Five centuries ago, the Incas ruled the western half of South America with the help of a unique form of writing based on ...

Up until the time of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, Inca communities in the Andean highlands used a peculiar form ...

Finally, how did the Inca Empire write things down, and who did the writing? It has been thought that ornate threads of strings and baubles known as khipu are how records were made for business ...

For hundreds of years, Andean people recorded information by tying knots into long cords. Will we ever be able to read them?

Only a few very high-ranking Inca bureaucrats supposedly knew how to make these knots. Inka khipu with human hair was carbon dated to the Inca Empire, around 1480AD. Isotopic sampling of the ...

The research, undertaken by Professor Sabine Hyland at the University of St. Andrews, reveals that the enigmatic form of communication, known as quipu (also written as khipu), helped record ...

The Atlantic has a fascinating deep dive into khipus — long cords that the Inca tied knots into to preserve information. Few know how to read the knots, which are hundreds of years old and fragile.

They found a three-knot pattern in some of the strings which they believe identifies the bunch as coming from the city of Puruchuco, the site of an Inca palace. "We hypothesize that the arrangement of ...

I make a numeric connection between two important khipus from history – the first being being the largest khipu ever known and the other one of the most complex. While khipus were used in earlier ...