khipukamayuq to “read” the strings in 1542. Spanish scribes recorded their testimony but did not preserve the khipu; indeed, they may have destroyed them. Later the Spanish became so infuriated when khipu records contradicted their version of events that in 1583 they ordered that all the knotted strings in Peru be burned as idolatrous objects. Only about six hundred escaped the flames.

All known writing systems employ instruments to paint or inscribe on flat surfaces. Khipu, by contrast, are three-dimensional arrays of knots. Although Spanish chronicles repeatedly describe khipukamayuq consulting their khipu, most researchers could not imagine that such strange-looking devices could actually be written records. Instead they speculated that khipu must be mnemonic devices—personalized memorization aids, like rosaries—or, at most, textile abacuses. The latter view gained support in 1923, when science historian L. Leland Locke proved that the pattern of knots in most khipu recorded the results of numerical calculations—the knotted strings were accounting devices. Khipu were hierarchical, decimal arrays, Locke said, with the knots used to record 1s on the lowest level of each string, those for the 10s on the next, and so on. “The mystery has been dispelled,” archaeologist Charles W. Mead exulted, “and we now know the quipu for just what it was in prehistoric times…simply an instrument for recording numbers.”

Based on such evaluations, most Andeanists viewed the Inka as the only major civilization ever to come into existence without a written language. “The Inka had no writing,” Brian Fagan, an archaeologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, wrote in Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade, his 1991 survey of Native American cultures. “The quipu was purely a way of storing precise information, a pre-Columbian computer memory, if you will.”

But even as Fagan was writing, researchers were coming to doubt this conclusion. The problem was that Locke’s rules only decoded about 80 percent of khipu—the remainder were incomprehensible. According to Cornell archaeologist Robert Ascher, those khipu are “clearly non-numerical.” In 1981, Ascher and his mathematician wife, Marcia, published a book that jolted the field by intimating that these “anomalous” khipu may have been an early form of writing—one that Ascher told me was “rapidly developing into something extremely interesting” just at the time when Inka culture was demolished.

The Aschers slowly gained converts. “Most serious scholars of khipu today believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably much more,” Galen Brokaw, an expert in ancient Andean texts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said to me. This view of khipu can seem absurd, Brokaw admitted, because the scientists who propose that Tawantinsuyu was a literate empire also freely admit that no one can read its documents. “Not a single narrative khipu has been convincingly deciphered,” the Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton conceded, a situation he described as “more than frustrating.”

Spurred in part by recent insights from textile scholars, Urton has been mounting the most sustained, intensive attack on the khipu code ever performed. In Signs of the Inka Khipu (2003), Urton for the first time systematically broke down khipu into their grammatical constituents, and began using this catalog to create a relational khipu database to help identify patterns in the arrangement of knots. Like cuneiform marks, Urton told me, khipu probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.

The Aschers worked mainly with khipu knots. But at a 1997 conference,