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In the absence of an alphabetic writing system, this simple and highly portable device achieved a surprising degree of precision and flexibility. Quipu could record dates, statistics, accounts, and even abstract ideas. Quipu are still used today across South America.
Quipu (also spelled khipu) are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the central Andes Mountains of South America. [1] A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings, and contained categorized information based on three dimensions of color, order and number. [2]
Quipu, an accounting apparatus used by Andean peoples from 2500 BCE, especially during the Inca empire of the 15th and 16th centuries. It consisted of a long textile cord (called a top, or primary, cord) with a varying number of pendant cords with knots encoding numeric values.
Instead of using paper, stone, wood, or any known form of writing, the Incas developed a system using specially woven cords with branching structures and knots called quipu. Even centuries after the empire’s decline, quipus continue to captivate historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists.
The quipu is a collection of cords with knots in them. These cords and knots are carefully arranged so that the position and type of cord or knot gives specific information on how to decipher the cord.
Messages from one city to another were carried by messengers who run from one post to the next like in relay race. The people in the Inca empire did not 'write' messages, however, but the information was sent in form of knotted cords which were called 'quipus'.
Two researchers, Leland Locke and Erland Nordenskiold, have carried out research that has attempted to discover what mathematical knowledge was known by the Incas and how they used the Peruvian quipu, a counting system using cords and knots, in their mathematics.
The quipu (also spelled khipu or quipo) is the only known pre-Columbian information system in South America: it has yet to be fully deciphered.
Mathematics involved more than just arithmetic for the Incas. The khipus present us with numbers in three dimensions—their knots represent quantities through a complex combination of shape, spin direction, and relative position.
How do you read a quipu? The knot value. Numerically, quipus work like a decimal system. There are three different types of knots: the single knot, the long knot and the figure eight knot. Sometimes referred to as Inca knots, the knots’ arrangement on the strong shows its numeric value.