This mentions the professor Upton and his database but left out interesting story about the undergrad student who deciphered one for one correspondence between khipu and Spanish records and helped compile the database. The fact that most khipu were destroyed by the Spanish is a terrible loss.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931972-600-we-thoug...
I don't normally defer to Wikipedia, but on this topic the Wikipedia entry is far more informatative and less slanted towards trying to make them about 'narrative stories':
I had the same reaction. The narrative story bit would be different from how I've seen it presented in other sources.
Also, there was at least at one time a surviving example of a Quipu in the Seattle Art Museum. I had known about them but to be surprised by one in person was really something and I look back on it fondly
It breaks my heart that till today we don't know how Inca (or possibly their predecessor civilization) constructed Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu. It is still unclear exactly how they achieved those structures. We're talking about 140 tonne rocks being put together to form those structures and assembled without mortar in such a way that one can't slip a piece of paper in between rocks.
When the Conquistadors encountered the structures, they had no idea how they were being made or put together. They pulled them apart and used the pulled apart chunks with mortar to build cathedrals that mostly fell apart every time there was a tectonic movement. So much knowledge in those khipus burnt by religious fanatics.
We use cement concrete which is a massive source of CO2 production. If we could have somehow preserved the knowledge of how those structures were built instead of burning their knowledge, and killing their stone masons and scientists, we could have had a very different modern world today.
> Uh... An underclass that isn't as valued as royalty can easily get you this. Otherwise, there maybe isn't value in stuff like this?
That's one way. Another is a (theoretical) advanced society that directs its surplus value into creating art rather than consumerism or oligarchical capital accumulation.
I mean.... I was (hopefully) obviously going for a cynical take. That said, I don't know how far I can agree with "we could have a society that acts like basically no other society we have ever seen." Do you have anything to base this "theoretical" on?
Similarly, I'm fine with creating more homes for people, even if they are not artistic. When the value is on someone living there, as opposed to others looking at it, it sounds a whole lot differently.
We're talking about 140 tonne rocks being put together to form those structures and assembled without mortar in such a way that one can't slip a piece of paper in between rocks.
> As the other comment here says, this isn't a mystery. It's just extremely labour-intensive.
And as I said there, I don't find that kind of blaise response as convincing or substantial. Labour intensive way of lifting and lapping 140 tonne rocks?
> If we could have somehow preserved the knowledge
Most of the stuff from the ancient would is quite easy to reproduce--throw hordes of people at it. The ancient world didn't have some fantastically superior knowledge.
I forget the magician, but he stated something along the lines of "Magic is simply being willing to devote to accomplishing a task an amount of time and preparation that any rational person would regard as insanity."
Sadly, when the ancient world couldn't support throwing hordes of people at the problems, it collapsed.
> Most of the stuff from the ancient would is quite easy to reproduce--throw hordes of people at it. The ancient world didn't have some fantastically superior knowledge.
I don't find this type of explanation convincing at all. If your claim was true, then just look at the fact that we still can't reproduce such structures today. I would allege the type of sentiment and thinking your paragraph is representing borders on arrogance. I'm reminded of the story of the illiterate Roman soldier w ho murdered Archimedes and said that man was just drawing circles in the sand.
We are a violent illiterate people who murdered Incan Archimedes and their khippus and since we can't understand their science we try to put down their structures as 'throw hordes of people'.
> The other key is that the hordes of people should be expendable.
Except that they really weren't.
The Egyptian pyramids, for example, had an entire support ecosystem around it--guilds, hospitals, lodging, everything. The people working on building the pyramids were probably slightly better off than the average person.
We have several recent examples of countries that worked their populations to death. Their GDP was in the dumpster.
Those methods cannot compete with free labor.
Pulling on this thread a bit more - slavery died out because it became uncompetitive. I suspect it being found to be immoral around the same time is not a coincidence.
I think we do know a little of it. They used limestone and an acid -- so the touching surfaces of the rock were softened, which is how they conformed so closely and precisely to each other.
It reminds me of the Lukasa which was used in the Congo river basin around the XVII century. But indeed it use a fundamentally different principle than Quipu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukasa_(Luba)
The Lukasa performs many mnemonic functions, and although all memory cards share some common information, certain types of memory cards are used to communicate specialized or elite-specific data.
It uses multicolored beads, shells and bits of metal, or are incised or embossed with carved symbols.
Gary Urton's book, "Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records" [0] is a great introduction to this topic. After reading this I was reminded how not all writing systems can easily be encoded in utf-8, à la Awesome Falsehoods. [1]
In the time when quipus were in use, there was exactly one Inka. We don't use whatever word they used to refer to everybody else, who were all his personal property, and now, incorrectly, call them all Incas.
The Ottomans had a similar system: everybody was the slave of Suleiman.
A similar conceit was common in the old world.
It is painfully evident that the people Pizarro subjugated were not who built any of the most impressive megalithic works. You can easily distinguish the crude repair work they did on them, long afterward. (They are doubtless descendants of the builders.)
Khipu don't require us to rethink writing. They are most likely an accounting/tabulation system, the same as other early forms of writing as found for example in Sumer.
I think it's wrong to think they encoded data like a stylesheet, I think they encoded information through arborescence and fractal charts. Big difference if you're thinking of understanding their data structure. First idea that popped into my mind was that these are perfect to keep track of genealogy across generations and multiple families.
I can't not go all over the place here to make two small points. But in summary, author has tunnel vision, and with repetition, wasted column inches. Should have said more with less.
I find pre-european contact N & S American civilizations fascinating, but with my casual interest I can only reliably name three off-hand, Maya, Aztec and Inca. There are piles more: Norte Chico, Cahokia, Zapotec, Toltec, Olmec, Chimor, Mixtec, Moche, Mississippian, Puebloan, Totonac, Teotihuacan, Huastec, Purépecha, Izapa, Mazatec, Muisca, and all the other distinct Native American cultures. I don't think there is an exhaustive list. Author could have spared a sentence here or there to help place the Incas for us, to give us more than we already knew by the first few paragraphs.
The practice of mnemonic knotting is ancient. I believe artifacts have been found all over the world related to primitive civilizations going back to the Paleolithic, and I am pretty sure there are some famous ones of medieval European origins that are on display in some Irish museum(s). But my search fu is not strong, and all I can recall is reading something (I think) Christopher Tolkien wrote about what his father's "lays" actually were: the writing is his father's translation from (allegedly, obviously that's fiction, but we play along) a physical "lay," which is a product of mnemonic knotting. J.R.R Tolkien's lays were, in origin, in universe, these long textile-like things that may look like embroidery or a banner to any not already knowing what it is, which is mnemonic knotting. And although Tolkien's lays are fiction, lays are real things. I just can't produce a link to an image of one, but I have seen such images. And my point here is: was the author unaware of the very long history of mnemonic knotting? Perhaps they might have said, "like the famous [such and such] on display at the [blah blah blah] that gives a full account of [8 generations of a large and successful pre-Roman family in Scotland, or whatever]."
