Short Stuff: Khipu

more than we did ten years ago. Yeah, you know, we're getting older and that's when dad jokes start creeping in. So these people are right, they are correct. Man, never would have thought I'd live to see the day. Literally, that's right. We we we still stopped before we hit puns. Yeah, we're no strickling. Nope, that's ageless. That's just some sort of mental defect. Has nothing to do with age. Yeah.

Not ageless is in timeless and you could do that anytime and it's great, right, Yeah, the opposite of that. So Chuck, speaking of um opposites of that, let's talk about whether or not the INCA actually ever created a written language of any sort. Yeah, this was cool, and I would love to do a longer form show on the Inca period the Inca people, because, man, when you when you start poking around a little bit, uh, the

things that they achieved and when it happened, it's pretty striking. Well, you know, we did an episode called how did a hundred and sixty eight Conquistadors bring down the Inca Empire? Did we Really? That was a good one, But I'm sure there's still plenty more to talk about with them. We could do one just on the Inca I'll bet yeah. So, Uh, I mean, here's here's a couple of things in the way of an overview. Uh, they had the largest pre columbia An empire in the America's a lot of people

during the Bronze Age. And you're not successful as a people that that that can grow and thrive like that unless you're doing some of these things like building roads to the tune of twenty five thousand miles of highway, right, that's amazing. Yeah, there was something like twelve I saw ten to twelve million people in the Inca Empire who were walking along the twenty five thousand miles of highway,

which by the way, cut through the Andies. It was largely in the Andes, up in the Andes, which was not a hospitable place to form a civilization in the first place, no man, but they did. They thrived where it was dry and harsh and steep, and they were able to engineer like the kind of farmland at the altitudes, at these altitudes that you would never think would be possible,

like millions of acres of high altitude terrorist farms. And the way that I saw that the whole thing worked was there were clans and villages and groups that all kind of um. They did their own thing, and they paid tribute to the what you would call kind of the federal government, the Inca chiefs, the people um who were who had the whole empire together, and then the Inca who were running the show, would in turn provide these these people, like the farmers and the villages and

the clans with stuff they needed. It bore a striking resemblance to like Soviet communism. Yeah, and they kept it going for about a hundred and fifty years again until the Spans showed up. They were they were very powerful empire But the weird thing about the Inca is that they were able to do all this that included math and abstract thought and um major like socio political administration. They appeared to have done it without any written language whatsoever.

That's been basically the way that people have viewed the Inca for a very long time. Yeah, which is is remarkable because it's not like, oh, well, this was back during the Bronze Age, like the Maya had written languages, the az Text did, Mesopotamians did, Egyptians of course did,

Chinese did. So a lot of people were writing things down and uh, it appeared and we're still not super sure, but or are we Like, can we say definitively we're almost but no, I don't think we can definitively say it is sure starting to look that way, all right, So let's let's get to the sort of the heart of the story. Then, is is it? I believe it's pronounced keepu k h I p you or or key q u i p u r, which would also be

pronounced keep who right. But if you look this up on the internet, if you can pull your car over, whatever, don't anything dangerous. They are these really kind of cool. It looks like Macromay almost. These knotted which I know you like, uh, these knotted links of cord made from cotton.

Sometimes sometimes it's a llama or alpaca wool. And you would see them hung up in rows that looks like like from a curtain rod or something from but that that curtain rod is really like a thicker central rope and these things would just hang down and for many many years someone more color coded. But for many years people thought that these were just like art, right arts crafts, that kind of thing, like something somebody would do when they were bored, you know. And a lot of them

were lost because there's the Spanish. When they showed up, the found them everywhere and they were like, well, I don't know what this is, so I'm just gonna burn them. Yeah, I'm gonna kill everybody and burn everything. And so for a long time people, yeah, they just had them in museums. They were they were ink and relics of an empire that had crumbled and gone away. So people are like,

we gotta preserve these, and they took them to be museums. Um. But it wasn't until the nineteen twenties that a guy named Leland Locke, who was studying them at the Museum of Natural History in New York, who said, you know what, I think these actually are symbolic. I think they encode information, and I think that they probably are used to kind of tabulate things. And he he was right, boy, that sounds like a good cliffhanger, my friend. Okay, I should

take out that he was right part then? But was he? Well find out right after this he was okay, so he was right. Yeah, he was to right. Leland Luck was correct. And what he found was that these uh the keep who uh nots, We're definitely used. And this

is the part that we for sure know. Um. It was sort of like a calculator or an abacus um or a file that you would use to to like instead of writing down numbers and putting in at a file cabinet, you would not this thing up to represent like a census or something like that, or maybe how much you know, how many cowbrains you had on hand in the back, or how many llamas you had cowbrains. Sure they probably make cowbrains, right, I don't think so.

