Short Stuff: Khipu

Listen in to learn all about the fascinating "language" of the Incan khipu knotted ropes. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm INCA Josh, and
there's INCA Chuck and INCA Jerry's over there. So this
is an INCA cast. Stuff. You should INCA short stuff,
you should INCA. Do you like that one? Huh yeah,
I'm surprised. Just dumb enough. Wait what do you mean, Oh,

(00:24):
I mean dumb in a good way. A dumb joke
is what my one of my biggest compliments. You know,
we have really been hit with the accusations of dad
jokes a lot more frequently lately. Have you noticed, well
more than we did ten years ago. Yeah, you know,
we're getting older and that's when dad jokes start creeping in.
So these people are right, they are correct. Man, never

(00:46):
would have thought I'd live to see the day. Literally,
that's right. We we we still stopped before we hit puns. Yeah,
we're no strickling. Nope, that's ageless. That's just some sort
of mental defect. Has nothing to do with age. Yeah.
Not ageless is in timeless and you could do that
anytime and it's great, right, Yeah, the opposite of that.

(01:08):
So Chuck, speaking of um opposites of that, let's talk
about whether or not the INCA actually ever created a
written language of any sort. Yeah, this was cool, and
I would love to do a longer form show on
the Inca period the Inca people, because, man, when you
when you start poking around a little bit, uh, the

(01:32):
things that they achieved and when it happened, it's pretty striking. Well,
you know, we did an episode called how did a
hundred and sixty eight Conquistadors bring down the Inca Empire?
Did we Really? That was a good one, But I'm
sure there's still plenty more to talk about with them.
We could do one just on the Inca I'll bet yeah. So, Uh,
I mean, here's here's a couple of things in the

(01:55):
way of an overview. Uh, they had the largest pre
columbia An empire in the America's a lot of people
during the Bronze Age. And you're not successful as a
people that that that can grow and thrive like that
unless you're doing some of these things like building roads
to the tune of twenty five thousand miles of highway, right,

(02:18):
that's amazing. Yeah, there was something like twelve I saw
ten to twelve million people in the Inca Empire who
were walking along the twenty five thousand miles of highway,
which by the way, cut through the Andies. It was
largely in the Andes, up in the Andes, which was
not a hospitable place to form a civilization in the

(02:40):
first place, no man, but they did. They thrived where
it was dry and harsh and steep, and they were
able to engineer like the kind of farmland at the altitudes,
at these altitudes that you would never think would be possible,
like millions of acres of high altitude terrorist farms. And

(03:02):
the way that I saw that the whole thing worked
was there were clans and villages and groups that all
kind of um. They did their own thing, and they
paid tribute to the what you would call kind of
the federal government, the Inca chiefs, the people um who
were who had the whole empire together, and then the

(03:22):
Inca who were running the show, would in turn provide
these these people, like the farmers and the villages and
the clans with stuff they needed. It bore a striking
resemblance to like Soviet communism. Yeah, and they kept it
going for about a hundred and fifty years again until
the Spans showed up. They were they were very powerful

(03:44):
empire But the weird thing about the Inca is that
they were able to do all this that included math
and abstract thought and um major like socio political administration.
They appeared to have done it without any written language whatsoever.
That's been basically the way that people have viewed the
Inca for a very long time. Yeah, which is is

(04:05):
remarkable because it's not like, oh, well, this was back
during the Bronze Age, like the Maya had written languages,
the az Text did, Mesopotamians did, Egyptians of course did,
Chinese did. So a lot of people were writing things
down and uh, it appeared and we're still not super sure,

(04:25):
but or are we Like, can we say definitively we're
almost but no, I don't think we can definitively say
it is sure starting to look that way, all right,
So let's let's get to the sort of the heart
of the story. Then, is is it? I believe it's
pronounced keepu k h I p you or or key

(04:46):
q u i p u r, which would also be
pronounced keep who right. But if you look this up
on the internet, if you can pull your car over, whatever,
don't anything dangerous. They are these really kind of cool.
It looks like Macromay almost. These knotted which I know
you like, uh, these knotted links of cord made from cotton.

