BrainStuff Classics: How Did the Inca Knot Language Work?

The Inca never developed a system of writing, but they kept records and told stories through intricate knotwork. Learn what researchers know -- and what they're still looking to find out -- about Inca khipu in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/cultural-traditions/unraveling-khipu-inca-knot-language.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren vogelbomb here with a classic episode from our archives.
In this one, we peer into the history of a
recorded language that goes back to ancient times, but that
doesn't involve writing. Welcome to Kipu, the Incan system of

(00:24):
recording information with knots tied in string. Hey brain stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. During the Bronze Age, the Inca
built the largest pre Columbian empire in the Americas, extending
along the west coast of South America from Bolivia to Chile.
They not only thrived in the harsh climate and dry,
steep slopes of the High Andes, they also served up

(00:45):
a master class in technical road building that would have
made the Romans quaken their sandals think it created a
twenty five thousand mile highway system that's about forty thousand kilometers,
complete with rope bridges across treacherous mountain chasms. They also
engineered millions of acres of high alayitude, terraced farmland, and
constructed an earthquake proof citadel on top of a craggy
mountain peak one point five miles that's two point four

(01:07):
kilometers above sea level. They even figured out how to
freeze dry potatoes. But unlike the neighboring Maya and Aztecs
and the ancient Mesopotamians, Chinese, and Egyptians, the Inca never
developed a system of writing. What they did have were cipu,
or knotted lengths of cord made from lama or alpaca
wool or cotton. They hung in rows like a curtain,

(01:27):
from a thicker central rope, which was sometimes coiled up
to resemble a string mop. These bundles were often color coded,
although most surviving cepuo are now a uniform camel color
and could contain just a few strings or hundreds. When
the Spanish arrived and wiped out the entire Inca civilization,
they found cupou everywhere, but destroyed many of them. In

(01:48):
the nineteen twenties, a science historian named Leland Locke, studying
the keepu at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York City, discovered the knots in the keepu represented numbers,
and the bundles of textiles were most likely record keeping
devices similar to abacass, probably used to hold census data
or to keep track of the contents of storehouses, or
how many lamas were paid as tribute. He realized that

(02:11):
the height of a knot and its position on its
cord sybolized units tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on, and
the position of a string off the main rope could
denote things like specific people or villages. But even after
Locke cracked the code, he noticed that some of the
keepoo he studied seemed to be anomalies. He figured these
were used for ceremonial purposes. There are, however, anecdotal clues

(02:34):
that entire narratives could be passed along through keipu. A
one seventeenth century Spanish conquistador reported meeting an Inca man
on the road who carried cipo that he said told
of all the deeds of the Spanish and Peru, good
and bad. Cipo couriers reportedly ran all over the Incan
Empire the chords looped over their shoulders. But finding living

(02:54):
people now who can help researchers unravel the secret of
the knots has proved very difficult, if not impossible, so
KEEPU research has made slow progress in the past century.
Since the early nineteen nineties, a Harvard anthropologist named Gary
Urton has been working to decipher what, if anything, the
keepoos that don't fit the normal mold of accounting devices
might mean, collecting a database of over nine hundred keepu.

(03:17):
In the process, Rton has discovered that beyond the position
and height of the knots, there are other factors to
take into consideration when reading a keipo, the color of
the string, the direction the knots are twisted, and the
type of knots used. Through cross referencing keepoo in the
Harvard Collection with Spanish documents from the exact time and
location in Peru where they originated, he has recently been

(03:39):
able to prove that the direction the knots are tied
in could denote which clans individuals belonged to. Another researcher
named Sabine Highland at Saint Andrew's University in Scotland has
recently found that some keepoos still exist within villages in
the Andes. The locals there have shared some new information
about them, for instance, that the different materials used in

(03:59):
the strings is significant and their understanding is that the
devices were used to tell stories of warfare. Highland also
reports evidence of phonetic symbols in the strings. It could
be for all their ingenuity, the Inca has never learned
to use symbolic written language, But it looks like they
may have been just a little more creative with their
storytelling than any other major civilization to date. Today's episode

(04:29):
is based on the article Unraveling Peopoo the Inca not
Language on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Jesslin Shields. Brain
Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffwork
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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