The Incas were no slouches : During the Bronze Age , they built the large pre - Columbian empire in the Americas , extending along the west coast of South America from Bolivia to Chile . They not only thrived in the harsh clime and dry , steep slopes of the high-pitched Andes , they also function up a original grade in technicalroad buildingthat would have made the Romans quake in their sandal ( they make a 25,000 - mile ( 40,000 - kilometre ) highway arrangement , complete with rope bridge across treacherous mickle chasms ) , engineer billion of Acre of high-pitched - altitude , terraced farmlandand constructed anearthquake - proof citadelon top of a craggy mountain extremum , 1.5 miles ( 2.4 kilometers ) above sea level . They even figured out how tofreeze - drypotatoes .
But , unlike the neighboringMayaand Aztecs , and the ancient Mesopotamians , Chinese and Egyptians , the Inca never develop a organisation of piece of writing . What they did have were khipu , or knotted lengths of corduroy made from cotton , llama oralpacawool . They hung in course like a mantle from a thicker central rope , which was sometimes coiled up to resemble a string mop . These big bucks were often color - coded ( although most surviving khipu are now a uniform camel colouration ) and could turn back just a few strings or hundreds . When the Spanish conquistador get and wiped out the integral Inca civilization , they found khipu everywhere , but destroyed many of them .
In the 1920s , a skill historiographer named Leland Locke studying the khipu at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City discovered the knots in the khipu represent numbers , and the megabucks of cloth were most likely criminal record - keeping devices similar to abacuses , probably used to hold census data or keep runway of the substance of storage or how many llamas were bear as tribute . He realized the height of a knot and its emplacement on its cord symbolized unit — tens , hundreds , thousands and so on — and the position of a chain off the main rope could denote thing like specific masses or villages . But even after Locke snap the code , he comment that some of the khipu he studied seemed to be anomaly — he figured these were used for ceremonial purposes .
There are , however , anecdotal clues that entire narratives could be go by along through khipu — one seventeenth - century Spanish conquistadorreported meeting an Inca man on the road who carried khipu he insist told of all the deed of the Spanish in Peru , good and defective . But find survive people who can help researcher unpick the closed book of the knots has prove very hard , if not impossible .
So , khipu research has made dim progress in the preceding century . Since the other nineties , a Harvard anthropologist name Gary Urton has been working to decrypt what , if anything , the khipus that do n’t match the normal mould of accounting devices might signify , collecting adatabaseof over 900 khipu in the process . Urton has discovered that , beyond the position and height of the knots , there are other factors to take into thoughtfulness when read a khipu : the semblance of the string , the direction the knots are writhe , the type of knots used . Through cross - referencing khipu in the Harvard collection with Spanish documents from the accurate clip and location in Peru where they originated , he has recently been ableto provethat the direction the knots are tied in could denote which clans individual go to .
Another researcher name Sabine Hyland at St. Andrews University in Scotland has recently found that some khipu still exist within Village in the Andes . The locals have deal some new information about them — for instance , that the unlike materials used in the strings is significant , and their understanding is that the devices were used totell tale of warfare , for example . She has even feel grounds of phonetic symbol in the string .
It could be , for all their cleverness , the Incas never learned to apply symbolic language . But it front like they may have been just a lilliputian more creative with their storytelling than any other major civilization to date .