(05:07):
Sometimes sometimes it's a llama or alpaca wool. And you
would see them hung up in rows that looks like
like from a curtain rod or something from but that
that curtain rod is really like a thicker central rope
and these things would just hang down and for many
many years someone more color coded. But for many years

(05:28):
people thought that these were just like art, right arts crafts,
that kind of thing, like something somebody would do when
they were bored, you know. And a lot of them
were lost because there's the Spanish. When they showed up,
the found them everywhere and they were like, well, I
don't know what this is, so I'm just gonna burn them. Yeah,
I'm gonna kill everybody and burn everything. And so for

(05:50):
a long time people, yeah, they just had them in museums.
They were they were ink and relics of an empire
that had crumbled and gone away. So people are like,
we gotta preserve these, and they took them to be museums. Um.
But it wasn't until the nineteen twenties that a guy
named Leland Locke, who was studying them at the Museum
of Natural History in New York, who said, you know what,

(06:11):
I think these actually are symbolic. I think they encode information,
and I think that they probably are used to kind
of tabulate things. And he he was right, boy, that
sounds like a good cliffhanger, my friend. Okay, I should
take out that he was right part then? But was he?
Well find out right after this he was okay, so

(06:52):
he was right. Yeah, he was to right. Leland Luck
was correct. And what he found was that these uh
the keep who uh nots, We're definitely used. And this
is the part that we for sure know. Um. It
was sort of like a calculator or an abacus um
or a file that you would use to to like

(07:14):
instead of writing down numbers and putting in at a
file cabinet, you would not this thing up to represent
like a census or something like that, or maybe how
much you know, how many cowbrains you had on hand
in the back, or how many llamas you had cowbrains.
Sure they probably make cowbrains, right, I don't think so.
I think that's how rumors get started. Chunking. Okay, well,

(07:37):
whatever there whatever they want to keep track of. It
served as as an abacus essentially. Yeah, it's storied information,
like they kept track of all that tribute that was
coming in from the hundred and thirty different clans under them,
like it was. It was. It was a way to
store information. But that is boring and pedestrian, and it's
still says that the Inca managed to keep track of

(08:00):
all this and do all this stuff without a written
language like that does not happen. Usually you have a
written language and then math develops later. The Inca developed
all this, or it appeared that they did without a
written language, but that's just what it seemed to be.
Like nobody could figure out or see any written language
in this for a very long time. Well, and here's

(08:20):
the thing too, uh that I didn't mention. It's not
as simple as I have ten lama, so I'm gonna
te ten knots on this string. Yeah. So it was
like the height of the knot and where it was
positioned on the cord. Uh. It all symbolized different things.
The color symbolize something they had had multiples like one
thing the way you know it could be done in

(08:40):
such a way or represented a hundred or a thousand.
Uh So it wasn't just like you know, eight beads
means eight cows, right. Yeah. So like, um, if you
have three knots, right, and the top one has like
five loops, in the middle one has five loops, in
the bottom one has two loops, what you're seeing is
five hundred and fifty two. Like the top one is
the hundreds column, the middle ones the tens, and the

(09:03):
lower ones of the singles. Um. So yeah, and so
like there was it wasn't just like one yeah counting
off like that was much much more sophisticated that and
you know, the color that that they used, the type
of material that they used, the direction that not was
tied in the number of loops that had. There are
all sorts of things. So when you when you take that,

(09:23):
you know, if you have three different dimensions or five
or seven or ten different dimensions of something, um, those
things start to interact and now you have a lot
of different symbols to choose from doingcode information. But again,
everyone just thought that it was just numbers that they
were encoding until the I think the nineteen nineties when
a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton um who spent years

(09:46):
working on analyzing these finally was like, no, there's there's
words in here, there's names in here. And if there's
names in here, symbols of names, then that means that
they're encoding more than just numbers. They're encoding abstract thoughts
like a language does. Yeah, and and Burton started to

(10:08):
look into this because, like, despite all the great work
Locke did to crack this code about accounts, he pretty
much did, there were still a bunch of these UH
configurations that did not fit with the rest. And he
always just sort of thought those were outliers and maybe
those were arts and crafts or for ceremonies or something.

