Quipu
Quipu, also spelled khipu, are record-keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.
A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber cords, and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order, and number. The Inca, in particular, used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in quipu cords. Depending use and the amount of information stored, quipus can have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords.
Objects which can unambiguously be identified as quipus first appear in the archaeological record during the 1st millennium CE, likely attributable to the Wari Empire. Quipus subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco of the 13th to 15th centuries, and later of the Inca Empire, flourishing across the Andes from to 1532. Inca administration used quipus extensively for a variety of uses: monitoring tax obligations, collecting census records, keeping calendrical information, military organization, and potentially for recording simple and stereotyped historical "annales".
It is not known exactly how many intact quipus still remain, as many were deposited in ancient mausoleums or later destroyed by the Spanish. However, a recent survey of both museum and private collection inventories places the total number of known extant pre-Columbian quipus at just under 1,400.
After the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, quipus were slowly replaced by European writing and numeral systems. Many quipus were identified as idolatrous and destroyed, but some Spaniards promoted the adaptation of the quipu recording system to the needs of the colonial administration, and some priests advocated the use of quipus for ecclesiastical purposes. In some cases quipu technology was even fused with writing to form hybrid objects called quipu boards, which were often used to track religious duties. Today, quipus continue to serve as important items in several modern Andean villages.
Various other cultures have used knotted strings, unrelated to Andean quipus, to record information—these include, but are not limited to, Chinese knotting, also practiced by Tibetans, Japanese, and Polynesians.
Etymology
The word quipu is derived from a Quechua word meaning 'knot'. The terms quipu and khipu are spelling variations on the same word. Quipu is the traditional spelling based on the Spanish orthography, while khipu reflects the Quechuan and Aymaran spelling shift. comes from Cusco Quechua, while many other Quechua varieties use the term. The hispanicized spelling of quipu is the form most commonly used in both Spanish and English.Purpose
Quipus held information, decipherable by officials called quipucamayocs, classified in various categories, narrated from the most important to the least important category, according to color, number, and order.To date, most of the information recorded on the quipus studied by researchers consists of numbers in a decimal system, such as "Indian chiefs ascertain which province had lost more than another and balanc the losses between them" after the Spanish invasion. In the early years of the Spanish conquest of Peru, Spanish officials often relied on the quipus to settle disputes over local tribute payments or goods production. The quipucamayocs could be summoned to court, where their bookkeeping was recognised as valid documentation of past payments.
Some knots — as well as other features, such as color, fiber type, cord attachments, etc. — are thought to compose an undeciphered non-numeric information system. The lack of a clear link between any indigenous Andean languages and the quipus has historically led to the supposition that quipus are not a glottographic writing system and have no phonetic referent. However, anthropologist Gary Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system that could record phonological or logographic data. According to Martti Pärssinen, quipucamayocs would learn specific oral texts, which in relation to the basic information contained in quipu, and pictorial representations, often painted on quiru vessels, similar to aztec pictograms, related simple "episodes". Frank Salomon, meanwhile, has argued that quipus are actually a semasiographic language, a system of representative symbolssuch as music notation or numeralsthat relay information but are not directly related to the speech sounds of a particular language, like ideograms and proto-writing.
In 2011, a potential match between six colonial-era Santa Valley Quipus and a Spanish colonial document from the same region was identified. Researchers believe this possible quipu-document match is the strongest Rosetta Stone-like connection currently known, which could offer key clues needed to unlock the full extent of the quipu code. Subsequent studies have built on the proposed quipu-document connection, suggesting that the binary manner by which cords can be attached to the main body of the six quipus may encode moiety affiliation, and uncovering detailed Andean social structures encoded within the six quipus.
Sabine Hyland claims to have made the first phonetic decipherment through her analysis of epistolary quipus from San Juan de Collata, Peru, challenging the assumption that quipus do not represent information phonetically. However, the quipus in question date to the colonial period and are believed to have been exchanged during an 18th-century rebellion against the Spanish government, suggesting that their encoding may have been influenced by the introduction of European writing systems. With the help of local leaders, Hyland argues that the names of the two ayllus, or family lineages, who received and sent the quipus can be translated using phonetic references to the animal fibers and colors of the relevant quipu cords.
