Inca Knot Code Partially Detangled 47
mulufuf writes "It looks like some progress has been made on translating those old Inca knot strings that have baffled everyone for ages now. From the article:'While the Incan empire left nothing that would be considered writing by today's standards, it did produce knotted strings in various colors and arrangements that have long puzzled historians and anthropologists.'"
thats pretty impressive code reading (Score:3, Funny)
Re:thats pretty impressive code reading (Score:5, Funny)
Code (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Code (Score:1)
Yes I've met programmers like that once in a great while (in the mirror when I do my annual shave).
If I keep this up, in 2000 years my yearly shave might be mistaken for a religious holiday. Which is why *my* incomprehensible code would be more cool to the historians than your incomprehensible code!!!
Re:Code (Score:1)
You know, I used to think exactly the same, until I had to fix a bug on a system that had been untouched for years - so i'm trawling through the code, saying out loud stuff like "oh my god, this is awful, what muppet wrote this?", until after a couple of hours, I finally checked the logs, and found out who originally wrote it - me. D'oh....
What a Joke (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What a Joke (Score:1)
Khipu (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Khipu (Score:1)
Yeah, but you cut the time in half if you go 130. Do the Math!
Re:Khipu (Score:2)
"Remember. Traffic lights set for 35 are also timed perfectly for 70."
Apparently (Score:4, Funny)
To Serve Man (Score:2)
Programmers, take note (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Programmers, take note (Score:2)
The Incans did have library's. (Score:1)
We know this, because the Catholic priests and missionaries of the time recorded burning them.
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:4, Informative)
We know this, because the Catholic priests and missionaries of the time recorded burning them.
I think you mean the infamous Bishop of Yucatan, who burned all the Maya books that could be located.
Unlike the Maya, the Inca didn't have a written language, which is why these knots are so important a discovery.
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't have a written language, but they did have picture books.
Books and illegal book owners were burned by the Christians. Most herecy laws in Spanish Peru did not apply as harshly to native Americans as to Europeans, the ban on books was an exception to the rule.
The khipu were much more numerous and not considered dangerous until later on, so a few survive. But there probably are not enough known khipu to left to decipher them. However, there may be caches of them buried somewhere. There too many unexplored archeological sites in Peru to count. The last remnants of the Inca state set up camp in the Amazon jungle, where any Khipu would have rotted quickly, but there may have been loyal subjects elsewhere in the Kingdom that thought to bury some of their documents.
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:1)
I thought they were burned by the RIAA.
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:2)
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:3, Insightful)
The main problem with South America is that the climate is not conducive to the long-term survival of organic material. However, that does not make it impossible such material has survived. It just means that we don't have the luxury of time in looking for it. If it exists today, that does not guarantee it'll survive into next week.
More likely to be found will be
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem with South America is that the climate is not conducive to the long-term survival of organic material. However, that does not make it impossible such material has survived. It just means that we don't have the luxury of time in looking for it. If it exists today, that does not guarantee it'll survive into next week.
This is more true of Mesoamerican rather than South American cultures. But, much of Peru is a desert which gets less than a centimeter of rain per decade. Unless that land is irrigated it is very dry. The post-colonial Peru has never been able to irrigate anywhere near as much land as the cultures that thrived there over the last few thousand years.
There is no lack of 'discovered' ancient cities in Peru, but there is a lack of money to dig any of them up.
This allows you to get a team of archaeologists to a relatively small area, which you can then safeguard against loggers, gold-hunters and slavers.
Ridiculous in Peru, there are no loggers where there are archeological sites, there are no slavers, and the gold-miners are harmless. What there are as a problem is an army of well financed looters from the USA and Europe, these people would probably have access to any such technology years before any archeologist could obtain it. In fact should such a technology exist their makers should cough up a few million dollars per machine to guard sites in Mexico, Peru and Iraq where most of the world's advanced ancient cultures developed.
Re:The Incans did have library's. (Score:1)
I may be wrong, but I don't think heresy laws applied to non-Christians at all. Before Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain or forced to convert, they were immune from heresy charges. So unless that changed drastically by the time of the colonial period...
It's only a matter of time... (Score:4, Funny)
I decoded this years ago (Score:2)
You hang the ropes from the wall so that the knots and colours form an aesthetically pleasing pattern.
When pattern becomes boring, rinse, repeat hanging procedure.
What is so difficult for these people to understand about evolving art? They always want it to have some hidden meaning..
The Inca's last message to mankind... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Inca's last message to mankind... (Score:3, Funny)
Goodbye, and thanks for the fish!
Fascinating (Score:2)
Definitely a job for The Librarian [imdb.com]
Re:Fascinating (Score:2)
Easy Answer? (Score:2)
problems reading (Score:1)
hmm, (Score:2)
Knot Write (Score:3, Insightful)
Another facile comment in the article is the certainty with which the writer regards the decimal encoding of slightly-decoded quipu as proof that they're just accounting records. Well, every letter in their web article is encoded in binary - it's hardly a grocery bill. Though perhaps the writer could be described as an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to deliver a bag of spaghetti. Which arrived all twisted into knots.
Re:Knot Write (Score:3, Insightful)
This suggests that the strings were multi-function, which in turn suggests that they are a "true" writing system, which I don't think is seriously contended anyway.
The Incas had other writing methods, but I'm unclear on whether the string method was used before, after or tog
Re:Knot Write (Score:4, Interesting)
I've also heard that the Maya, hundreds of miles North in the "Greater Isthmus", used an intense psychedelic ritual to transfer the old records to the new king. The initiate was loaded with frogskin, mushroom, woody vine and other transformative psychedelics, inside a temple under the tutelege of certain priests. They were accompanied by scribes and vast "reams" of hieroglyphic records, encoding the gestalt of the state as incarnated by the passed king. Through the ritual, the priests would respark the old king's "psyche" into the young new king, immersing them in the records in their sensitive state. I believe that some aspects of this process probably also operated in the Inca governance. Though the Inca seem a lot more "square" than the Maya, the 3 major empires (including the Aztec) shared a lot of symbolic institutions, like the "Aztec" sun disk, believed to be Mayan in origin, but universal - though with different referents for its single set of encoded references.
We are ourselves now reaching a level of sophistication and complexity which lets us relate to these ancient civilizations. I think quipu research, especially, has been too "bottom up": experts looking at quipu in terms of other Inca artifacts and partial knowledge of the society which the Inca encoded. Rather than our current advantages in looking at them "top down": considering how these packages would be used, and how they'd be produced, codec'ed and transmitted. Arriving at our own society's development of messages, encoded for functional reasons (rather than mere secrecy), lets us relate to a culture that had their own function encoding needs.
We've been stuck at the crude level of "envelope" writers for the centuries since our forebears torched the Incas. Now that we've got all kinds of insights into a distributed messaging culture, with specialized codes for sequences of the messaging, we've got a better chance to understand the few messages we've still got. If only there were a Quecha mode to Babelfish, we might even coax some young Andean, whose grandma is leaving them a fancy old "wedding vest" they're sworn never to show to an outsider, into thinking more about decoding grandma's garment. Then we might see these messages emerge from a half-millennium of illiteracy, and perhaps even benefit from some of the wisdom that held Inca society together for so long, including in its centuries of eclipse.
Inca Physics (Score:1)
And no doubt SCOX claims... (Score:2)
The first partially translated knot! (Score:1)