Khipu And Inca Civilization Essay

Monica Quizhpi

LTS-1003

The Quipu and the Inca Civilization

19 March 2017

Writing systems were employed by numerous prehistoric civilizations to provide a visible form of a spoken language. In contrast to other primitive civilizations the Inca civilization is the only Bronze Age civilization without a written language. Despite of the lack or absence of a written dialect, the Inca Civilization was able to administer and govern its territory which stretched along Andes Mountains from modern-day Southern Colombia through Ecuador, Peru and Chile over to Argentina and into the Amazon basin through the use and implication of knots and dyed strings. The khipu or quipu, a word from Quechua the Amerind language spoken by the Inca people which means

The khipu, a three-dimensional array of knots, also written as quipu was an accounting instrument employed by the Incan community to record numerical information regarding the number of people living within the community, the amount of livestock within the civilization, quantity of goods, and tax revenue of Incan cities. According to Charles C. Mann in the article titled, “Cracking the khipu code”, the khipu was a “mnemonic device” used to facilitate the recording of statistical data in the Incan community. The statistical data encrypted by the Inca people into the khipu tool utilized a ten base system. Each cord in the khipu represented a number and clusters of knots represented digits. The primary cord in the khipu ranged from 0.5cm to 0.7cm in diameters. The knots on the lower level of each string represented the number 1, w hile the knots that were placed in a higher level represented tens, hundreds, thousands and etc. The recording and accounting of the economic output by the khipu which utilized knots as a symbolic representation for calculation differentiated from other ancient societies who utilized tools of paints or flat surfaces as a method of writing