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Short Stuff: Khipu · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm INCA Josh, and
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: there's INCA Chuck and INCA Jerry's over there. So this
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: is an INCA cast. Stuff. You should INCA short stuff,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: you should INCA. Do you like that one? Huh yeah,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: I'm surprised. Just dumb enough. Wait what do you mean, Oh,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I mean dumb in a good way. A dumb joke
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: is what my one of my biggest compliments. You know,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: we have really been hit with the accusations of dad
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: jokes a lot more frequently lately. Have you noticed, well
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: more than we did ten years ago. Yeah, you know,
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: we're getting older and that's when dad jokes start creeping in.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: So these people are right, they are correct. Man, never
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: would have thought I'd live to see the day. Literally,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: that's right. We we we still stopped before we hit puns. Yeah,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: we're no strickling. Nope, that's ageless. That's just some sort
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: of mental defect. Has nothing to do with age. Yeah.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Not ageless is in timeless and you could do that
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: anytime and it's great, right, Yeah, the opposite of that.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: So Chuck, speaking of um opposites of that, let's talk
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: about whether or not the INCA actually ever created a
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: written language of any sort. Yeah, this was cool, and
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: I would love to do a longer form show on
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: the Inca period the Inca people, because, man, when you
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: when you start poking around a little bit, uh, the
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: things that they achieved and when it happened, it's pretty striking. Well,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: you know, we did an episode called how did a
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty eight Conquistadors bring down the Inca Empire?
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Did we Really? That was a good one, But I'm
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: sure there's still plenty more to talk about with them.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: We could do one just on the Inca I'll bet yeah. So, Uh,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, here's here's a couple of things in the
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: way of an overview. Uh, they had the largest pre
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: columbia An empire in the America's a lot of people
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: during the Bronze Age. And you're not successful as a
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: people that that that can grow and thrive like that
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: unless you're doing some of these things like building roads
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: to the tune of twenty five thousand miles of highway, right,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: that's amazing. Yeah, there was something like twelve I saw
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: ten to twelve million people in the Inca Empire who
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: were walking along the twenty five thousand miles of highway,
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: which by the way, cut through the Andies. It was
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: largely in the Andes, up in the Andes, which was
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: not a hospitable place to form a civilization in the
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: first place, no man, but they did. They thrived where
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: it was dry and harsh and steep, and they were
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: able to engineer like the kind of farmland at the altitudes,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: at these altitudes that you would never think would be possible,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: like millions of acres of high altitude terrorist farms. And
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: the way that I saw that the whole thing worked
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: was there were clans and villages and groups that all
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: kind of um. They did their own thing, and they
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: paid tribute to the what you would call kind of
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: the federal government, the Inca chiefs, the people um who
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: were who had the whole empire together, and then the
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Inca who were running the show, would in turn provide
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: these these people, like the farmers and the villages and
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: the clans with stuff they needed. It bore a striking
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: resemblance to like Soviet communism. Yeah, and they kept it
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: going for about a hundred and fifty years again until
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: the Spans showed up. They were they were very powerful
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: empire But the weird thing about the Inca is that
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: they were able to do all this that included math
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: and abstract thought and um major like socio political administration.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: They appeared to have done it without any written language whatsoever.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: That's been basically the way that people have viewed the
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Inca for a very long time. Yeah, which is is
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: remarkable because it's not like, oh, well, this was back
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: during the Bronze Age, like the Maya had written languages,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: the az Text did, Mesopotamians did, Egyptians of course did,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Chinese did. So a lot of people were writing things
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: down and uh, it appeared and we're still not super sure,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: but or are we Like, can we say definitively we're
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: almost but no, I don't think we can definitively say
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: it is sure starting to look that way, all right,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: So let's let's get to the sort of the heart
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: of the story. Then, is is it? I believe it's
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: pronounced keepu k h I p you or or key
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: q u i p u r, which would also be
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: pronounced keep who right. But if you look this up
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: on the internet, if you can pull your car over, whatever,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: don't anything dangerous. They are these really kind of cool.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: It looks like Macromay almost. These knotted which I know
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: you like, uh, these knotted links of cord made from cotton.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: Sometimes sometimes it's a llama or alpaca wool. And you
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: would see them hung up in rows that looks like
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: like from a curtain rod or something from but that
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: that curtain rod is really like a thicker central rope
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: and these things would just hang down and for many
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: many years someone more color coded. But for many years
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: people thought that these were just like art, right arts crafts,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing, like something somebody would do when
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: they were bored, you know. And a lot of them
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: were lost because there's the Spanish. When they showed up,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: the found them everywhere and they were like, well, I
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: don't know what this is, so I'm just gonna burn them. Yeah,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna kill everybody and burn everything. And so for
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: a long time people, yeah, they just had them in museums.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: They were they were ink and relics of an empire
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: that had crumbled and gone away. So people are like,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: we gotta preserve these, and they took them to be museums. Um.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't until the nineteen twenties that a guy
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: named Leland Locke, who was studying them at the Museum
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: of Natural History in New York, who said, you know what,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: I think these actually are symbolic. I think they encode information,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: and I think that they probably are used to kind
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: of tabulate things. And he he was right, boy, that
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: sounds like a good cliffhanger, my friend. Okay, I should
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: take out that he was right part then? But was he?
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Well find out right after this he was okay, so
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: he was right. Yeah, he was to right. Leland Luck
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: was correct. And what he found was that these uh
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: the keep who uh nots, We're definitely used. And this
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: is the part that we for sure know. Um. It
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: was sort of like a calculator or an abacus um
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: or a file that you would use to to like
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: instead of writing down numbers and putting in at a
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: file cabinet, you would not this thing up to represent
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: like a census or something like that, or maybe how
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: much you know, how many cowbrains you had on hand
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: in the back, or how many llamas you had cowbrains.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Sure they probably make cowbrains, right, I don't think so.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: I think that's how rumors get started. Chunking. Okay, well,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: whatever there whatever they want to keep track of. It
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: served as as an abacus essentially. Yeah, it's storied information,
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: like they kept track of all that tribute that was
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: coming in from the hundred and thirty different clans under them,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: like it was. It was. It was a way to
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: store information. But that is boring and pedestrian, and it's
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: still says that the Inca managed to keep track of
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: all this and do all this stuff without a written
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: language like that does not happen. Usually you have a
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: written language and then math develops later. The Inca developed
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: all this, or it appeared that they did without a
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: written language, but that's just what it seemed to be.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Like nobody could figure out or see any written language
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: in this for a very long time. Well, and here's
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: the thing too, uh that I didn't mention. It's not
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: as simple as I have ten lama, so I'm gonna
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: te ten knots on this string. Yeah. So it was
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: like the height of the knot and where it was
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: positioned on the cord. Uh. It all symbolized different things.
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  Speaker 1: The color symbolize something they had had multiples like one
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: thing the way you know it could be done in
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: such a way or represented a hundred or a thousand.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Uh So it wasn't just like you know, eight beads
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  Speaker 1: means eight cows, right. Yeah. So like, um, if you
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: have three knots, right, and the top one has like
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: five loops, in the middle one has five loops, in
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  Speaker 1: the bottom one has two loops, what you're seeing is
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: five hundred and fifty two. Like the top one is
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: the hundreds column, the middle ones the tens, and the
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: lower ones of the singles. Um. So yeah, and so
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: like there was it wasn't just like one yeah counting
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: off like that was much much more sophisticated that and
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: you know, the color that that they used, the type
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: of material that they used, the direction that not was
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  Speaker 1: tied in the number of loops that had. There are
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: all sorts of things. So when you when you take that,
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: you know, if you have three different dimensions or five
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: or seven or ten different dimensions of something, um, those
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: things start to interact and now you have a lot
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: of different symbols to choose from doingcode information. But again,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: everyone just thought that it was just numbers that they
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: were encoding until the I think the nineteen nineties when
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Urton um who spent years
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: working on analyzing these finally was like, no, there's there's
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: words in here, there's names in here. And if there's
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: names in here, symbols of names, then that means that
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: they're encoding more than just numbers. They're encoding abstract thoughts
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  Speaker 1: like a language does. Yeah, and and Burton started to
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: look into this because, like, despite all the great work
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Locke did to crack this code about accounts, he pretty
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: much did, there were still a bunch of these UH
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: configurations that did not fit with the rest. And he
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: always just sort of thought those were outliers and maybe
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: those were arts and crafts or for ceremonies or something.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: But it was Urton who picked that back up and
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: was like, I don't know, man, why would they go
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: through all this trouble to design this intricate numerical recording
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: system and then just have the same exact thing, just
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: be crafty. He's like, there's something else going on here,
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: right exactly? So Um he was, I guess teaching a
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: freshman economic student named Manny Madrono who managed to crack
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: a little bit more of the code um and and
