← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · robinder
Thread ID: 19587 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-08-12
2005-08-12 06:16 | User Profile
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Incas' curious knotted strings called khipu were probably used by bosses and accountants to keep track of taxes and tributes and carried both words and numerical information, two experts said on Thursday.
The dyed bunches of string, also spelled quipu by some scholars, have confused outsiders since Spanish conquerors first described them 500 years ago. Most experts agree they are ledgers of a sort but no one has been able to decipher them.
"The Spaniards were bewildered by them," said Gary Urton of Harvard University in Massachusetts, who worked on the study. "Four hundred years later, we aren't much better off."
Theories abound -- that they are a kind of binary code, that they are simply dull collections of numbers, or that they are one of the earliest forms of human writing.
Urton and Carrie Brezine turned to computers for help.
"We recently undertook a computer analysis of 21 khipu from the Inca administrative center of Puruchuco, on the central coast of Peru," they wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.
"Results indicate that this khipu archive exemplifies the way in which census and tribute data were synthesized, manipulated, and transferred between different accounting levels in the Inca administrative system."
And they found what appears to be a word -- the name of a specific palace.
"We hypothesize that the arrangement of three figure-eight knots at the start of these khipu represented the place identifier, or toponym, Puruchuco. We suggest that any khipu moving within the state administrative system bearing an initial arrangement of three figure-eight knots would have been immediately recognizable to Inca administrators as an account pertaining to the palace of Puruchuco."
FOUND IN FIVE COUNTRIES
Just last month archeologists said they found a khipu on the site of the oldest city in the Americas, called Caral. They said their find supported the idea that the knotted bunches of string were complex written works that were in use for 4,500 years.
Now Urton and Brezine say their findings fit in with what is known about the Inca's hierarchical society and widespread empire across what are now Peru, Ecuador, Chile and parts of Argentina and Bolivia.
"This work gives us some sense of how this complex information was compiled, manipulated, shared and archived in the Inca hierarchy," Urton said in a statement. "Instructions of higher-level officials for lower-level ones would have moved, via khipu, from the top of the hierarchy down."
"In the reverse direction, local accountants would forward information on accomplished tasks upward through the hierarchy," he said.
Urton has previously argued that khipu may also have been used as calendars. Some khipu have been found in burial sites that have 730 strings grouped in 24 sets -- equivalent to the number of days and months in two years.
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