It is possible that the Kipo system, which until recently was perceived as an aid to managing accounts in the Inca kingdom, was actually a language that expressed complex meanings in a way reminiscent of computer languages
John Noble Wilford New York Times
Above: Kipo threads. The Spanish conquerors destroyed the threads they found. Below: a drawing of making kipo. A detailed Kifu database may soon be uploaded to the Internet
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Of all the civilizations of the Bronze Age, it seems that only the Incas of South America did not have a written language. This is an exception that has puzzled anthropologists, who tend to see writing as a defining characteristic of a vibrant and complex culture worthy of the title "civilization".
The Incas left behind a wealth of evidence of other cultural features: monumental architecture, technology, city life, and political and social mechanisms for mobilizing people and resources. Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the Maya of Mexico and Central America all had these and wrote.
The only possible example from the Inca culture of encryption and recording of information was enigmatic knotted threads, called "kipu". The bonds do not resemble any bonds of sailors or patrolmen. According to the accepted view of the researchers, most of the kippo were arranged as highly knotted wires, hung from horizontal ropes in a way that made it possible to represent numbers for the purposes of accounting and population censuses. The kippo, according to this assumption, were a kind of textile invoices; They were certainly not written documents.
But a more in-depth analysis of about 450 of the 600 existing kippo cast doubt on this interpretation. Although these were probably primarily bookkeeping tools, more and more scholars now believe that some Kipu were non-numerical and may have been an early form of writing. A "reading" of the interwoven threads may reveal narratives of the Inca Empire, the largest kingdom on the gold line of the Americas before the Spanish conquest in 1532.
According to Dr. Gary Orton, an anthropologist from Harvard, if indeed the kippo was used as a writing method, it is a method completely different from all known ancient writings, starting with the Mesopotamian cuneiform script more than 5,000 years ago. The kippo did not record information using graphic symbols that represented words, but in a kind of XNUMXD binary code, similar to today's computer language.
Orton hypothesizes that the Incas used threads and knots to express certain meanings. Through a series of binary decisions, the creators of the capo were able to encrypt and store information in a common system of documentation, which was read throughout the Inca kingdom.
In his book "Kipu Marks of the Incas", which will be published in September by the University of Texas Press, Orton claims to have identified for the first time the basic components of Kipu. It seems that the connections were arranged in encrypted sequences similar, according to him, to "the process of writing computer programs encrypted in binary digits (0 or 1)".
Each sequence of ties could be a name, identity, or activity. Taking into account the various possibilities arising from the colors of the threads and the methods of spinning, Orton estimated that the kippo weavers could have used more than 1,500 separate units of information. By comparison, the Sumerians worked with less than 1,500 cuneiform signs, and the Egyptian hieroglyphs numbered less than 800 signs.
The scientific consensus on the essence of Kipo was established in the 20s of the last century. L. Leland Locke, an expert in the history of science, then studied a collection of tied strings found in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and came to the conclusion that the kipo do not represent a conventional writing system, but are signs that record series of numbers. The creators of the kippo, according to this view, were bureaucrats who kept accounts.
This was the prevailing opinion until about 20 years ago. The pair of researchers Dr. Robert Asher, an archaeologist, and his wife Dr. Marcia Asher, a mathematician, reopened the discussion on the subject when they estimated that about 20% of the existing Kipo are "clearly non-numerical" and may be examples of an early form of writing.
Orton went further in this direction, but he admits that his interpretation may be difficult to prove. So far no narrative written in Kippo has been deciphered. The Spanish conquerors, who suspected that the tied threads might teach stories from Inca history and religion, destroyed the capo they found. The few descriptions of Kipu in the writings of explorers and missionaries lack details that would help explain how the Incas created and "read" them.
Other Inca scholars agree that the capos may have been more than record keeping devices or memory aids, and may have been used to record historical information. But they refrained from evaluating the validity of Orton's binary cipher hypothesis.
Dr. Patricia Lyon, from the Institute for the Study of Andean Mountain Cultures at the University of Berkeley, claims that the kippo were memory aids - personal, visual and tangible cues that helped retrieve information that was stored in the memory of the kippo maker. According to this argument, it is impossible to define the kippo as a form of writing, because only their creators, or people who knew the narrative preserved in the memory of the creators, were able to understand them.
Orton said other researchers will soon be able to test his theory and possibly find other patterns and clues in the Kifo he studied. A detailed database of information about Kifu, prepared with the help of Dr. Kari Berzin, a mathematician at Harvard who also deals with weaving, should be ready by the fall and at some point will be uploaded to the Internet.
The history buff
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