From the Vault: The Inca Kingdom of Fibers

Welcome to the Kingdom of the Inca, where hundreds of rope bridges connect an imperial highway system and fiber-armored soldiers wield woven slings against the enemies of the Emperor. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the khipu system of knotted, colored string that served as a physical notation system in lieu of written language. (Originally published March 8, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it is
time to venture deep, deep into that fault. That's right.
This uh, this weekend, it is full of threads. Threads.
What what's it going to be, Robert, you're the one
looking at the notes. Oh, you don't know which which one? Well,
let me just say there's information contained within these threads. Oh,

(00:26):
this is the one we did about the Inca Kingdom
of the Fibers talking knots. That's right. This is from
March eight, and uh, yeah, this one was just really
fascinating because we get into this essentially this entire kingdom
that was built on fiber technology from rope bridges that
would connect an Imperial highway system to fiber armored soldiers.

(00:49):
Uh and and even keeping all sorts of detailed information
in the in the the KIPU system of knotted colored string.
I remember really enjoying this one, and so we hope
you will too. When did it originally air? This one
originally aired March eight. Al Right, well, we hope you
enjoyed this visit to the Inca Kingdom of the Fibers.

(01:13):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't it stuff to blow your Mind?
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
I've got a question I want you to think about it.
Imagine somebody contracted you. I don't know if you've ever

(01:34):
built anything like a ship or a house or anything
like that, but imagine somebody contracted you to build something.
Let's say it's a bridge. They want you to build
a suspension bridge over a chasm. But there is a
little qualifier on this request. You can't use any written
down words, so you can't read any words, and you

(01:58):
can't write any words. But I have to build a
physical bridge. Yes, So you need to get some workers together,
and you need to instruct them on how to build it.
And you've got to get all your materials that you're
going to need in order to build the bridge. And
you've I mean, you might have to research yourself how
to build a bridge if you've never done it before
and you can't use any written down words. Yeah, that's

(02:21):
gonna be challenging. Like it it almost makes the only
alternative to be for my from myself to build it
poorly without the hate of anyone else, because I'm gonna
have such a difficulty in communicating with the workers I'm
gonna have, but I'm gonna have all this difficulty just
acquiring the plans, acquiring the materials that I need. It's

(02:41):
going to be a huge headache. Okay. Now imagine on
top of that, I also want you to organize a
military campaign. So you're going to need to get a
whole bunch of people together and go rate a village
on the other side of a river. You need to
recruit your troops, you need to get provisions for all
of them, and to make sure they have food and
weapons and everything. Uh. And you can't use any written

(03:02):
down words. I think this is really demanding a lot
of me. I don't think this. I don't see see
my empire growing too too much. I don't either. I
And this is one of the questions that we're going
to have to confront in today's episode, because we're gonna
be talking today about the Keepoo, which are a fascinating
record keeping and notation system from the Inca Empire, and

(03:26):
that still has many questions about it today about to
what extent it represents different kinds of information and what
it can tell us about things that may otherwise be
lost to history. So I want to sort of draw
a picture in your brain to start off with. You
are holding a woven artifact between your hands, and it's

(03:49):
made out of hundreds of strings or chords. Uh, and
it's very old, and it looks like it may have
sort of succumbed to some I don't know what you
might call parasitism or predation on cloth over time. It
might have some fungus or some insect larva in it
or something like that. But it's made out of these
very old strings or chords. Uh. It might be woven

(04:10):
out of cotton, or it might be woven out of
wool from a South American camelid like a llama or
an alpaca. And it has one thick backbone cord stretching
horizontally at the top, sort of like a clothes line.
It might be about a quarter inch thick, so sort
of like the chords that you would have in your electronics.

(04:31):
And then down from that backbone cord hang lots of
other chords with different characteristics. Some have different colors, they
have not tied all over them, They might have subsidiary
strings hanging off of the cords. This is a key poo.
And if anyone out there has ever gone to an

(04:51):
art museum and seeing some examples of fiber art, particularly
modern fiber art, with kind of an archaic look to them,
that's kind of since you get looking at the key
poop because it's it's it's it's intricate looking, it's old looking.
But you also without coming in with some prior knowledge,
it's very difficult to understand what it's for. Yeah, So

(05:13):
these keypuo are so fascinating and enigmatic that I think
they have inspired a lot of other designs and artists
throughout the ages. And so the word keep you comes
from there. There are a lot of spellings of it,
we should note, so if you're looking forward on the internet,
you might have to try different spellings. It's k h
i pu or q u pu h some other variations.

(05:34):
But basically it comes from a Quechua word, and Quetchua
as an Andean language in South America, and the word
means not. And this makes sense because, as I've said,
in the strings, you'll see lots of knots tied up
and down the length of the strings hanging off the top.
So this is a very rare artifact in the modern day.
Only some hundred some few hundred of them exist. We

(05:55):
can talk about the numbers in a bit, and the
basic terminology that we're gonna use in the episode today
for your reference is that this this backbone chord at
the top sort of the main chord, is the primary chord.
The ones that hang down from it with knots on
them are called the pendant chords. And then some of
the pendant chords are going to have subsidiary chords hanging

(06:15):
off of them, and then there can be subsidiaries of
subsidiaries of subsidiaries, and these things can get very complicated
and huge over time. But the question, of course is
what does it do? Yeah, because looking looking at one
you might think, well, this is some sort of an
art mop or something. Right, what are all the knots for?

(06:35):
Why so many chords? Yeah, it looks like it could
be a garment, like you know, it could be like
a skirt. You might have a you know, grass skirt
or something like that. Or it could be yes, like
you say, a mop, a cleaning instrument of some kind
of some kind of tool. But What everyone now agrees
is that it was not these things. It might be
a tool in one sense, but it's an intellectual tool.

