Word of the Day
Tawdry (adj., TAW-dree)
Showy and cheap, or indecently showy. Think less like Lolita and more like a penny dreadful.
Gif of the Day
Wait for itWaterfallPlasticKnockdownWhy yes, I do have a container for thatYou must be this tall to ride the roller coaster?
Link of the Day
The Incan knot language of khipus
The Incans never learned to write. At least—that's what it's seemed like. For all their technological skill, no written records were found.
However, they did leave a lot of colorful, knotted rope. Scholars have been theorizing that these threads, called khipus, were more than just counting techniques and were actually a written language:
The majority of surviving khipus consist of a pencil-thick primary cord, from which hang multiple “pendant” cords and, in turn, “subsidiaries”. The Spanish described how they were used to record all manner of information. The poet Garcilaso de la Vega, son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador, noted in a 1609 account that they had “an admirable method of counting everything in the Inca’s kingdom, including all taxes and tributes, both paid and due, which they did with knots in strings of different colours.”
...
There are all sorts of varying factors in khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure of the knots and the direction in which they were hitched. Having spent countless hours poring over them, Urton began to think that binary differences in these features might be encoding information. For example, a basic knot tied in one direction could mean “paid”, while in the other it would mean “unpaid”. By 2012, he had developed a more specific hypothesis, proposing that the direction in which knots were tied, the colours of the strings, or some combination of the two, corresponded to the social status of the people whose tributes they recorded, and even individuals’ names. Without a khipu translation, however, the idea looked destined to remain untested.
Then in 2016, Urton was browsing his personal library when he picked out a book that contained a Spanish census document from the 1670s. It was what the colonists referred to as a revisita, a reassessment of six clans living around the village of Recuay in the Santa valley region of western Peru. The document was made in the same region and at the same time as a set of six khipus in his database, so in theory it and the khipus were recording the same things.
It's a fascinating article. Go over to New Scientist and read the whole thing.
KnotsLanguageIncaHidden in plain sightDeath to calligraphyThe files were in the computer?