Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain
Speaker 1: stuff lauring vogebam here. During the Bronze Age, the Inca
Speaker 1: built the largest pre Columbian empire in the Americas, extending
Speaker 1: along the west coast of South America from Bolivia to Chile.
Speaker 1: They not only thrived in the harsh climate and dry
Speaker 1: steep slopes of the High Andes, they also served up
Speaker 1: a master class in technical road building that would have
Speaker 1: made the Romans quake in their sandals. Thanka created a
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand mile highway system that's about forty kilometers,
Speaker 1: complete with rope bridges across treacherous mountain chasms. They also
Speaker 1: engineered millions of acres of high altitude terraced farmland and
Speaker 1: constructed an earthquake proof citadel on top of a craggy
Speaker 1: mountain peak one point five miles that's two point four
Speaker 1: kilometers above sea level. They even figured out how to
Speaker 1: freeze dry potatoes. But unlike the neighboring Maya and Aztecs,
Speaker 1: and the ancient Mesopotamians, Chinese, and Egyptians, the Inca never
Speaker 1: developed a system of writing. What they did have were kipou,
Speaker 1: or knotted lengths of cord made from lama or alpaco
Speaker 1: wool or cotton. They hung in rows like a curtain,
Speaker 1: from a thicker central rope, which was sometimes coiled up
Speaker 1: to resemble a string mop. These bundles were often color coded,
Speaker 1: although most surviving keepu are now our uniform camel color
Speaker 1: and could contain just a few strings or hundreds. When
Speaker 1: the Spanish arrived and wiped out the entire Incas civilization,
Speaker 1: they found keepu everywhere, but destroyed many of them. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, a science historian named Leland Locke, studying
Speaker 1: the keepu at the American Museum of Natural History in
Speaker 1: New York City, discovered the knots and the keepu represented numbers,
Speaker 1: and the bundles of textiles were most likely record keeping
Speaker 1: devices similar to advocacies, probably used to hold census data
Speaker 1: or to keep track of the contents of storehouses or
Speaker 1: how many llamas were paid as tribute. He realized that
Speaker 1: the height of a knot and its position on its
Speaker 1: cord civilized units tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on, and
Speaker 1: the position of a string off the main rope could
Speaker 1: denote things like specific people or villages. But even after
Speaker 1: Locke cracked the code, he noticed that some of the
Speaker 1: keep who he studied seemed to be anomalies. He figured
Speaker 1: these were used for ceremonial purposes. There are, however, anecdotal
Speaker 1: clues that entire narratives could be passed along through KEEPU.
Speaker 1: A one seventeenth century Spanish conquistador reported meeting an incoman
Speaker 1: on the road who carried keep that he said, told
Speaker 1: of all the deeds of the Spanish and Peru, good
Speaker 1: and bad. Keep you couriers reportedly ran all over the
Speaker 1: Incan Empire, the cords looped over their shoulders. But finding
Speaker 1: living people now who can help researchers unravel the secret
Speaker 1: of the knots has proved very difficult, if not impossible,
Speaker 1: so keep Bleu research has made slow progress in the
Speaker 1: past century. Since the early nineteen nineties, Harvard anthropologist named
Speaker 1: Gary Urton has been working to decipher what, if anything,
Speaker 1: the keep boos that don't fit the normal mold of
Speaker 1: accounting devices might mean collecting a database of over nine
Speaker 1: hundred CEBU. In the process, Burton has discovered that beyond
Speaker 1: the position and height of the knots, there are other
Speaker 1: factors to take into consideration when reading a keepu, the
Speaker 1: color of the string, the direction the knots are twisted,
Speaker 1: and the type of knots used. Through cross referencing keepu
Speaker 1: in the Harvard collection with Spanish documents from the exact
Speaker 1: time and location in Peru where they originated, he has
Speaker 1: recently been able to prove that the direction the knots
Speaker 1: are tied in could denote which clans individuals belonged to.
Speaker 1: Another researcher named Sabine Highland at St. Andrew's University in
Speaker 1: Scotland has recently found that some keepu still exist within
Speaker 1: villages in the Andes. The locals there have shared some
Speaker 1: new information about them, for instance, that the different materials
Speaker 1: used in the strings is significant, and their understanding is
Speaker 1: that the devices were used to tell stories of warfare.
Speaker 1: Highland also reports evidence of phonetic symbols in the strings.
Speaker 1: It could be for all their ingenuity, the Incas never
Speaker 1: learned to use symbolic written language, but it looks like
Speaker 1: they may have been just a little more creative with
Speaker 1: their storytelling than any other major civilization to date. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Jesselin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other historical topics.
Speaker 1: Visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.