(06:56):
This collection of strings and chords with knots tied in
is a system of storing information, just like the hard
disc on your computer, or like a or like a
clay tablet or a paper document. It's for storing information
that was useful to the Indian people's who used it.
So it stores information, but what kind of information? What

(07:19):
does it say? Yeah, we're getting into the into this
area of pre written language recording of information. Yeah, which
is such a fascinating area because, uh, you you're seeing
the emergence of of of written language. Uh, we're talking
about notation physical notation of information here. Yeah. We're so

(07:41):
used to the way our graphical languages work. I mean,
I think that's the term. We should use graphical languages right,
because we represent them by making essentially drawings on paper
or on another surface. You you you leave markings on
a flat surface to indicate letters that we use as
a phonetic system of communicating language. We operate by pictures

(08:01):
correspond to sounds of words, and those sounds of words
correspond to ideas. And we're so immersed in this uh,
in this system, I mean it informs the way we
think about the world as well as interact with it.
So it's it is kind of difficult for a modern
view or a modern language user to sort of strip

(08:22):
some of that away, uh, to strip our written system
away and try to imagine a world without it. Yeah.
And I want to get to the impact of physical
writing systems on the mind towards the end of this episode,
but for now, I think we should focus on the
Keypoo itself and look at what this artifact is, what
we can learn about it, and what the mysteries about
it that remain are. Yeah, and indeed where it comes from,

(08:45):
because understanding the Incan civilization is also vital to to
seeing like how did this, how did this come to
take place? Yeah? Absolutely, so I think that's a great
place to start. We should give a very brief, very
cursory overview of the Inca Empire. Obviously we can't get
into all the fascinating details about this empire. It would
take over the podcast and become the whole thing. But

(09:07):
but to start off with, the Inca Empire was a
civilization that occupied the Andes. The Andean region and the
mountains in the west of South America in what is
today Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and in terms of
sheer size, it was the single greatest empire in all
of the America's before the European invasion. So the Incas

(09:30):
had this vast, powerful, impressive empire stretching all and down
the west side of South America when the Europeans arrived
in the late fourteen hundreds early fifteen hundreds. But according
to the traditional understanding of the history of this pre
Columbian civilization, the Inca did not have traditional written records.

(09:53):
They didn't have a writing system, or they certainly didn't
have one of the kind that we can understand as
graphical writing system, like markings on a page, and for
a long time it was thought that they didn't have
any sort of writing system at all. And because of
the lack of known historical or written records by the
Incas themselves, a lot of the information that we have

(10:15):
about Inca culture comes directly from the Spanish conquerors and
colonists who came beginning with Francisco Pizzarro, who colonized South
America in the fifteen hundreds. And eventually brought the Inca
Empire to an end. But we should we should talk
about a few cultural facts about the Incas. Like one
of the things to look at is what their religion
and mythology looked like. Yes, indeed, and they had a

(10:38):
had a really, you know, fairly complex religious system. It
was centered on the worship of the Sun and the
guise of the ancestor guide Inti, but it also entailed
a host of other pre uh Inca belief systems as
well as a rich tradition of ceremonial magic, animism, dualism,
cults of the mummified dead, and hopefully that is something

(11:00):
that future episode of of Stuff to Blow your mind
will get to, as we've had some mummy episodes the
mummies of the Indian civilization. This is fascinating. We should
definitely come back to that. Indeed, magical items, divination as
well as animal and human sacrifice. Now that that god Inti,
the ancestor god, is depicted as a human face on

(11:21):
a race blade disc, it's an important god of crops
in life, and most of their major uh deities line
up with what you would expect from an agrarian society,
you know, the gods of rain, the gods of sun, etcetera. Okay,
so the INTI the face on the disc that's sort
of like a face in the sun. You're saying, yeah,
the sun god essential to everything. Gotta have one, right.

(11:42):
But then there's also a god by the name of
Vera Coca, which is the creator god of the Inca
or at least the Late Inca. And so the idea
here is that he created the sun and the moon
on Lake Titticaca. After his creation, he wanders the world
as a bearded robed man with a staff, teaching the
ways of yeaht of civilization to the people. So imagine

(12:03):
sort of a uh, you know, a South American gandolf.
I'm thinking that's amazing. So the creator god that comes
to earth and wanders his own creation as as a
sort of itinerant. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like, uh,
it reminds me a little bit of of of some
of the later Dune novels. Oh yeah, there you go.
But but he But the other thing is that this

(12:25):
is a very ancient god and he actually predated the
Inca Empire. They didn't actually add him to the pantheon
until much later, possibly under the rule of an emperor
who took the name of the god Vera Coca and
died in fourteen thirty eight. So it's kind of this
interesting scenario we have where it's a pre existing god,
it doesn't factor into the early Inca system, but then

(12:47):
ends up becoming a dominant one later on. Yeah, but
of course, when we talk about the Inca Empire there,
we're not just talking about the the ethnic group of
the Incas themselves, because that they went on to create
this vast impride that in included many different regions of
the continent and many different people. So so they had
a vast system of social and political organization exactly. So yeah,

(13:10):
it's like any really any kind of imperial religious system.
They're going to be these other older religions that are
playing into the popular belief system. Uh, they're gonna be
regional beliefs, they're gonna be new beliefs. Uh. Suddenly God's
gods that suddenly find a following with very important people. Uh.
So yeah, it's it's it's a rich tapestry. Now, as

(13:32):
for their overall political organization, they established their capital in
cuzco uh in Peru in the what is now Peru
and twelfth century. Uh. And they expanded via military conquest
in the early fifteenth century, and within a hundred years
they gained control of the Indian population of about twelve
million people total. Yeah. And I've read many sources talking

(13:52):
about the very hierarchical nature of the of the Incan Empire. Yeah,
like that they were very clearly defined systems of who
answered to who. Yeah, It's it's easy to to take
sort of a Western uh approach to all this and
and view other civilizations and kind of imagine something kind

(14:13):
of simple and primitive. They've got a pope and a
king and all that. Yeah. But but but this is
really it was a really rich system. And certainly at
the top it's it's headed by it by the emperor.
But underneath the emperor there's just a complete aristocratic bureaucracy,
and there's in in the military system that keeps a
firm commanding hand on everything. And the divisions here involve

(14:36):
the central government, quarter league governments of provincial governments, and
what they could called decimal administrations and so and the
priesthood plays an important role in the structure as well
as does the military. And it all kind of just
tightens the grip on on most of the the people
in the empire, who are just farmers. Yeah. Now, as
you mentioned earlier, there were hundreds of years of the

