![]() The remaining third of these devices – the so-called narrative khipus – appear to contain encoded non-numerical, narrative information, including names, stories and even ancient philosophies. However, these quantitative khipus account for only about two-thirds of the samples remaining today. We have known for about a century that the accounting khipus follow a base-10 knot scheme (imagine an abacus made out of string). ![]() The Inka bureaucrats used these data to keep tabs on the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas. ![]() Using locally available materials such as camelid fleece and cotton, the khipukamayuqs (Quechua for ‘knot-makers/animators’) encoded administrative data such as census figures and tax allocation in the twisted strings of these ancient spreadsheets. Cracking the code amounts to finding a pattern in history’s knotted haystack. We confront tens of thousands of knots tied by different people, for different purposes and in different regions of the empire. The challenge rests not in a lack of artifacts – more than 1,000 khipus are known to us today – but in their variety and complexity. ![]() But, after more than a century of study, we remain unable to fully crack the code of the khipus. Instead of words or pictograms, the Inkas used khipus – knotted string devices – to communicate extraordinarily complex mathematical and narrative information. The Inka empire (1400-1532 CE) is one of few ancient civilisations that speaks to us in multiple dimensions.
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