Numeric usage
While Spanish colonial chroniclers, such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, hinted at the numerical system of quipus, it is Leslie Leland Locke who is often credited with first demonstrating that many quipus encode numbers using a base-10 positional notation. Starting in the late 1960's and building on Locke's foundational work, Marcia Ascher and Robert Ascher analyzed several hundred quipus, revealing that most of the information recorded by quipu knots is numerical and can be systematically interpreted.Most quipus use three main types of knots: simple overhand knots; "long knots", consisting of an overhand knot with one or more additional turns; and figure-eight knots. The Aschers also identified a fourth, and less common, type of knot—a figure-eight knot with an extra twist—which they refer to as an "EE" knot. On a given quipu cord, knots are grouped into clusters. Each cluster is tied at specific registers, or lengths, along the cord. These knot clusters represent digits in a base-10 number system. The units, or "ones" position is commonly tied at the bottom of a cord, followed by a space above it, then the "tens" position, then another space, then hundreds position, and so on. In other words:
- Powers of ten are denoted by position along the string, and this position is often aligned between successive strands.
- Digits in positions for 10 and higher powers are represented by clusters of simple knots.
- Digits 2–9 in the "ones" position are represented by long knots, and the digit 1 in the "ones" position is represented by a figure-eight knot.
- Zero is represented by the absence of a knot in the appropriate position.
- The number 731 would be represented by 7s, 3s, E.
- The number 804 would be represented by 8s, X, 4L.
- The number 1493 would be represented by 1s, 4s, 9s, 3L.
- The number 107 followed by the number 51 would be represented by 1s, X, 7L, 5s, E.
Some data items are not numbers but what Ascher and Ascher call number labels. They are still composed of digits, but the resulting number seems to be used as a code. For example, Carrie J. Brezine decoded that a particular three-number label at the beginning of some quipus may refer to Puruchuco, similar to a ZIP code.
Non-numeric usage
Some have argued that far more than numeric information is present and that quipus are a writing system. This would be an especially important discovery as there is no surviving written record of the Inca Empire predating the Spanish invasion.Making deciphering more complex, the Inca 'kept separate "khipu" for each province, on which a pendant string recorded the number of people belonging to each category.'
How exactly non-numeric information is encoded is disputed. Historians Edward Hyams and George Ordish claim, for example, that quipus were recording devices, similar to musical notation, in that the notes on the page present basic information, and the performer would then bring those details to life.
In 2003, while checking the geometric signs that appear on drawings of Inca dresses from the First New Chronicle and Good Government, written by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in 1615, William Burns Glynn found a pattern that seems to decipher some words from quipus by matching knots to colors of strings.
The August 12, 2005, edition of the journal Science includes a report titled "Khipu Accounting in Ancient Peru" by anthropologist Gary Urton and mathematician Carrie J. Brezine. Their work may represent the first identification of a quipu element for a non-numeric concept, a sequence of three figure-eight knots at the start of a quipu that seems to be a unique signifier. It could be a toponym for the city of Puruchuco, or the name of the quipu keeper who made it, or its subject matter, or even a time designator.
Beynon-Davies considers quipus as a sign system and develops an interpretation of their physical structure in terms of the concept of a data system.
Quipucamayocs supplied colonial administrators with a variety and quantity of information pertaining to censuses, tribute, ritual and calendrical organization, genealogies, and other such matters from Inca times. One study led by Alberto Sáez-Rodríguez discovered that the distribution and patterning of S- and Z-knots can organize the information system from a real star map of the Pleiades cluster.
Laura Minelli, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at the University of Bologna, has discovered something which she claims to be a seventeenth-century Jesuit manuscript that describes literary quipus, titled Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum. This manuscript consists of nine folios with Spanish, Latin, and ciphered Italian texts. Owned by the family of Neapolitan historian Clara Miccinelli, the manuscript also includes a wool quipu fragment. Miccinelli claims that the text was written by two Italian Jesuit missionaries, Joan Antonio Cumis and Giovanni Anello Oliva, around 1610–1638, and Blas Valera, a mestizo Jesuit sometime before 1618. Along with the details of reading literary quipus, the documents also discuss the events and people of the Spanish conquest of Peru. According to Cumis, since so many quipus were burned by the Spanish, very few remained for him to analyze. As related in the manuscript, the word Pacha Kamaq, the Inca deity of earth and time, was used many times in these quipus, where the syllables were represented by symbols formed in the knots. Following the analysis of the use of "Pacha Kamaq", the manuscript offers a list of many words present in quipus. However, both Bruce Mannheim, the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan, and Colgate University's Gary Urton, question its origin and authenticity. These documents seem to be inspired freely by a 1751 writing of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero.