Page 84 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

The Peruvian Quipu 73

Sources on Incan Quipus
When Francisco Pizarro reached the western coast of South America in 1533,
he met a complex and flourishing culture named the Incas. The Spaniards
did not come as guests, but as conquerors, and they managed to destroy the
native culture within a few decades. Only a few of them, now known as the
chroniclers, noted down their observations on the Incas. But as they came from
a completely different cultural background, there were many things they did
not understand, and as they usually felt superior to the Incas, their evaluations
were often not very careful. An important source of information are authors
who stood between the cultures, such as Garcilasso de la Vega. He was born
in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca state, in 1539, as the son of a Spanish cavalier
and an Inca princess. Raised within Inca culture until the age of twenty, he
later travelled to Spain, learned Spanish and wrote about the culture of his
mother's people.
Another source is Felipe Guaman Poma de Alaya, also the son of a Spanish
father and an Incan mother. In the 1610s, he wrote a 1179-page letter to the
Spanish king in which he describes the Inca culture and begs for a better
treatment of the Incas by the conquistadores. This letter is of special interest
because it contains almost four hundred drawings depicting scenes from Inca
life before and after the conquest. In fact he wrote that letter 80 years after
the Spaniards had entered the land, so he did not know life before the conquest
from personal experience, and a strong Spanish influence can be found in his
argumentation.
More direct information can be gained from the physical remains of the
Inca culture, that is from archeological finds. These are mostly either build-
ings or jewellery taken away by the conquerors for the value of the material.
Some, however, are rather plain pieces of knotted cords, called `quipus'. The
Spaniards, who did not know what was laid down on the quipus, either re-
garded them as witches' knots and burned them, or simply threw them away
as the material was not valuable to them. So there is nothing left of the large
quipu `library' that existed in Cuzco before the Spaniards arrived. The com-
paratively few ancient quipus that we do have come from graves in the dry
coastal areas, where the material did not rot. It is not always clear how they
found their way into the museums, so we often do not know precisely where
they were found.
The first scientist who wrote about the quipu code was the US-American
anthropologist L. Leland Locke. In an article which appeared in 1912 he de-
scribed the number system and the values of the knots, following a description
he found in Garcilasso's writings. He also showed that a special kind of cord,
the top cords, contain the sums of the numbers on other cords associated with
them. So he could confirm Garcilasso's description and deduced the reading