The Investigation of a Semasiographic Recording System

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Gary Urton, will address the problem of how to interpret information stored in 500+ year-old knotted cord records - the Inka khipu. Khipus were the knotted-string devices used for record keeping in the Inka Empire of Pre-Columbian South America. Beginning in 2002, Dr. Urton and colleagues began collecting and recording detailed observations on khipu samples in museum collections in Europe and North and South America. With observations on hundreds of khipus in hand, Urton set about building a searchable database -- the Khipu Database (KDB) -- which currently holds information on some 520 of the 850+/- extant khipus in museums around the world. Samples in the KDB pertain to at least a dozen "archives" that were retained at different locales within Inka territory. This is the first time an entirely searchable khipu database has existed in the history of the study of this enigmatic recording system. The khipu was said by Spanish chroniclers of the 16th century to have been used for recording information on state administration, histories, songs and other forms of narratives that were performed by cord-keepers. While students of the khipu have succeeded in determining how numerical data were recorded by state administrators (for census, tribute records, etc.), we lack a basic understanding of how personal names, place names, identifiers of events, etc., were recorded in the cords, knots and colors of the khipu. Decipherment of the latter is the principal objective of this project. The intellectual merit of this research will be realized in the investigation of what was the unique, alternative communication technology and intellectual traditions whereby peoples living in the high Andes before the time of European contact communicated across frontiers separating speakers of multiple different languages as they succeeded in building the largest empire of the ancient New World in what was one of the most challenging and inhospitable environments on earth. The research will advance our understanding of human sign production and manipulation in early, pre-modern societies and should, if our efforts prove successful, result in the decipherment of the khipu. This project will hopefully allow us to interpret, or "read" the knotted-cord records left by the Inkas - the lords of the last great empire of Pre-Columbian South America. The method of analysis to be followed is based on the hypothesis that khipu recording signs were registered in the form of semasiographic (meaning sign) units of information stored on the cords and arrayed in the form of cord structures, knots and patterned arrays of colors according to standardized formatting and encoding principles constituting conventionalized sign values. Focus will be on the study of what are termed "cord types" -- standardized configurations of cord structure, colors and numbers -- found within individual samples and across the entire khipu corpus. "Translation" values for cord patterns will be sought in Inka political, social, economic, ritual, and calendrical institutions and practices that are structured and organized in patterns similar to those identified in the khipus.