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After the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, quipus were slowly replaced by European writing and numeral systems. Many quipus were identified as idolatrous and destroyed, but some Spaniards promoted the adaptation of the quipu recording system to the needs of the colonial administration, and some priests advocated the use of quipus for ...
Code of the Quipu is a book on the Inca system of recording numbers and other information by means of a quipu, a system of knotted strings.It was written by mathematician Marcia Ascher and anthropologist Robert Ascher, and published as Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture by the University of Michigan Press in 1981.
Representation of a quipu, an Inca accounting and mnemonic instrument. The prevailing numeral system was the base-ten. [2] One of the main references confirming this are the chronicles that present a hierarchy of organized authorities, using the decimal numeral system with its arithmometer: Quipu.
Unlike other civilizations that developed writing systems, the Andeans never had one, but they created the quipu, an intricate record-keeping technique that used knots and strings to store data.
There is no evidence that the chasquis could read the quipus, which was a delicate and difficult task carried out by khipukamayoq [7]: 151 (experts in writing and reading quipu); [3] in practice, it was not necessary for the chasquis to have access to the information they delivered.
Writing systems typically satisfy three criteria. Firstly, the writing must have some purpose or meaning to it, and a point must be communicated by the text. Secondly, writing systems make use of specific symbols which may be recorded on some writing medium. Thirdly, the symbols used in writing generally correspond to elements of spoken ...
Due to the texture (cotton) of Quipus, very few of them survive. By analyzing those remaining artifacts, Erland Nordenskiöld [19] proposed that Quipus is the only writing system used by Inca, and the information encoding technique is sophisticated and distinctive. [20]
“The writing is visual. So that’s why it’s powerful. Because when you write something, what you say becomes record, it becomes document, and it becomes permanent,” he said.