The Inca Khipu: An Empire Tied in Knots

In 1583, the Third Council of Lima, the Catholic bishops of Spanish Peru, ordered that the Indigenous peoples' khipus be taken and burned, because they were used to record "idolatry" and to confess sins in the old way. The khipu was the knotted cord of the Andes: a main cord from which hung dozens or hundreds of coloured pendant cords, knotted in patterns. With them the Inca, who ruled the largest state in the Americas, counted people, llamas, tribute and time. The Spanish chroniclers said that the khipu specialists, the khipukamayuq, could also read out histories, laws and songs from them. Whether that is true is still unknown.

The numbers

In 1912 the American historian Leland Locke showed how the numbers worked. Each pendant cord holds a number in base ten: clusters of single knots mark hundreds and tens, and the units position uses a long knot of 2 to 9 turns, or a figure-eight knot for one. An empty position means zero. Some khipus have a top cord recording the sum of a group of pendants, and it was these sums that proved the knots were numbers. Later work by Marcia and Robert Ascher (1981) documented how khipus were structured, with colour, cord order and subsidiary cords carrying further information.

The interactive khipu above follows Locke's rules. It is illustrative, not a copy of a surviving khipu.

Words in knots?

Many khipus do not follow the numerical rules. That, with the chroniclers' reports, suggests that some khipus recorded words, names or narrative.

• Gary Urton (2003) proposed that khipus encode information in binary choices: cord material, direction of spin, knot direction.
• In 2016, a Harvard student, Manuel Medrano, working with Urton, matched six khipus to a Spanish census of the 1670s, and found that cord features might mark names.
• In 2017 Sabine Hyland studied two khipus kept by the village of Collata in Peru, said by villagers to be letters written in a rebellion. They use 95 distinct combinations of colour and fibre, enough for a logosyllabic system, and she proposed that the final cords spell family names.

None of these is an accepted decipherment. The question of narrative khipus remains open.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Knots in a sacred landscape. Around Cusco, the Inca organised the valley's shrines (huacas) along some 41 lines, the ceques, radiating from the Temple of the Sun. The anthropologist R. T. Zuidema compared the ceque system to a khipu laid on the landscape; the comparison is influential but interpretive.

Colour. Cord colours were meaningful, possibly marking categories such as types of tribute or social groups. What each colour meant is mostly unknown.

Religious use and suppression. Chroniclers report khipus used to record sacrifices, the calendar of festivals, and confessions. Hence the Church's decree of 1583. Some Andean villages, however, kept khipus in ritual use into modern times.

Connections

The Inca (ch44). Compare the Dresden Codex (V31) and the Codex Mendoza (V51), a record of Aztec tribute, for other record systems of the Americas, and the Phaistos Disc (V56) for an undeciphered text.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/inca-khipu.html