The Inka Empire Recorded Their World In Knotted Cords Called Khipu

The great South American civilization used complex knots and fibers for record-keeping and communication.

By Bridget Alex
Jan 4, 2019 2:47 PMNov 12, 2019 5:36 AM
unraveling-secret.jpg
More than 400 pendants hang from the primary cord of a khipu, an example of the complex record-keeping system used throughout the Inka Empire and beyond, even well into the 20th century. | Sam Ogden, Khipu Gift of Robert Woods Bliss and President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM# 42-28-30/4532

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High in the Peruvian Andes, in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, sits a wooden box that’s sacred to the locals who keep close guard over it. It contains 487 cords of twisted and dyed animal fibers that, according to its caretakers, encode messages planning an 18th-century rebellion.

Anthropologist Sabine Hyland was invited by community members to study the strings — the first outsider permitted to view them — but only for 48 hours and under constant supervision.

Although no one alive today can decipher the cords, their general message and significance has been passed down orally for generations. Hyland was told by a village elder, “If we could read what is in here, we would know for the first time who we truly are.”

The strings are khipus, devices invented by indigenous Andeans to store information. Khipus are mostly known by archaeologists as the records of the Inka civilization, the vast multiethnic empire that encompassed as many as 18 million people and nearly 3,000 miles along the Andes and the Pacific coast of South America. Builders of the spectacular mountain fortress of Machu Picchu, the Inka ruled from the early 1400s until the Spanish conquest began in 1532.

Anthropologist Sabine Hyland studies the complex language of khipu knots, fibers and cords to uncover their meaning. | Christine Lee
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