Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Khipu

Episode Date: January 2, 2019

Listen in to learn all about the fascinating "language" of the Incan khipu knotted ropes.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Inka Josh and there's Inka Chuck and Inka Jerry's over there So this is an Inka cast stuff. You should Inka short stuff. You should Inka You like that one, huh? Yeah, I'm surprised just dumb enough Wait, what do you mean? Oh, I mean dumb in a good way. Okay, a dumb joke is what my one of my biggest compliments

You know, we have really been hit with the Accusations of dad jokes a lot more frequently lately. Have you noticed? Well more than we did 10 years ago Yeah, you know, we're getting older and that's when dad jokes start creeping in so these people are right. They are correct Man never would have thought I'd live to see the day literally. That's right We we still stop before we hit puns Yeah, we're no Strickland. Nope. That's ageless. That's just some sort of mental defect There's nothing to do with age Yeah, not ageless is in timeless and you could do that anytime and it's great

Yeah, the opposite of that So Chuck speaking of um Opposites of that. Let's talk about Whether or not the Inca actually ever created a written language of any sort Yeah, this was cool. And I would love to do a longer form show on the Inca period the Inca people because Man when you when you start poking around a little bit Uh things that they achieved and when it happened

It's pretty striking. Well, you know, we did an episode called how did 168 conquistadors bring down the Inca empire? Did we really? That was a good one, but I'm sure there's still plenty more to talk about with them We could do one just on the Inca. I'll bet. Yeah. So, uh, I mean, here's here's a couple of things in the way of an overview They had the largest pre-columbian empire in the Americas A lot of people during the Bronze Age And you're not successful as a people that that that can grow and thrive like that unless you're doing some of these things like

uh, building roads to the tune of 25,000 miles of highway, right? That's amazing. Yeah, there was something like 12 I saw 10 to 12 million people in the Inca empire Who were walking along the 25,000 miles of highway, which by the way cut through the Andes It was largely in the Andes up in the Andes Which is not a hospitable place to form a civilization in the first place. No man, but they did they thrived Uh where it was dry and harsh and steep And they were able to engineer

like the kind of farmland At the altitudes at these altitudes that you would never think would be possible, right? Like millions of acres of really high altitude terraced farms And the way that I saw that the the whole thing worked was there were clans and villages and groups that all kind of um They did their own thing And they paid tribute to the what you would call kind of the federal government the Inca chiefs the people Um who were who had the whole empire together and then the Inca

Who were running the show would in turn provide these these people like the farmers and the villages and the clans With stuff they needed the boring striking resemblance to like soviet communism. Oh interesting. Yeah And they kept it going for about 150 years again until the spans showed up They were they were a very powerful empire, but the weird thing about the Inca is that they were able to do all this that included math and abstract thought and um major like socio-political administration Yeah, they appeared to have done it without any written language whatsoever That's been basically the way that people have viewed the Inca for a very long time

Yeah, which is is remarkable because it's not like oh, well, this was back during the bronze age Like the Maya had written languages. They Aztecs did Mesopotamians did Egyptians of course did Chinese did so a lot of people were writing things down and uh It appeared And we're still not super sure but or are we? Like can we say definitively? We're almost but no, I don't think we can definitively say it is sure starting to look that way

All right, so let's let's get to the the sort of the heart of the story then is is it I believe it's pronounced kipu uh k-h-i-p-u Or or q-u-u-i-p-u right which would also be pronounced kipu right Uh, but if you look this up on the internet if you can pull your car over or whatever don't anything dangerous They are these uh really kind of cool. It looks like macrame almost these knotted which I know you like Oh, yes, these knotted links of cord made from cotton sometimes sometimes it's Llama or alpaca wool

And you would see them hung up in rows That looks like like from a curtain rod or something From but that that curtain rod is really like a thicker central rope And these things would just hang down and for many many years some of them were color-coded But for many years people thought that these were Uh, just like art Right arts crafts that kind of thing like something some of you would do when they were bored, you know And a lot of them were lost because there's the spanish when they showed up

We found them everywhere and they were like, well, I don't know what this is. So I'm just gonna burn them Yeah, I'm gonna kill everybody and burn everything and so for a long time people. Yeah, they just had them in museums They were they were inking relics of an empire that had crumbled and gone away So people were like, we got to preserve these and they took them to museums Um, but it wasn't until the 1920s that a guy named Leland Locke Who was studying them at the Museum of Natural History in New York Who said, you know what? I think these actually are symbolic. I think they encode information And I think that they probably are used to kind of tabulate things and he he was right

Oh boy, that sounds like a good cliffhanger my friend. Oh, okay. I should take out that he was right part then But was he we'll we'll find out right after this He was Hey everybody, when you're staying at an airbnb, you might be like me wondering Could my place be an airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse And the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an airbnb too find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca

slash host on the podcast paydude the 90s called David lasher and christine taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it It's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair Do you remember aol instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your game boy blowing on it and popping it back in As we take you back to the 90s Listen to hey, dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app ample podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Okay, so he was right. Yeah, he was totally right Leland luck was correct and what he found was that these uh, these kipu Nuts were definitely used and this is the part that we for sure. No It was sort of like a calculator or an abacus

Or a file that you would use to to like instead of writing down numbers and putting it in a file cabinet You would knot this thing up to represent like a census or something like that or maybe how much uh, you know How many cow brains you had on hand In the back or how many llamas you had cow brains? Sure. They probably had cow brains, right? I don't think so. I think that's how rumors get started chunky. Okay. Well, whatever they're whatever they want to keep track of It served as as an abacus essentially. Yeah, it's stored information Like they kept track of all that tribute that was coming in from the the 130 different clans under them Like it was a it was it was a way to store information

