New clues to an old mystery about Inca writing aren't etched in stone. They're tied in knots.
A discovery made in a remote mountain village high in the Peruvian Andes suggests that the ancient Inca used accounting devices made of knotted, colored strings for more than accounting.
The devices, called khipus (pronounced kee-poos), used combinations of knots to represent numbers and were used to inventory stores of corn, beans, and other provisions. Spanish accounts from colonial times claim that Inca khipus also encoded history, biographies, and letters, but researchers have yet to decipher any non-numerical meaning in the chords and knots.
Now a pair of khipus protected by Andean elders since colonial times may offer fresh clues for understanding how more elaborate versions of the devices could have stored and relayed information.
Anthropologist Sabine Hyland studies a khipu board, a colonial-era invention that incorporated earlier Inca technology.
“What we found is a series of complex color combinations between the chords,” says Sabine Hyland, professor of anthropology at St. Andrews University in Scotland and a National Geographic Explorer. “The chords have 14 different colors that allow for 95 unique chord patterns. That number is within the range of symbols in logosyllabic writing systems.”
Hyland theorizes that specific combinations of colored strings and knots may have represented syllables or words. Her analysis of the khipus appears in the journal Current Anthropology.
SECRET MESSAGES
Hyland made her discovery in the Andean village of San Juan de Collata when village elders invited her to study two khipus the community has carefully preserved for generations. Village leaders said the khipus were “narrative epistles about warfare created by local chiefs,” Hyland reports.
The khipus were stored in a wooden box that until recently was kept secret from outsiders. In addition to the khipus, the box contained dozens of letters dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of the documents are official correspondence between village leaders and the Spanish colonial government concerning land rights.
Spanish chroniclers noted that Inca runners carried khipus as letters, and evidence suggests that the Inca composed khipu letters to ensure secrecy during rebellions against the Spanish, according to Hyland.
A khipu from the Andean village of San Juan de Collata may contain information about the village’s history.
“The Collata khipus are the first khipus ever reliably identified as narrative epistles by the descendants of their creators,” Hyland writes in her analysis. She notes that they are larger and more complex than typical accounting versions, and unlike most khipus, which were made of cotton, the Collata khipus were made from the hair and fibers of Andean animals, including vicuna, alpaca, guanaco, llama, deer, and the rodent vizcacha.
Animal fibers accept and retain dyes better than cotton, and so they provided a more suitable medium for khipus that used color as well as knots to store and convey information.
In fact several variables—including color, fiber type, even the direction of the chords’ weave or ply—encode information, villagers told Hyland, so that reading the khipus requires touch as well as sight.
Hyland cites a Spanish chronicler who claimed that khupus made from animal fiber “exhibited a diversity of vivid colors and could record historical narratives with the same ease as European books.”
THE BIG QUESTION
The Collata khipus are believed to date from the mid-18th century, more than 200 years after Spanish colonizers first arrived in 1532. This raises the question whether they are a relatively recent innovation, spurred on by contact with alphabetic writing, or whether they bear a close similarity to earlier narrative khipus.
“These findings are historically very interesting, but time is a big problem,” says Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton. “Whether or not we can take these findings and project them into the past, that remains the big question.”
A few years ago, Urton and Peruvian archaeologist Alejandro Chudiscovered a trove of khipus in what may have been a khipu workshop or possibly a repository of Inca records.
[VIDEO AT NAT GEO WEBSITE]
Deciphering patterns hidden within the devices may eventually become the work of computers, Urton says. He and his Harvard colleagues maintain a digital repository called the Khipu Database that categorizes images, descriptions, and comparisons of more than 500 of the artifacts.
The Inca at their height may have made thousands of khipus, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. But archaeologists suspect that natural deterioration and European colonizers destroyed most of the devices. Fewer than 1,000 are known to exist today.
Hyland plans to return to Peru in July to resume her research. Last summer, on her last day of fieldwork, she met an elderly woman who said she remembered using khipus as a young girl. But before Hyland could ask more questions, the woman darted away to tend to her livestock.
Hyland’s goal is not only to solve a historical mystery, she says, but also to bring to light the “incredible intellectual accomplishments of Native American people.”