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: was the one who showed I can't remember exactly what
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: he showed, but he he took Burton's decades of work
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: and in a spring break said, yep, here's some here's
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: some indications that the colors are actually indicating like abstract thoughts,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: like like green um might be like cattle and that's
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: a concrete thought. But but red equals war or something.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: So he cracked the coat a little further over spring break.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Over spring break, and he was like, and I figured
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: it out and passed me the beer bong, right, which
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: we called we didn't we called him funnel yeah bong.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it makes sense because there's a
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: I'm sure it's a regional phrase. I'll bet you're right too.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: We just called it funneling beer. And by the way,
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: you shouldn't do it everyone. It's dangerous stuff, it is,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: and it's it's just dumb. I've never funneled the beer.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Oh I did it a few times. It's just stupid. Actually,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: let me let me change that. I can't recall ever
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: funneling it. I never did any of that dumb stuff.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Keg stands or funneling just stupid. It is a little stupid,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: but I mean, yeah, it is. I just sat there
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: as a nineteen year old on my my credit couardu
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Roy Couch throwing my martini right, was clucking your tongue
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: at all? The Philistines. Yeah, uh, all right, so he
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: figures this out on spring break. It was a big like,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: it was a big breakthrough that not only were these
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: uh used for numbers that's been record keeping, but like
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: you said, like potentially we do have an entire knot
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: language laid out in front of us, but most of
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: this stuff is gone, Like that's the big tragedy. Yeah.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: So so this is the current thinking is that, yes,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: they're definitely abstract thoughts possibly even phonetic sounds encoded in
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: these along with numbers. Like Leland Locke wasn't wrong, you
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: didn't misinterpret it, but he found he found um the
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: or the over time they found that, No, there's abstract
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: thoughts in here too. And there's a couple of pieces
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: of evidence that really back this up. One they found
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: key poos in burials. Right, why would you be buried
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: with a an avocus a census document? Nobody would, but
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: you might be. You might be buried with a something
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: that's basically like a narrative of some battle that you
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: showed your bravery in and that was like the greatest
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: thing you ever did in your life. You might be
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: buried with something like that. So that's one point. And
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: then a researcher at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, so
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: being Highland UM, did some analysis of two key poos
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: that are incin that we're from the Spanish colonial area
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: or era that supposedly the people, the villagers who were
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: preserving these things said these are these two these tell
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: of a great war. Yeah, that's that was key for sure.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: So these things are supposed to have a narrative code
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: within them. And she analyzed him and found like, yeah,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: there's something going on here. Yeah, I mean she got
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: back up because they said, yeah, the different materials means something.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: You guys are uh, you guys are figuring this out.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: She she found that there different symbols encoded in these
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: key poos, which is way more than you need for
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: um like accounting system, but much more in line with
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: something like a language. We still haven't cracked it yet,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: but it's starting to be clear that the Inca did
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: develop a written language. We just can't understand it and
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: the way that it was lost to history is the
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: same as if um, all of the monks in England
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: have been killed off in dred when they were the
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: only ones who knew how to read and write, that
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: the like that stuff that they encoded in in English
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: would have been lost to the English people who survived
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: and who are still around today but have no I
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: couldn't tell you what this Bible says because it's in
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: English and the monks didn't live long enough to pass
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: along how to do this. I loved that last analogy.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Thanks man, it's fantastic, Chuck, I appreciate that. I don't
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: want to push my luck any further, so let's end
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: this one, agreed. If you want to know more about
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the Incas or keep you there's a lot out there
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: to learn. Just go check it out on the Internet
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: and in the meantime you can reach us via email,
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: It's Stuff podcast, how Stuff Works dot Com.