I will say, just to start off, that this is my favourite thing in the world.

Khipu from the British Museum.

Khipu, or quipu comes from the Quechua word for “knot,” and these knots are the basis for what you see below. Using a central string that branches off with attached “pendant” cords, the order, colour, number and configuration of the knots and their parent strands can be used to encode a large amount of information. We find these belongings all over the historical Incan empire–some of my favorite examples come from the Chachapoya culture in the Peruvian Andes–but we do find them from earlier in the record. There have been multiple researchers who have proposed different interpretations for the khipus’ coding system, like Gary Urton who proposes a cipher similar to binary code that could also notate decimals. He and multiple other researchers have studied the artifact known as Khipu UR19, and it is thought by some in the field to note pi, the diameter of the moon and its distance from the earth. There is a sizeable amount of debate over whether khipus were akin to memory devices or “mneumonics,” that helped the user recall figures or information without encoding the entirety of said information, or whether khipus constituted a system of writing that could be used and read by people all over the empire.

Scholars estimate that about 600 extant examples of khipus exist in museums and collections around the world, and most were looted from gravesites during the 18th and 19th centuries. The presence of khipus in funerary contexts is really interesting to me; were they records of the persons life? Similar to the Book of the Dead in ancient Eqypt? Or were they eulogies, wishes from family or wills?

Khipus are such a vital example of textile traditions and industries being firmly ingrained in and in many ways inseparable from systems of gender, politics, religion, ancestral history and collective knowledge; and in some cases are the foundation for a writing system, a literal vessel for a way of knowing. Availability of cotton or camelid fibres would therefore have been essential to the dissemination of information and resources in the Inca empire and previous to it, centering a textile craft in both academia and administrative roles throughout a large society. 

Diagram from Signs of the Inca Khipu by Gary Urton (2003)