(14:58):
Incas sort of expanding their their power and capabilities. But
as the actual official empire goes, it was fairly short lived,
officially lasting only from the early fourteen hundreds think the
fourteen thirties or so until the Spanish conquest beginning in
the fifteen thirties, with the last Inco resistance being destroyed
by the Spanish in the fifteen seventies. However, despite that

(15:20):
short period, the Incas were incredibly productive in building this
powerful technological civilization. Yeah. And the same way that their
religion was sort of pieces of things that already worked,
so to their their empire seems to be built of
technologies that were already more or less in place. But
then what they did with them, uh, in creating the

(15:41):
unified structure is pretty amazing. Yeah. I read definitely one
scholar talking about how the the the amazing technology of
the Inca was primarily an organizational or management based technology.
What was amazing about what they did was their ability
to to organize groups of people to achieve in is
whether those ends are engineering or architectural, or strategic social

(16:05):
organizations or civic organizations, that they were able to mobilize
people toward goals and get things done. Yeah, because they
already had You already had the skills out there. You
already had plenty of of of successful farmers who had
successful craftsmen. Uh. And then they were able to utilize
these uh to create the infrastructure of empire. Yeah. But
just a few quick things to name about the Incan

(16:27):
technological achievements. One of course would be their their civic infrastructure,
So the cities and the roads they have that span
diverse climates and ecoregions and dealt with very difficult terrain
throughout the Andes. I mean, they're building a civilization up
and down the sides of unwelcoming mountains, you might say.
But there's also the Incan road system, and this passes

(16:49):
through the high Andes coastal desert, the lowland forest. It
was complex and use traffic management. And then there's this
one fact that often gets referenced because it's so interesting
that they had a they had a mess anger system
made of these messengers known as choskis. Have you read
about these guys, yes, because they do tie in with
our our core subject here today. Yeah. Yeah. So these
are lightning, fast running messengers, and they carried information across

(17:13):
these empire spanning road systems, and they would carry with
them the subject of what we're talking about today, Like
you said, the key boos, these these strings and chords
that had knots on them to carry information, and they
would carry the key boos with them, and they trade
out with rested runners at way points, and they would
bring information about state projects back to central administrative nodes

(17:34):
like CUSCO. And they could cover huge distances very quickly,
and often cited numbers that they could cover two and
forty kilometers at day on foot and uh and and
another thing I've read is that they boosted their high
altitude sprinting power by chewing coca leaves to increase endurance
and dull pains and hunger and thirst and the sort

(17:55):
of focus of course, the coca leaves being the precursor
to cocaine. Uh And even here you might say that
this is a technological innovation in the use of new
tropics or performance enhancing drugs. Oh yeah. And of course,
even to this day you can. It's it's sometimes recommended
to have the coca tea if you're trying to adapt
to high altitude UH situations in South America. Yeah. But

(18:18):
of course on top of all that, they had irrigation systems,
calculations used for engineering that the Incans had this interesting
stone device called a yu panna, which is from what
I've read, it's similar to an abacus. It was like
a stone device they used for doing calculations. Also, one
of the most impressive and interesting things to me is
their bridges. They're just amazing. Yeah, they're They're bridges are

(18:42):
really fascinating. And this this is something I think I
covered for the first time when I was working on
how bridges work for how stuff Works dot com um.
The Incans built the earliest known suspension build bridges in
the world out of twisted grass. Essentially, we're talking about
fiber arts here. And this is where I get kind
of excited thinking about them, because you you think of

(19:04):
this this culture where again they're building the empire out
of the existing tools. What are we good at? What can?
What are what are we great at? One of the
things they're great at is crafting things out of fiber
out of stringing out of rope and twine. Yeah. I
didn't even think about this connection until now. But we're
seeing this notation system that we're focusing on today made
out of textiles. We're seeing major infrastructure like bridges made

(19:27):
out of weaving. Uh. It's it's a sort of weaving
based techno culture. Yeah, it's kind of like to come
back to that question you ask me at the beginning
of the episode, you know, how would I do all
these things? How would I build my empire if I
couldn't use written language? Like the follow up question would
might have to be what what are you good at?
What is the what what is your what is your

(19:48):
your primary skill that we could build all of this
or more than that, what is what are lots of
people good at? You know what? What are the skills
that we can get lots of people doing for the
empire without having to teach them how to do it? Yeah.
So these bridges in question here, they were first discovered
when Spanish conquistadors made their way into Buru in the
year fifteen thirty two. Uh, And they discovered this this

(20:12):
wonderful highway system that we've already mentioned. But as you
mentioned that highway system has to span some pretty treacherous areas,
including some some some deep mountain gorges. Uh. And that's
where they discovered these, um the suspension bridges, achieving spans
in some places of more than a hundred and fifty
feet or or forty six meters uh. In Europe, on

(20:34):
the other hand, they wouldn't see Europe wouldn't see its
first suspension bridge until nearly three hundred years later. So
they were they were building these these grass these fiber
bridges to connect their highway system. And if you're having
trouble picturing this, I would recommend looking it up to
see what they look like. Is that you can see
pictures of them today. But also essentially it's a bridge

(20:55):
hanging from ropes. Yes, that's what it is. Yeah. And
there is one left in the world. Um, there's I
mean one Inco grass bridge. One one remaining income grass
a bridge, and it is the Keshua Chaka uh. And
it's there's like a single Inco bridge keeper named Victoriano

(21:16):
orist Pana who believe it's still alive, still caring for
the bridge. Because that's the other thing. If you're building
your bridge, your bridge system, uh, if you're connecting your
highways with rope bridges, um in a climate like this,
you have you have to continually care for them, uh,
with a with a frequency that you maybe don't have
to to turn to as much with stone bridges. Yeah.

(21:39):
I was watching a video actually about modern upkeep of
these bridges, and they don't just have to maintain them,
they have to replace them frequently. So they'll at a
at a certain period every number of years or something.
I think maybe depending on the condition of the bridge,
they'll cut it down and put up a new one. Indeed.
And uh and and of course there are other areas

(21:59):
where uh they're really using these these fiber arts as well.
So they're they're create creating fiber boats out of reads,
fiber armor that's uh stronger pound for pound than the
steel worn by conquistadors, woven slings that could supposedly split
a Spanish sword with the stone that it fired. Uh.

