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Quipu in the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.. Quipu (/ ˈ k iː p uː / KEE-poo), also spelled khipu, are recording devices fashioned from knotted cords.They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.
Inca Quipus, fundamental elements in the administration and accounting of the Inca Empire. The quipus constituted a mnemonic system based on knotted strings used to record all kinds of quantitative or qualitative information; if they were dealing with the results of mathematical operations, only those previously performed on the "Inca abacuss ...
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.
The quipu controlled every economic part of the large empire. Those in charge of keeping the documentation via the quipu were called quipucamayocs. [29] There are 1,500 strings on the largest quipu. The Sacred City of Caral-Supe has the oldest quipu, which dates from about 2500 BC. [30]
The Inca recorded information on assemblages of knotted strings, known as quipu, although they can no longer be decoded. Originally it was thought that Quipu were used only as mnemonic devices or to record numerical data. Quipus are also believed to record history and literature. [139] The Inca made many discoveries in medicine. [140]
Quipus could represent the amount of taxes to be paid by a village or a province or the number of soldiers to be moved. [6] 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 ...
Leslie Leland Locke (1875–1943) [1] was an American mathematician, historian, and educator, best known for his work on deciphering ancient Andean knot records called quipus. Locke's most prominent work, The Ancient Quipu or Peruvian Knot Record (1923), demonstrated how the Inca tied knots on quipu cords using a base-10 positional number ...
Inca agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin. These three radically different environments were all part of the Inca Empire (1438-1533 CE) and required different technologies for agriculture .