The meal – or, more likely, the dish, one element of a more varied repast – was simple, but elegantly so. It comprised freshwater carp eggs, cooked in a fish broth.
The top of the earthenware bowl in which it was prepared was sealed with leaves of some sort – the eggs perhaps fried off before the stock was added, the leaves holding in steam and perhaps also adding a note or two of their own.
All up, then, the dish – a fish roe soup a little like a Korean altang, perhaps, or a Thai tom yam khai pla – likely had a pleasing and rounded depth of flavour, a certain delicacy and a beguiling aroma. It would not have been out of place on a menu in any posh restaurant from New York to Tokyo.
Except that this particular meal was cooked almost 6000 years ago, not far from what is these days Berlin.
The ingredients were identified by scientists led by Anna Shevchenko from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology in Dresden, Germany. Read more.
today in “things i’m disproportionately emotional about”:
it’s facial reconstructions of prehistoric humans!!
like, look at this part-homo sapiens, part-neandertal man from well over 30,000 years ago:
doesn’t he just look like a dude you’d wanna hang out with? like he probably washes dishes in the kitchen with you, and has excellent weed
what a charming fellow. what stories he probably has to tell. i’d definitely go shoot the shit with him on Contemplation Rock after i’d finished my day’s work carving a bone flute for the autumn hunting ceremony, or whatever
people have been people ever since people first became people, i tell you what
they all had lives and histories and families and friends and dumb gossip and games they played and total bullshit in which they believed wholeheartedly
they all argued about the nature of the world, and of themselves
they all sang songs
they all drew pictures
they all buried their dead in graves, and they buried their dead in graves well before they did a lot of that other stuff. they buried their dead with flowers, with panther claws, with the bones of animals they’d killed, with the bones of family members who had died at the same time or earlier. they buried their dead with their arms folded across their chests
they fell in love
they took care of their old and their sick and their disabled, even when it cost them
they made new things, and worried about what the new things meant for people everywhere, as a whole
This guy was sculpted by Alfons and Adrie Kennis, and their Neanderthal reconstructions are all delightful.
I love the kid in the last picture a lot- they look like a kid, just a little kid who’s done some mischief and is trying not to laugh about it.
I also adore their Lucy- they’ve struck a wonderful balance between the falling angel and the rising ape.
And their Turkana boy- there’s something precious and wistful in those eyes.
But my favorite has got to be their reconstruction of H. floresiensis.
Just look at her. That’s a face of someone who’s lived and seen a lot, but also a face that’s known love and joy and laughter. That’s a face with a soul.
“Ilhan Omar escaped war-torn Somalia and grew up in a Kenyan refugee camp. Her family immigrated to America with nothing. And tonight she became the first Somali American congresswoman in US history!”
I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day. Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top.
Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others.
This is why I fucking hate it when Europeans make jokes about how they have “more history” than the Americas. “This church is older than your country hahaha.” Actually, it’s older than the country you put there, massacring millions in the process, but go off, I guess.
when you have a white supremacist president, he views haiti in the classic manner white supremacists do therefore it’s based on tons of misinformation and straight up lies.
Coast Salish Robe. British Columbia, Canada. Pre-1850. Charles F. Newcombe purchased this dazzling Coast Salish textile from the Tolmie family of Victoria. Dr William F. Tolmie, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, may have collected it as early as 1852. Traditional twined and twill-woven Coast Salish textiles were made of mountain-goat wool mixed with plant fiber and hair from ‘wool dogs’ that were bred for that purpose, and coloured with plant and other natural dyes. When commercial wools and dyes became available, they were incorporated, as they were in this example that includes commercial yarns but possibly not mountain-goat wool and dog hair. This robe was probably made in the first half of the 19th century when bright colours and intricate patterns began to be used. The Royal BC Museum acquired it with the Newcombe estate in 1961. Royal British Columbia Museum.
A pair of fabulous thigh-length, fur-topped boots from Greenland. We love the decoration of embroidered silk flowers and leaves and the white crochet work. Such a wonderful mixture of colours and textiles.
So it turns out that there’s this entire series of animated Inuit legends produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. I highly recommend giving them a watch.
areudirty
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
gamechangershow
turnnoffyourmind