(10:28):
But it was Urton who picked that back up and
was like, I don't know, man, why would they go
through all this trouble to design this intricate numerical recording
system and then just have the same exact thing, just
be crafty. He's like, there's something else going on here,
right exactly? So Um he was, I guess teaching a

(10:48):
freshman economic student named Manny Madrono who managed to crack
a little bit more of the code um and and
was the one who showed I can't remember exactly what
he showed, but he he took Burton's decades of work
and in a spring break said, yep, here's some here's
some indications that the colors are actually indicating like abstract thoughts,

(11:11):
like like green um might be like cattle and that's
a concrete thought. But but red equals war or something.
So he cracked the coat a little further over spring break.
Over spring break, and he was like, and I figured
it out and passed me the beer bong, right, which
we called we didn't we called him funnel yeah bong.

(11:32):
I mean, I guess it makes sense because there's a
I'm sure it's a regional phrase. I'll bet you're right too.
We just called it funneling beer. And by the way,
you shouldn't do it everyone. It's dangerous stuff, it is,
and it's it's just dumb. I've never funneled the beer.
Oh I did it a few times. It's just stupid. Actually,
let me let me change that. I can't recall ever

(11:52):
funneling it. I never did any of that dumb stuff.
Keg stands or funneling just stupid. It is a little stupid,
but I mean, yeah, it is. I just sat there
as a nineteen year old on my my credit couardu
Roy Couch throwing my martini right, was clucking your tongue
at all? The Philistines. Yeah, uh, all right, so he

(12:13):
figures this out on spring break. It was a big like,
it was a big breakthrough that not only were these
uh used for numbers that's been record keeping, but like
you said, like potentially we do have an entire knot
language laid out in front of us, but most of
this stuff is gone, Like that's the big tragedy. Yeah.
So so this is the current thinking is that, yes,

(12:35):
they're definitely abstract thoughts possibly even phonetic sounds encoded in
these along with numbers. Like Leland Locke wasn't wrong, you
didn't misinterpret it, but he found he found um the
or the over time they found that, No, there's abstract
thoughts in here too. And there's a couple of pieces
of evidence that really back this up. One they found

(12:56):
key poos in burials. Right, why would you be buried
with a an avocus a census document? Nobody would, but
you might be. You might be buried with a something
that's basically like a narrative of some battle that you
showed your bravery in and that was like the greatest
thing you ever did in your life. You might be
buried with something like that. So that's one point. And

(13:18):
then a researcher at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, so
being Highland UM, did some analysis of two key poos
that are incin that we're from the Spanish colonial area
or era that supposedly the people, the villagers who were
preserving these things said these are these two these tell

(13:39):
of a great war. Yeah, that's that was key for sure.
So these things are supposed to have a narrative code
within them. And she analyzed him and found like, yeah,
there's something going on here. Yeah, I mean she got
back up because they said, yeah, the different materials means something.
You guys are uh, you guys are figuring this out.
She she found that there different symbols encoded in these

(14:02):
key poos, which is way more than you need for
um like accounting system, but much more in line with
something like a language. We still haven't cracked it yet,
but it's starting to be clear that the Inca did
develop a written language. We just can't understand it and
the way that it was lost to history is the
same as if um, all of the monks in England

(14:26):
have been killed off in dred when they were the
only ones who knew how to read and write, that
the like that stuff that they encoded in in English
would have been lost to the English people who survived
and who are still around today but have no I
couldn't tell you what this Bible says because it's in
English and the monks didn't live long enough to pass

(14:47):
along how to do this. I loved that last analogy.
Thanks man, it's fantastic, Chuck, I appreciate that. I don't
want to push my luck any further, so let's end
this one, agreed. If you want to know more about
the Incas or keep you there's a lot out there
to learn. Just go check it out on the Internet
and in the meantime you can reach us via email,
It's Stuff podcast, how Stuff Works dot Com.