‘Deciphering these mysterious strings’: How reading the Inca’s knotted cords can reveal past droughts and deluges
Five centuries ago, the Incas ruled the western half of South America using a unique writing shape based on colored and tied strings. These strings, called Khipus, recorded major events, followed economic issues and even encoded biographies and poetry, according to Spanish columnists who have witnessed their use.
Most khipus have nodes that indicate numbers that we can “read”, but we have lost the ability to interpret what these figures mean. Recent discoveries bring us closer to the deciphering of these mysterious strings. In a distant community, a top of the Peruvian Andes, my team and I found Khipus which was used by the villagers to follow climate change.
Last year, I was invited To study the Khipus of centuries preserved in the village of Santa Leonor de Jucul in the Peruvian Andes. The 97 khipus preserved by the villagers include the largest khipu in the world, which lasts more than 68 meters.
An elderly ritual specialist, Don Lenin Margarito, told me that the Khipus had recorded the annual ritual offers given in different sacred places in the surrounding landscape. Miniature pink ritual bags stuffed with coca leaves and tobacco hang on the strings, representing the sacred goal of these old strings. Rather than communicating by nodes, the Jucul Khipus records data with different types of acorns.
For example, a blurred beige blade glans indicates that an offer has been made to the sacred lake of Paccha-Cocha, high in the mountains. The down of the Lama Tails is like a cloud of rain, explained Don Lenin, representing the fact that the offerings given to Paccha-Cocha would bring the rain.
Different types of acorns indicate offers made on other ritual sites, each of which is considered an effect on the local environment. It is believed that rituals involving the spirits of the dead, for example, interrupt the floods.
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If you look at one of the Jucul Khipus and see that there were a lot of offers in Paccha-Cocha that year, you know that it was a period of drought, because the offerings were given to increase the rain.
When we speak with members of the community, we have learned that the Khipus were kept in public so that they could be consulted by the elders. The people of the Ande of the past considered these khipus as a recording of the climate, and they studied them to understand the models of what was going on, just as we do today.
New methods
New methods for obtaining precise radiocarbon dates for Khipus have been launched by a team led by Khipu researcher Ivan Ghezzi.
Efforts are now underway to obtain precise radiocarbon dates for the Jucul Khipus, which will provide a chronology of these climate offers.
If we can trace the khipus and then take them out, we will have a recording of climatic data from this region created by the local Andean people themselves. In their current state, the Jucul Khipus is threatened by insects, molds and rodents. The British Museum recently obtained funding to clean, preserve and display the Khipus so that these precious objects of the Andean past persevered in the future.
There are only five villages in the Peruvian Andes where the ancestral khipus are preserved. These rare archives offer attractive clues to the way Khipus has coded the information.
Research in other villages with Khipu Vivantes traditions has led to breakthroughs in the importance of Khipu color patterns And phonology. Many Inka Khipus have acorns which, in our view, can reveal the object of the associated khipu. If we could unlock the meaning of the acorns on the Jucul Khipus, this could allow us to interpret more precisely the meaning of the Inca strings.
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