The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.
I’ve been loosely following developments in research about khipus since reading about them in an obscure paragraph in the back of my high school history textbook and every time I read more about them, it’s more and more exciting.
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i ran a super smash brothers club in high school and we literally had to shut it down for this reason. like the class that used the room after us was complaining that the room was unusable
valar apologist 