I think that's how rumors get started. Chunking. Okay, well, whatever there whatever they want to keep track of. It served as as an abacus essentially. Yeah, it's storied information, like they kept track of all that tribute that was coming in from the hundred and thirty different clans under them, like it was. It was. It was a way to store information. But that is boring and pedestrian, and it's still says that the Inca managed to keep track of all this and do all this stuff without a written

language like that does not happen. Usually you have a written language and then math develops later. The Inca developed all this, or it appeared that they did without a written language, but that's just what it seemed to be. Like nobody could figure out or see any written language in this for a very long time. Well, and here's the thing too, uh that I didn't mention. It's not as simple as I have ten lama, so I'm gonna

te ten knots on this string. Yeah. So it was like the height of the knot and where it was positioned on the cord. Uh. It all symbolized different things. The color symbolize something they had had multiples like one thing the way you know it could be done in such a way or represented a hundred or a thousand. Uh So it wasn't just like you know, eight beads

means eight cows, right. Yeah. So like, um, if you have three knots, right, and the top one has like five loops, in the middle one has five loops, in the bottom one has two loops, what you're seeing is five hundred and fifty two. Like the top one is the hundreds column, the middle ones the tens, and the

lower ones of the singles. Um. So yeah, and so like there was it wasn't just like one yeah counting off like that was much much more sophisticated that and you know, the color that that they used, the type of material that they used, the direction that not was tied in the number of loops that had. There are

all sorts of things. So when you when you take that, you know, if you have three different dimensions or five or seven or ten different dimensions of something, um, those things start to interact and now you have a lot

of different symbols to choose from doingcode information. But again, everyone just thought that it was just numbers that they were encoding until the I think the nineteen nineties when a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton um who spent years working on analyzing these finally was like, no, there's there's words in here, there's names in here. And if there's names in here, symbols of names, then that means that they're encoding more than just numbers. They're encoding abstract thoughts

like a language does. Yeah, and and Burton started to look into this because, like, despite all the great work Locke did to crack this code about accounts, he pretty much did, there were still a bunch of these UH configurations that did not fit with the rest. And he always just sort of thought those were outliers and maybe those were arts and crafts or for ceremonies or something.

But it was Urton who picked that back up and was like, I don't know, man, why would they go through all this trouble to design this intricate numerical recording system and then just have the same exact thing, just be crafty. He's like, there's something else going on here,

right exactly? So Um he was, I guess teaching a freshman economic student named Manny Madrono who managed to crack a little bit more of the code um and and was the one who showed I can't remember exactly what he showed, but he he took Burton's decades of work and in a spring break said, yep, here's some here's some indications that the colors are actually indicating like abstract thoughts, like like green um might be like cattle and that's a concrete thought. But but red equals war or something.

So he cracked the coat a little further over spring break. Over spring break, and he was like, and I figured it out and passed me the beer bong, right, which we called we didn't we called him funnel yeah bong. I mean, I guess it makes sense because there's a I'm sure it's a regional phrase. I'll bet you're right too. We just called it funneling beer. And by the way, you shouldn't do it everyone. It's dangerous stuff, it is, and it's it's just dumb. I've never funneled the beer.

Oh I did it a few times. It's just stupid. Actually, let me let me change that. I can't recall ever funneling it. I never did any of that dumb stuff. Keg stands or funneling just stupid. It is a little stupid, but I mean, yeah, it is. I just sat there as a nineteen year old on my my credit couardu Roy Couch throwing my martini right, was clucking your tongue at all? The Philistines. Yeah, uh, all right, so he

figures this out on spring break. It was a big like, it was a big breakthrough that not only were these uh used for numbers that's been record keeping, but like you said, like potentially we do have an entire knot language laid out in front of us, but most of this stuff is gone, Like that's the big tragedy. Yeah. So so this is the current thinking is that, yes, they're definitely abstract thoughts possibly even phonetic sounds encoded in

these along with numbers. Like Leland Locke wasn't wrong, you didn't misinterpret it, but he found he found um the or the over time they found that, No, there's abstract thoughts in here too. And there's a couple of pieces of evidence that really back this up. One they found key poos in burials. Right, why would you be buried with a an avocus a census document? Nobody would, but

you might be. You might be buried with a something that's basically like a narrative of some battle that you showed your bravery in and that was like the greatest thing you ever did in your life. You might be

buried with something like that. So that's one point. And then a researcher at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, so being Highland UM, did some analysis of two key poos that are incin that we're from the Spanish colonial area or era that supposedly the people, the villagers who were preserving these things said these are these two these tell of a great war. Yeah, that's that was key for sure. So these things are supposed to have a narrative code

within them. And she analyzed him and found like, yeah, there's something going on here. Yeah, I mean she got back up because they said, yeah, the different materials means something. You guys are uh, you guys are figuring this out. She she found that there different symbols encoded in these key poos, which is way more than you need for um like accounting system, but much more in line with something like a language. We still haven't cracked it yet, but it's starting to be clear that the Inca did

develop a written language. We just can't understand it and the way that it was lost to history is the same as if um, all of the monks in England have been killed off in dred when they were the only ones who knew how to read and write, that the like that stuff that they encoded in in English would have been lost to the English people who survived and who are still around today but have no I couldn't tell you what this Bible says because it's in

English and the monks didn't live long enough to pass along how to do this. I loved that last analogy. Thanks man, it's fantastic, Chuck, I appreciate that. I don't want to push my luck any further, so let's end this one, agreed. If you want to know more about the Incas or keep you there's a lot out there to learn. Just go check it out on the Internet and in the meantime you can reach us via email, It's Stuff podcast, how Stuff Works dot Com.