A khipu (quipu) is a knotted rope used by the pre-Contact peoples of the Andes to record information.
In the modern world, the printed word (see printing press) has come to dominate most people’s modes of communicating, but in past times there were other modes of transmitting information that could be just as effective. Many cultures relied (and continue to rely) on the spoken rather than the written word, and among some peoples in the Americas and elsewhere (such as the Maori of New Zealand), oral historians continue to preserve extensive stories and traditions. Many Native peoples in North America used wampum—small, round shells from Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound strung together in certain patterns—to communicate messages. Aztec and Maya artists carved detailed histories in stone, using that medium more effectively than European stone carvers to preserve memories. Every known population in the world kept some track of the seasons, with information passed on from one generation to the next. In human history, the vast majority of this communication occurred without the written word.
The peoples of the Andes were no exception: They, too, communicated to each other without using the written word. Instead, experts among them understood the ancient practice of knotting ropes together and interpreting them. For many years, non-Andean observers believed that khipu were used as calendrical devices, particularly to measure the passing of leaders or celestial events.
But Europeans who ventured to the Americas in the 16th century had a more expansive understanding of what the khipu might contain. As the Venetian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio wrote, “it is possible to find public houses full of those ropes, through which the person in charge of them can tell the past events, although they are far in the past, in the same way as we do with our letters.”
Modern scholars now tend to agree with Ramusio’s contention: khipu contained clues to entire bodies of knowledge. When subjected to computer analysis it becomes clear that the intricate knotting of the ropes conveyed more than a mathematical system. Khipu was not a simple mnemonic device to measure the passing of time. Tragically, the ability to read khipu seems to have disappeared with the destruction of the Incan empire, a process begun with Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Atahualpa. The knowledge contained in those knots has not yet been revealed.
Further reading: Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, eds., Narrative Threes: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khippu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
World History