(22:21):
They also had burial and sacrificial textiles. They were also
quite important, which in a way that gets into our
techno religion episode of of of Your Right, because anytime
you have a culture that has some sort of technology,
that technology is of course going to be used for
religious purposes. Oh, I'm gonna get into that later. And uh,

(22:42):
textiles are so important. Textiles along with corn, served as
a kind of currency for paying the soldiers of the empire.
So you really to the point where you almost cannot
overstate the importance of textiles and fiber arts and crafts
within the Inca Empire. Yes, but reviewing all of these
massive projects and achievements of this empire, I want to

(23:05):
come back to that question I started with at the beginning,
because the traditional understanding is that the Incas did not
have a writing system, and they certainly didn't have a
graphical writing system. And so if you assume that they
didn't have a system for notation of words in any
in any way, these achievements they seem almost impossible to me,

(23:27):
Like how could it be done without being able to
write down notes about how things should be carried out? Well,
it makes you think you're you're sitting that runner off right,
and you you say them, Hey, I need you to
tell such and such the next village over. Make sure
you remember it. Hey, we have all the string around here.
Type a piece of string around your pinky finger, and
that'll remind you. So like how far could you extrapolate

(23:49):
that system. You'd run out of fingers, but you still
have all this string. Yes, And that brings us back
to the key poos that we're talking about today. Now,
one of the central themes of this episode is going
to be talking about the disputes about what is encoded
in the keepos, what kind of information is in there.
I think what's undisputed is that there is numerical information

(24:09):
in there, and that the keepos were used to keep
track of goods and labor in society. So people living
under the Inca Empire might have owed the state X
the number of days of work every month or something
like that. How to keep track of the number of
days you've worked and how many you owe. And then
also people are organized into labor groups. You need census

(24:30):
data to make organizational decisions about how many people you're
going to have doing a certain project or available if
you need them to fight in your army. And then
of course the Incan engineers and architects needed to be
able to make notes about the products of calculations used
in engineering and architecture, and all all these numbers we
now know we're encoded in the keep But is there

(24:53):
other stuff in them as well? So here here we
should get into what the Spanish colonial authorities had to
say about that. As we said earlier, for a long time,
pretty much everything we knew about the Incas came from
written records of the Spanish and that's not a great
situation to be in, right, You're depending upon the conquerors,
the alien conquerors, to tell you how these people lived

(25:16):
and and and what they're they're they're not system represented, yeah,
I mean there are, they're just different concerns. The Spanish
colonists were very concerned about the glory of the Spanish crown,
with domination, exploitation of resources, spreading their version of Christianity,
so gaining a deep understanding of the existing cultures and
their technology might not have always been at the forefront

(25:40):
of of their list of priorities, right, Yeah, I mean,
the the the system itself does not prize that so much. Yeah.
But more recently, physical clues from archaeology have started to
round out our modern understanding of the Incas. I think
we're getting a better and more unbiased idea of what
the empire looked like. But there's still so much we
don't know. Uh. But so what what did the Spanish

(26:03):
chroniclers make of these key poos? Well, one of the
things that I found is a collection of awesome illustrations
that the Spanish colonists made of the key poos explaining them.
Just a few here from the seventeenth century, one group
by Guaman Poma de Ayala and another group by Martin
de Marua. What are we seeing here, Robert, Well, we

(26:25):
are seeing drawings of individuals holding these key poos, which
look again at times just kind of like mops like that.
They're not the most detailed representations of what's going on,
I mean, more so in the Marua illustrations than in
the earlier ones. But but then on the other hand,
you do see an attempt to document and understand what's

(26:46):
going on with this with this system. Yeah. One example
is there's it almost looks like a political cartoon. It's
just sort of a black and white drawing of someone
in UH with a with a ponytail and UH and
a tunic of some kind holding one of these keeps.
And then there's a little sign extending off of it
that has the word for letter in Spanish, indicating that this,

(27:08):
this collection of strings is a message that's being carried.
So I think this is supposed to be an illustration
of the chats keys, but of course there are written
accounts also. I want to read one quote from the
Jesuit missionary Jose de Acosta, and this is cited in
translation in the Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology,

(27:29):
and Medicine and Non Western Cultures edited by Elaine Selene
and translated by the entry author Molly Tune. So here's
this selection. They are keeps, memorials or events registered in
strings on which diverse knots and diverse colors meant different things.
It's incredible what they achieved this way. How much books

(27:50):
can say about history and laws and ceremonies and business accounts.
The keepers supply all this so promptly that it's admirable.
In order to have these keep us or memorials, there
were official representatives that today are called keep who Kamayo,
who were obligated to give accounts of everything like the
public scribes here, and as such they have to be

(28:10):
given full credit. For diverse genres like war, government, tribute, ceremony, land.
There were diverse keeps or strings, and in each handling
of these so many knots and intricacies and strings were attached.
Some were colored, some green, some blue, others white, and
so many differences that, just as we form twenty four

(28:31):
letters in different ways to make such an infinity of words,
these knots and colors make innumerable meanings of things. And
there there are also stories of keeps being used for
narrative purposes in other contexts. For example, somebody might be
in the middle of a court case before before a
governor and they have to bring a keep who out
to give testimony in the court. So it's it's serving

(28:52):
as an official record of transactions or some sort of
business history. The keep who is is is the recorded documents.
So we're seeing the not only the externalization of human thought, uh,
but and not only the use of the keep who
as a as a way to remember something and convey information,

(29:13):
but just to store it and immortalize it. Yeah. And
so the question here is can we trust the Spanish
understanding of what they claim to see? I mean, are
these accounts accurate? Are are the Is it really true
that you could take a keep who and read testimony
from it? You can take a keep who and read
histories of governments and uh, and even read religious things,

(29:37):
ceremonial incantations that read all of these sort of literary
formats from it, can you fit a history into knots?
And that's still the question for researchers in this area.
So we'll we'll get into the modern quest to solve
the mystery of the knots in a moment. At first,
we should take a quick break. All right, we're back.

