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 episode of BrainStuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain
stuff lauring vogebam 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

(00:22):
a master class in technical road building that would have
made the Romans quake in their sandals. Thanka created a
twenty five thousand mile highway system that's about forty kilometers,
complete with rope bridges across treacherous mountain chasms. They also
engineered millions of acres of high altitude terraced farmland and
constructed an earthquake proof citadel on top of a craggy
mountain peak one point five miles that's two point four

(00:44):
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 kipou,
or knotted lengths of cord made from lama or alpaco
wool or cotton. They hung in rows like a curtain,

(01:05):
from a thicker central rope, which was sometimes coiled up
to resemble a string mop. These bundles were often color coded,
although most surviving keepu are now our uniform camel color
and could contain just a few strings or hundreds. When
the Spanish arrived and wiped out the entire Incas civilization,
they found keepu everywhere, but destroyed many of them. In

(01:25):
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 and the keepu represented numbers,
and the bundles of textiles were most likely record keeping
devices similar to advocacies, probably used to hold census data
or to keep track of the contents of storehouses or
how many llamas were paid as tribute. He realized that

(01:48):
the height of a knot and its position on its
cord civilized 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
keep who he studied seemed to be anomalies. He figured
these were used for ceremonial purposes. There are, however, anecdotal

(02:10):
clues that entire narratives could be passed along through KEEPU.
A one seventeenth century Spanish conquistador reported meeting an incoman
on the road who carried keep that he said, told
of all the deeds of the Spanish and Peru, good
and bad. Keep you couriers reportedly ran all over the
Incan Empire, the cords looped over their shoulders. But finding

(02:31):
living people now who can help researchers unravel the secret
of the knots has proved very difficult, if not impossible,
so keep Bleu research has made slow progress in the
past century. Since the early nineteen nineties, Harvard anthropologist named
Gary Urton has been working to decipher what, if anything,
the keep boos that don't fit the normal mold of
accounting devices might mean collecting a database of over nine

(02:54):
hundred CEBU. In the process, Burton has discovered that beyond
the position and height of the knots, there are other
factors to take into consideration when reading a keepu, the
color of the string, the direction the knots are twisted,
and the type of knots used. Through cross referencing keepu
in the Harvard collection with Spanish documents from the exact
time and location in Peru where they originated, he has

(03:15):
recently been able to prove that the direction the knots
are tied in could denote which clans individuals belonged to.
Another researcher named Sabine Highland at St. Andrew's University in
Scotland has recently found that some keepu still exist within
villages in the Andes. The locals there have shared some
new information about them, for instance, that the different materials

(03:36):
used in 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 Incas 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

(04:03):
episode was written by Jesselin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
For more on this and lots of other historical topics.
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