But that is boring and pedestrian and it still says that the Inca Managed to keep track of all this and do all this stuff without a written language Like that does not happen Usually you have a written language and then math develops later The Inca developed all this or it appeared that they did without a written language but That's just what it seemed to be like nobody could figure out or see any written language in this for a very long time Well, and here's the thing too that I didn't mention. It's not as simple as

I have 10 llamas. So I'm gonna tie 10 knots on this string. Oh, yeah. Good point So it was like the height of the knot and where it was positioned on the cord Uh, it all symbolized different things the color symbolized something They had had multiples like one thing the way, you know, it could be done in such a way or represented 100 or 1000 Uh, so it wasn't just like, you know, eight beads means eight cows Right. Yeah. So like if you have three knots, right? And the top one has like five loops and the middle one has five loops and the bottom one has two loops What you're seeing is 552. So like the top one is hundreds call them the middle ones the tens and the lower ones are the singles

Um, so yeah, and so like there was it wasn't just like one. Yeah counting off like that It was much much more sophisticated that and you know the color That that they used the type of material that they used the direction the knot was tied in the number of loops that had so cool There were all sorts of things. So when you when you take that, you know, if you have Three different dimensions or five or seven or ten different dimensions of something Um, those things start to interact and now you have a lot of different symbols to choose from to encode information But again, everyone just thought that it was just numbers that they were encoding until the I think the 1990s When a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Erton

Um, who spent years working on on analyzing these finally was like, no, there is There's words in here. There's names in here. And if there's names in here Symbols of names then that means that they're encoding more than just numbers. They're encoding abstract thoughts Like a language does yeah and and Erton started to look into this because Like despite all the great work Locke did to crack this code of all accounts. He pretty much did There were still a bunch of these configurations That did not fit with the rest and he always just sort of

Thought those were outliers and maybe those were arts and crafts or for ceremonies or something But it was Erton who picked that back up and was like, I don't know man. Why would they Go through all this trouble to design this intricate numerical Recording system and then just have the same exact thing just be crafty He's like, there's something else going on here. Right exactly. So, um, He was I guess teaching a freshman economic student named Manny Medrano Who managed to crack a little bit more of the code? Um, and and was the one who showed I can't remember exactly what he showed

But he he took Erton's decades of work and in in a spring break said yep Here's some here's some indications that the colors are actually indicating like abstract thoughts like like green Might be like cattle and that's a concrete thought but but red equals war or something So he he cracked the code a little further over spring break over spring break And he was like and I figured it out and passed me the beer bong right Which we called we didn't we call them funnel Yeah, funneling bong. I mean, I guess it makes sense because there's a I'm sure it's a regional uh phrase I'll bet you're right to we just called it funneling beer. And by the way, you shouldn't do it everyone

It's dangerous stuff. It is and it's it's just dumb. I've never funneled the beer Oh, I did it a few times. It's just stupid. Actually, let me let me change that. I can't recall ever funneling a beer I never did any of that dumb stuff keg stands or funneling And just stupid here is a little stupid, but I mean Yeah, it is sat there as a 19 year old on my my credit corduroy couch stirring my martini Right just clucking your tongue at all the philistines. Yeah

Uh, all right, so he figures this out on spring break It was a big like it was a big breakthrough that not only were these uh used for numbers that been record keeping but Like you said like potentially we do have an entire not language laid out in front of us, but most of this stuff is gone Like that's the big tragedy. Yeah, so so this is the current thinking is that yes, there are definitely Abstract thoughts possibly even phonetic sounds encoded in these along with numbers like leader and lock wasn't wrong He didn't misinterpret it, but he found he found um That or the over time they found that no there's abstract thoughts in here, too And there's a couple of pieces of evidence that really back this up one. They found kipus in burials

Right, why would you be buried with a an abacus a census document? Nobody would but you might be you might be buried with a something that's basically like a narrative of Some battle that you showed your bravery in and that was like the greatest thing you ever did in your life You might be buried with something like that So that's one point and then a researcher at st. Andrews University in scotland sabine highland um Did some analysis of two kipus that are incan that were from the the spanish colonial area or um era That supposedly the people the villagers who were preserving these things said these are these these tell of a great war

Yeah, that's that was key for sure. So these things are supposed to have a narrative code within them And she analyzed them and found like yeah, there's something going on here Yeah, I mean she got back up because they said yeah, the different materials mean something And you you guys are uh, you guys are figuring this out She she found that there are 95 different symbols encoded in these kipus Which is way more than you need for um like accounting system Yeah, but much more in line with something like a language We still haven't cracked it yet, but it's starting to to be clear that the inka

Did develop a written language. We just can't understand it Yeah, and the way that it was lost to history is the same as if All of the monks in england have been killed off in 1100 when they were the only ones who knew how to read and write That the like that stuff that they encoded in any English would have been lost to the the English people who survived And who are still around today, but have no I couldn't tell you what this bible says because it's in English and The monks didn't live long enough to pass along how to do this I loved that last analogy Thanks, man. That's fantastic

Chuck, I appreciate that. I don't want to push my luck any further. So let's end this one Agreed if you want to know more about the inkas or kipu There's a lot out there to learn just go check it out on the internet And in the meantime, you can reach us via email at stuff podcast at house stuff works dot com