(30:04):
So we're trying to unlock the mysteries of the key phos.
But one of the problems here, of course, is that
the Inca Empire is long gone. Most of the key
phos are long gone as well. Yeah, So after the
Spanish conquest of the region, the keypoos were just used
less and less frequently. And there are a bunch of
reasons for that. There's probably some stigma against it because

(30:24):
of the cultural power of the Spanish as the colonists.
They didn't like these things. They thought of them them
as idolatrous. Uh. And so the Spanish, it is said,
destroyed a lot of the key poo's intentionally because you know,
they're blasphemy. Uh. Some were also probably destroyed by the
Incas themselves during their own Civil War. Many others were

(30:45):
simply lost to time, like these are not stone carvings,
these are textiles, and there you know, they can be
subject to the elements. And so almost all of the
key woos we have available to archaeology today come from
graves that we've opened up, or come from private collections
that or museums, and they're originally of unknown origin. We
don't know where they come from, so it can be

(31:07):
difficult to figure out what the keep who was supposed
to mean in its original context. We don't have the contacts,
we don't have the uh, we don't have the record
keeper to to tell us what the notations are referring to. Yeah,
and so we're back to that big question. Are these
only numbers? Are they only the raw data sheets for
imperial accounting? Or do they contain words and calendars and

(31:31):
genealogies and astronomy and royal history and literature and even
poems and songs? Uh and so many. For many years,
scholars all knew that these systems of chords and knots
were used for some kind of notation, but they were
not able to translate or decode them, and eventually, in
the first half of the twentieth century. That changed because
a scholar named Leland Locke demonstrated conclusively to the academic

(31:55):
community that the chords carried NW miracle messages in decimal form. However,
Locke argued that these knots were used for purely numerical purposes,
and so he was saying that, look, and we can
show how these things work to calculate numbers and to
transmit numbers, and that's all they do. Uh, And this

(32:17):
remained the dominant thinking for a long time. Most scholars
were convinced by Locke's point of view that these didn't
have they didn't have stories in them, they didn't have
words in the literature. But then, of course, and as
we get into the bias or just approaching this with
it with our own written language so firmly ingrained in
our minds exactly. So to answer this question, I think

(32:37):
we should start by looking at how you read a
keep you, and we should just start with the numbers,
because that's what everybody agrees is there. How do you
read the numbers on a keep you? Well, we have
we have a pretty good understanding of the numerical notation system,
and I want to give a brief explanation that I
got from a presentation given by a researcher named Gary Earton,
and Earton is one of the foremost keepe researchers in

(33:00):
the world. His name comes up a lot if you're
reading about this subject. And Urton says that the keeping
was probably the principal instrument of management of the Inca Empire,
and it was used to manage numbers in the following way.
So picture you're keeping again. Put it up in your mind.
You've got the big primary string hanging horizontally, and then
down from that or your pendant strings with knots on

(33:22):
them in different places. So the Inca is as we've said,
they had a decimal number system that's a base ten
counting system is just like ours. And the way the
strings work is the placement of the knot on the
string represents number places in the same way we represent
them by the order of writing. So think of the
number five dred and thirty seven. You see that number

(33:44):
written down and you instantly know what it means because
the number the farthest to the right is the ones
place there are seven ones, and then the second most
to the right is the tens place there are three tens,
and then the number of farthest from the right is
the hundreds place, and there are five hundreds, so it's
five dred and thirty seven. And there's a very similar

(34:05):
placement system with the kypoos, except it goes from the
bottom of the string to the top, so not at
the bottom of the string represents a value of one
the ones place, the next space of the string represents
a value of the tens place, and so on like that,
and then different types of knots represented different values in
those numeral places. So yeah, we can all easily imagine that,

(34:29):
I think, and certainly you can look at some of
the visual aids as well, um knots in the string
representing numbers coming together to represent larger numbers. Yeah, and
there are some variations, but that's the gist of it.
And we can be confident that we're reading the strings
correctly because sometimes the strings are summed by other strings.
This is one of the things leland Lock showed, So

(34:50):
that there might be, for example, four pendant strings, and
then the primary string shows a number that happens to
be the sum of all of the pendant strings put together.
So that would be very very unlikely to happen if
that were not, if we were not reading the numbers correctly.
But even with the numerical notation, there's a question. Let's

(35:11):
say you're looking at to keep you. You You gotta keep
it in your hands, and it might smell kind of moldy,
and it's this ancient thing, and you figure out by
adding up the knots on it, you you figure out
how to read the not placement, and there's six and
sixty seven of something? What is the something? Is there
more information to get out of a keep you, even
if it's just meant for numerical notation, as the traditional

(35:34):
hypothesis holds. And so one hypothesis is that the colors
of the chords means something. So maybe a chord that's
red colored means, uh, some number of corn ears of corn,
and then uh, the chord that's a different color means
some number of peanuts or something, because I mean the
other idea would be that it would depend entirely upon

(35:55):
the context that was known by the holder of the
keep it, And that is something that has been hypothesized
as well. For example, some people might say that the
keep who would require specially trained people to keep track
of an orally transmit contextual information about the keypoo. So,
for example, these chatskys the runners uh. The idea is

(36:15):
that the runners would deliver the keeps for numerical data,
but they would also orally relay messages contextualizing the numbers,
so that handoff to keep you to you it's sixty seven,
and they say, this is the number of times the
emperor is going to kick you in the face if
you don't do what he says, or or this is
the number of ears of corn he'll give you if

(36:37):
something if you do what he wants. So in this model,
the keep who would not be say a a a
more primitive substitute for written language. It would be a
notation system that does not in and of itself tell
the story or tell the complete data it relies to
upon the narration and or interpretation of another human. Yes, exactly,

(37:00):
and this is something that also might have been done
by these people called the keepu kama yuk, the not
keepers who were talked about by the Spanish, who specialized
in creating and reading the keepoo. So these were like
the scribes who would be called if you needed to
keep you read in court to give testimony, the scribe
would come out and explain what the keep who said.
So the idea here could be that, well, maybe some

(37:22):
of the information isn't in the keep who, it's in
the scribe, and the scribe knows, okay, this keep who
means X, Y and z. So there's the possibility that
the idea is just sort of hard coded numerical data
with oral metadata. Okay. But then back to your point though,
that we do see colors, we do see other differences

