1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [201]
Building on this insight, Urton argued that khipu makers were forced by the very nature of spinning and weaving into making a series of binary choices, including the type of material (cotton or wool), the spin and ply direction of the string (which he described as “S” or “Z,” after the “slant” of the threads), the direction (recto or verso) of the knot attaching the pendant string to the primary, and the direction of the main axis of each knot itself (S or Z). As a result, each knot is what he called a “seven-bit binary array,” although the term is inexact because khipu had at least twenty-four possible string colors. Each array encoded one of 26 × 24 possible “distinct information units”—a total of 1,536, somewhat more than the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and more than twice the approximately 600 to 800 Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic symbols.
If Urton is right, khipu were unique. They were the world’s sole intrinsically three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of writing on paper) and the only ones to use a “system of coding information” that “like the coding systems used in present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code.” In addition, they may have been among the few examples of “semasiographic” writing—texts that, unlike written English, Chinese, and Maya, are not representations of spoken language. “A system of symbols does not have to replicate speech to communicate narrative,” Catherine Julien, a historian of Andean cultures at Western Michigan University, explained to me. “What will eventually be found in khipu is uncertain, but the idea that they have to be a representation of speech has to be thrown out.”
Not all researchers embrace Urton’s binary theory. In an interview, Brokaw argued that “there is no way to reconcile it with the decimal code in which the khipu [also] clearly participate.” In addition, he said, Urton’s ideas have little support in ethnographic data. But Brokaw was much more enthusiastic about other Urton khipu work. Working with Harvard mathematician-weaver Carrie J. Brezine, Urton used the new khipu database in 2005 to identify seven khipu that seem to represent a hierarchy of accounting records. Found half a century ago in the home of a khipukaymayuq in Puruchuco, an Inka administrative center near modern-day Lima, the khipu seemed to be created in levels, with the numerical values on lower-level khipu adding up to those on higher-level khipu. Fascinatingly, some of the knots in the top-level khipu seem not to be numbers. Urton and Brezine argued that these anomalous introductory knots most likely served to indicate the origin of the seven khipu, Puruchuco. The knots, if Urton and Brezine are correct, would be the first-ever precisely deciphered “words” in khipu “writing.”
Writing and reading are among the most basic methods of transmitting information from one person to another. In cultures throughout the world, this procedure is fundamentally similar. One reads a parade of symbols, taking up information with the eyes; emphasis and context is provided visually, by changing the size and form of the symbols (printing in italics or boldface, increasing or diminishing the font size, scattering words or characters around the page). All European and Asian cultures share the common experience of reading—sitting in a chair, the book in one’s lap, wagging the head from side to side (Europe) or up and down (Asia).
Because Tawantinsuyu existed only for a few centuries, it is widely assumed that the Inka khipu built on other, earlier forms of writing that had