The baffling Incan rope language

Inka ? Don't be so bloody stupid. New word added to Word Replacer, because if other people are going to arbitrarily replace words with other words, then so will I.

(Inka ? sounds like a race of tattoo artists... [wanders off grumbling about the kids on the lawn...])

Instead of words or pictograms, the Incas used khipus – knotted string devices – to communicate extraordinarily complex mathematical and narrative information. But, after more than a century of study, we remain unable to fully crack the code of the khipus. The challenge rests not in a lack of artifacts – over 1,000 khipus are known to us today – but in their variety and complexity. We have known for about a century that the accounting khipus follow a base-10 knot scheme (imagine an abacus made out of string). However, these quantitative khipus account for only about two-thirds of the samples remaining today. 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.

What is so radical about wrapping numbers in knots? Consider how we typically learn to count. In school, counting begins with objects – wooden blocks, Lego pieces or other toys. Addition and subtraction involve making piles of these objects or tallying with our fingers. Then fingers and blocks turn into two-dimensional formulas, as students are taught a series of mathematical figures, commonly called ‘ciphers’. As a result, we can lose our ability to appreciate numbers as being represented by anything other than these abstract written symbols. Think about it: is there anything about the symbol '7' that communicates the meaning of seven? By contrast, the Inca khipu code for seven was a special type of knot, made by wrapping the string around itself to make a series of loops – seven, to be exact.

Try imagining three dots in your head. Easy, right ? Now try seventy nine... that gets a bit harder. Maybe you imagined a grid of 8x10 and took one away. OK, now try moving those remaining dots around into a random configuration. I bet you can't do it. Yet you could also imagine a vast array of random dots, more than you could reliably count. We're really not very good at quantitative analysis without mathematical language to help us.

Then there are the narrative khipus. These might have used numbers as qualitative identifiers for people or ideas – consider how we are each identified by a phone number, social security number or street address. This raises an important question: when numbers can signify quantities, identities or some combination of both, how do we know what category of number we are looking at? In other words, might a knot that signals the number ‘3’ reflect a count of 3 pesos, an identifier of a local villager or perhaps an emerging postal-code system? Some scholars have even suggested that the knots themselves encoded syllabic language.

Given these complexities, how confident can we be in our ability to learn about the narrative khipus, when they are so radically different from our understandings of communication? We are trained from an early age that mathematics and language are two discrete worlds. The Incas, however, collapsed them into a three-dimensional construct – an achievement of civilisational complexity in the form of narrative cords.

Oh, I don't know, the idea of mathematics as a universal language is very common. Still it is very different from other languages though. Sure, you can do mathematics in ordinary descriptive language (http://www.jokes4us.com/pickuplines/mathpickuplines.html) or vice-versa, but... don't. It's horrendous. Or apparently not if you use a knotted rope, bizarrely.

Mathematics involved more than just arithmetic for the Incas. The khipus present us with numbers in three dimensions – their knots represent quantities through a complex combination of shape, spin direction and relative position. For the Incas, numbers were an integral part of social life: Spanish records tell us that the Incas placed numbers in space, their three-dimensional number line conceiving of quantity as distance from the body.

The Incas’ 3D records are intimidating because they are so radically outside the comfort zone of modern society and communications technologies. The Incas managed to centralise and collapse mathematics, language, accounting and history into a durable and portable recording device. Their khipus are a perfect example of why it is dangerous to judge the past through the lens of the present. If ancient peoples were ‘primitive’, then we must be as well – the Incas and the narrative khipus have, after all, managed to baffle us so far.

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-khipu-code-the-knotty-mystery-of-the-inkas-3d-records