(37:43):
that go beyond the mere knots right, yes exactly. And
one other very interesting fact speaking to the BBC in
two thousand three that scholar I mentioned earlier, Gary Earton
gave this figure that's kind of interesting. About two thirds
of the known keep you at that time. That number
might have changed somewhat since then, but about two thirds
of them back then obviously consisted of numerical figures. They

(38:06):
fit the standard scholarly model. You can look at the
numbers and just count up numbers. But what about the
other one third. There's this other group of keypoos that
we have available to archaeologists that don't obviously just transmit
numerical information. So what's going on with them? Are they
saying something, And that's the big question that scholars are

(38:29):
still trying to answer today. So one of the biggest
steps towards discovering the other information contained in the keypoo,
if there is such information, is the creation of a
standardized computer database of keypoo descriptions, because it's very hard,
you know, like you don't know what information is relevant.
So you're looking at a bunch of textile woven stuff
and you're like, well, this one has kind of a

(38:50):
fraight end. Is that something? Could that mean something? Or
is that just how it is? And this one has
an overhand not, this one has an underhand not in
the same place. Is that meaningful? Is that coding some
kind of something that would means means something makes sense?
Or is it just an accident. So having a standardized
database of descriptions, including basically all of the relevant information

(39:13):
that you can state about these strings, allows people to
cross reference them and look for patterns, and especially allows
computer programs to look for patterns and the strings and knots,
because patterns are often the key to translation. For example,
if you see a very commonly repeated pattern in something,
even if you have no idea what the pattern means

(39:33):
you might start by assuming it represents a common word
like the name of an emperor or the name of
a capital city or something like that. And so researchers
have been doing this. Actually more than a decade ago.
Harvard University researchers Gary Earton and Carrie Braziine started doing
computer analysis of KEEPU and in two thousand five they
published research suggesting that introductory chords on some of these

(39:58):
keep who might serve as topa nims, which would be
like location tags that would be the name of a
place to show where keep you came from or what
community a concern. And if this is correct, this means that, Okay,
we definitely know there's some kind of notation in these
strings other than mere numbers the name of a place,

(40:18):
and if there's a name of a place, there could
be other words, right m. That's interesting. Um. Yeah, And
especially again if you think back to the INCA is
just is having such a an expertise and textiles likes
textiles are going to speak to their their masters, perhaps
in a way that they're just not going to speak

(40:39):
to a modern observer, even a modern observer who has
immersed themselves in the topic uh. And I also have
to say that the idea of a modern computer essentially
speaking or attempting to speak and communicate with this older
form of notation, this older informational system, is just really

(41:00):
mind boggling. I love, I just loved to to envision it. Yeah,
it's it's really interesting. And there's another really interesting development
this is actually reading this story is what made me
want to do this episode, that there's a very recent
discovery that might help us crack the code. It might
give us a foothold into looking for the Rosetta stone

(41:22):
of the Keepo. So the discovery was that there's an
archaeological site about a hundred miles south of Lima, Peru,
and it's called Incahuas. And at the site, excavators found
a collection of keeps in their original place of use.
If you want to look this up, there's a great
New York Times article on it called Untangling, an accounting
tool and an ancient Incan mystery from January. So the

(41:46):
keepoos in their original place of use, it was a
storage facility for food crops. So they've got foods. They're
like peppers, corn beans, peanuts, and remnants of many of
these foods have been preserved by the arid climate of
the site, so we can still tell what crops were
where in the storehouse. And this is significant because, as

(42:08):
we said before, most keepoos today they don't come from
their original context. They were buried in a grave with somebody,
or they came from somebody's private collection, and we don't
know where they originally came from or what they might
have meant. So here we can see keepos along with
the quantities they're supposed to be counting six hundred and
sixty seven, some things become six hundred and sixty seven

(42:30):
baskets of peanuts. And using this contextual information, archaeologists can
look for physical signifiers in the keepoos like extra naots
are not orientation or string color that might correlate with
what's being counted. Has something to say that this was
not six hundred and sixty seven peanuts, but six hundred
sixty seven uh um, you know, bundles of peanuts or

(42:53):
something there was there was some other detail that defines
exactly what it's saying. And so if they can find
such detai ails that might correlate with what's being counted,
and like I said, give us a foot in the
door to start understanding non numerical information hidden in the
strings that we couldn't understand before. But I do want
to also qualify it. Gary Urton, that same scholar he's

(43:15):
quoted in the article, and he he says it's not
quite the perfect Rosetta Stone yet. So if there are
any linguistic narratives waiting in the undiscovered deciphered keeps, we
haven't found the perfect key to decoding them yet. But
that made me wonder what would be the jackpot find
what what is exactly what we'd like to find to

(43:36):
figure out if they're literary histories and poems and stuff
like that in the keep boos and I found a
pretty good answer to this. In a two thousand three
newspiece for the Journal Science, Charles C. Man Uh offered
that the best case scenario would be to discover a
Spanish colonial translation of a known keep oo, and then

(43:56):
we really would have something like the Rosetta Stone. So
the Rosetta Stone helped us discover how to translate hieroglyphics
by having the same document in hieroglyphics and then in
Greek right next to it. So what we need is
a contemporary translation where um, where a Spaniard essentially set
down and said, hey, explain to me what this keep
who is saying, Show me what this keep who is saying,

(44:18):
and then him recording yeah and so, And we would
also have to have access to what the keep who was,
you know, to actually have the keep who still or
to have a complex description of what was on it. Okay,
So both of these things have to survive, have to
have existed and to have survived. But if we had
such a thing, we could form the basis of Alexicon. Unfortunately,

(44:39):
we don't think there's anything like that, unless I should
mention that I should mention this though it's a kind
of iffy road to go down. So there is one
set of colonial documents out there, or claimed colonial documents,

(45:01):
produced by the Neapolitan amateur historian Clara Michinelli in the
nineteen nineties, which claims to include an original historical account
of the literary contents of Keepu. And so it explains
that some keep us contain a secret phonetic rendering of
the Andean language Quechua, which you mentioned earlier. And they
say certain physical markers on the strings represent syllables of

(45:23):
the language. So that would be actual phonetic language, not
just not like a symbol, not like a not means
a word, but like a certain symbol on the rope
means a sound that you make with your mouth. So
what's the problem with this document? Well, if it were true,
would be a huge discovery. But um, but this collection
of documents has been regarded with what I would describe

(45:44):
as serious skepticism by the scholars I was reading. I
haven't seen any Indian scholars talking about it in recent publications.
Almost everything that mentions it says, I don't know, this
looks kind of iffy. Um. So it doesn't seem to
me like the academic community is persuaded that these documents
hold any value. They might be forgeries, or they might

(46:06):
the documents might be really historical, but they might have
been forged at the time they were created. But if
you want to learn more about that, you can google
the Mitchinelli documents or the Naples documents and that will
turn up some leads for you. So the mystery of
whatever literary content the keep Whos contain is still a mystery.

(46:27):
We we don't have the answer yet. Who know, we
may never have the answer, or we may find out
that you know what it's all, it's all just numerical notation.
In fact, there is no literary content there. But I
hope that's not the case, because it really would be
amazing to suddenly uncover the meaning of of all these
documents that contain the history we never got from the Spanish. Yeah,

(46:48):
and you know, you you want that culture to still
have a voice in our world despite um what was
done to eradicated and that that also gets to another
UM area here is that and and one of the
other just huge tragedies of of any of the American cultures,
UM is that we will never know where they would

(47:10):
have gone. What would would they would have developed into
without this outside context event of the of the of
the colonial invasion. Yeah, yeah, I mean, what would the
income culture have looked like a few hundred years down
the road if not for the introduction of of smallpox
and the Christian mission and and the and the military

(47:31):
conquest of the Spanish. It's hard to say, but it
would have been fascinating to learn that. Yeah, Because fortunately
we can look back to other physical notation systems in
history and we can actually see how they developed and
look at how they seem to have played into the
development of written language and uh and and and in

(47:52):
numbers as well. Yes, exactly. So if you do think
of of one possibility about the keep, who's being a
sort of proto writing system them, Like maybe it wasn't
fully able to communicate literary content yet, but it had
some literary content, Like it had some words, but not
the whole language I presented. Uh. That has some parallels

(48:13):
that we know about from other times and places in history. Yeah,
particularly if we go back to uh Neolithic Mesopotamia. Particularly,
we're going back to around uh uh seven thousand, five
hundred b C. And this is where we saw the
use of clay tokens in accounting. So these were clay
tokens and they were inscribed with recorded information about traded

(48:36):
agricultural goods. We see the use of small geometric clay
objects throughout the Near East in this period, and it's
all serving as as ultimately as a precursor to writing
in mathematics, so this is trying sort of like the
traditional understanding of the numerical keypoo. It's trying to it's
trying to use a notation system without writing yet. And
of course in both cases, agricultural is is tremendously important

(48:59):
both to the inc and to the the ancient Mesopotamians,
because remember, it wasn't just that we learned to cultivate
crops and domesticate animals. These technological advancements change the shape
in the scope of human life. It demanded new systems
of thought, and the clay tokens were a part of this. Yeah,
I would say one thing that seems significant with the
introduction of agriculture and domesticated animals is that you're not

(49:21):
concerned with what you're eating today. You're dincerned with all
the things you have available to eat in the future exactly. Yeah.
So with the with the earlier tokens, it's a pretty
basic model. The more primitive tokens, you have like a
token with a sheep on it, and that play picture
of a sheep. Yeah, a little picture of a sheet,
and that means, hey, this represents one sheep, and that

(49:42):
is essentially a pictogram, all right, you have a symbol
that represents the thing that it is. So like if
you have a picture of a dog, that is a
pictogram representing a dog. But then the tokens uh get
more complicated to begin to represent multiple items Uh. So
you might have a token that would have multiple sheep

(50:02):
on it, and that would represent multiple sheep the number
of sheep represented there. What if you just sort of
like drew extra sheep on it. Well, that we will
get into some of that, because that would be that
would be wrong, that would be counterfeiting. Joe, um that
you know. It's the city's developed. You get more and
more complex tokens, tokens that they are not only representing

(50:23):
more of one item, but are essentially breaking off from
the idea of a mere pictograph to the idea of
an or pictogram to an ideogram, which is a symbol
that represents an idea. Okay, so there's a level of
abstraction there, right. Like a classic example of this would
be to go back to the dog. Picture of a dog.
It's a pictogram or a pictograph representing the dog, but

(50:44):
a picture of a dog with a circle and a
slash through it, that of course means no dogs. And
that's a rather simple thing. But it's it's the next
step in uh in in in symbolic representation. Yeah, it
makes sense, introduces abstract negation. Yeah, it's so these were
used for these clay tokens were used for trading and
record keeping. They were strung on strings. In some cases,

(51:08):
each end of the string attached to a clay bullet
that was that sealed the deal, so that this would
keep you from from tampering with it. So you have
like six sheep you put and that's that's the number
of sheep involved in this deal or whatever. Uh. Then
you join the strings. You see it with clay, nobody
can take any tokens off or put them on. You

(51:29):
can't cheat by adding beads exactly. Um. Then they also
had another system where they stored the tokens and clay envelopes. Uh.
But then, of course one of the idea the things
here is you put the toke clay tokens inside a
clay structure. How do you know what's in there? Well,
you take but before you seal it all up, you
take the tokens and use them to to to mark

(51:51):
the outside of the clay envelope so that people will
know exactly what's in there. So but then again you
have a sealed record of something, you know. All of
this discussion makes me think about a really interesting concept
that I'd like to do a full episode on sometime,
which is how physical writing systems affect the way we think.
I I know there are a few studies along these lines,

(52:13):
Like one of the things I read, uh, just poking
around real quick on this subject, is about how the
direction of a writing system changes how we envision the
passage of time. That's just one simple example, but I'm
sure there are tons of examples. If you're if you're
a literate person and you interact with reading and writing
on a frequent basis, I think that probably has some

(52:36):
effect on how you interact with the world, on how
your mind perceives, especially abstract concepts. So the question I
have is because almost everybody today who who is literate,
who uses reading and writing, uses graphical reading and writing
markings on a page. Now, you might have some differences
in that, like maybe writing that goes from right to

(52:58):
left or from left to right. That's one thing you
could look at. But how would it change the way
your mind interacts with the world if your physical notation
system of reality is based in strings instead of in
making marketings on a page. Indeed, yeah, we've touring clay tokens. Yeah,
how does that? How does that change the way you

(53:18):
you think about the world talk about the world. Um,
do you live in a world of had just trying
to imagine the income mind set where agriculture and textiles
are such an important aspect of your world? And then
then how are they they informing your view of reality itself? Yeah?
I would I would love to see the sort of

(53:40):
the differences in imaginations, say, uh, that are present between
a person who uses standard graphical writing systems and someone
who is maybe a novelist who works in strings with
Would that change how the way a novel unfurls, the
way the story is told. Yeah, Like just thinking back
to what we're talking about earlier, about the wandering God

(54:02):
of the of the incas uh verra coca um? Did
he you know, in sort of modern Western ideas of
a god. Sometimes you hear, you know about like the
Book of God, right, and he has a book and
he's writing people's names in it. So did did this
god of the inca, the wandering god? Did he have
a keepu? And then what what did he consist of?

(54:23):
What kind of information would be uh bound up in its? Not? Oh?
No is? Yeah? Is your name written or not written?
Is your name tied in the keep? Who of life. Yeah. Um,
and you know another area where all this talk of
clay tokens and keep wus uh and and and written language.
Another air with this, Uh, I can't help but think
about is our increasing use of emoticons, emojis and also

(54:49):
just memes and gifts to convey our emotional responses to
uh two different scenarios and bits of information on the Internet. Yeah. Well,
I mean one of the things that's that's true about
memes is that many of them are linguistic in nature,
so they'll have text on them plenty, aren't plenty or
just pictures you know, reaction gifts. Yeah, it's huge on

(55:11):
the Internet. Yeah, like the I mean, it's kind of
exploded into its own thing. But the whole John Travolta
wandering into a room confused. There's no text there, but
it conveys a little something more than merely Hey, I
don't understand, more than just putting a row of question
marks in response to something. Right. Yes, Um, there's actually

(55:32):
a brilliant uh short. I don't know if you've seen
this yet, but it air on the Colbert Show. Yeah,
you sent it to me, and it was it's like
a little skit and the idea is that Facebook is
rolling out an additional features as as a follow up
to their reactions deal where you know, the reactions thing,
of course, is where they took the thumbs up and

(55:53):
they augmented it so you can do, uh like a
heart or an angry face and a few others. I'm laughing. Yeah,
so they were this us get involved. Facebook rolling out
something called Facebook Alpha, which is essentially them recreating the
use of of the alpha bad saying hey, we have
we have these all these Each one of these stands
for a different part of a word, symbols that you

(56:16):
can now use to show your reactions to things. Yeah,
I loved out. They were like, you can in fact
represent the entire works of Shakespeare sing only these twenty
six symbols. Yeah. So I'll have to link to that
on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com, because if you haven't seen it,
it's a not only is it a wonderful sind up
of emoji culture, uh, it also ties into some of

(56:39):
the origins of written language and some of the earlier
notation systems that we're talking about here. Yeah, there's one
more interesting fact I want to get to before we
finish out is that I don't know if you've got
a chance to read about this, but there are some
keep who's still in use in modern times. Uh. And
so you would be thinking like, oh, well, if there
are people who know how to, you know, write in

(57:00):
the language of keep us today, why don't we just
ask them to translate. That's not exactly how they're used today.
Instead of being used for literature record keeping, they're used
for ritual power. So the example I read about was
a University College London project page about how in the
Peruvian and East there's this mountain community called San Cristobal

(57:21):
de Rapas, and within this village, in a protected ceremonial
building known as a CA Hawaii, the villagers have been
keeping this gigantic keepu object for ritual and ceremonial use.
And this one giant object is believed to be collected
from a large number of smaller keep you over the years.
Some parts of it are older than others, some might

(57:43):
be more recent. But what really struck me is the
way it was used. And I want to read a
quote from this UCL project page where they say a
number of rituals happen inside the CA Hawaii. Their most
important aspect is labuskada del tiempo, which could be trans
slated the search for weather. When the mountains are invoked
to bring rain, participants bring offerings like oils, ray wains,

(58:07):
which is crop offerings, coca leaves, kunuk, incense, tobacco, liqueurs, flowers,
guinea pigs, et cetera. And the main ritual is the
ray Wan Intrego, which happens on the second night of January.
At this time, the members of the committee that oversees
the use of the pastures around Rapause are rotated. The

(58:28):
keepu are not handled, they're only invoked. Their presence is
considered beneficial to the rituals themselves and to the success
of the political changeover. So this makes me think about
in what ways the functional technologies of one era become
the holy relics of the next, Like which of our
functional technologies could become an item of religious significance in

(58:51):
the future. That this would be sort of like if
if our Excel spreadsheets became holy objects in the future,
or or if you take the the the hypothesis that
there's more literary information in the keypoos even if our
you know, books or something even if we couldn't read them,
we just had books put up somewhere as holy objects.

(59:13):
Oh yeah, I mean this gets right into the subject
of grimoires that that covered with the Christian about a
year back, where the book becomes uh more important as
a symbolic representation of the data within it and the
power within it and the meaning with it and as
opposed to just a mirror, um, you know, physical record

(59:35):
of the thing. Yeah. Once again we're seeing this fascinating
line that runs right through between the sort of mundane
usage of technology to the holy power of religion and
all of the symbolic territory in between. I love these
types of subjects. Uh. And I loved getting to talk
about the INCA today. Yeah. This has been really cool. Yeah,

(59:56):
I mean really hopefully, among other things, this will give
you a little more respect for for the this fabulous
culture and a sort of a a malcolm of cultures
that came before. Yeah. Absolutely. And if you're one of
the people out there who's working on this research to
try to decode the key poos and find out if
there's literary information in there and if so, what it is, Uh,

(01:00:18):
we we wish you all the best and we can't
wait to learn more. Yeah hey, And then in the
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