Beautiful ancient Peruvian kipu replica.An amazing recordkeeping system developed by the Inca Empire, and replaced their lack of a written language.
This replica quipu will be made utilizing the materials, methods and colours that were used by the Inca culture centuries ago. Everything hand made with attention to details.
Size 18 x 21 inch
Time to complete : 3 weeks
The “Quipu” Story
A quipu, or knot-record (also called khipu), was a method used by the Incas and other ancient Andean cultures to keep records and communicate information. In the absence of an alphabetic writing system, this simple and highly portable device achieved a surprising degree of precision and flexibility. Using a wide variety of colours, strings, and sometimes several hundred knots all tied in various ways at various heights, quipu could record dates, statistics, accounts, track tributes and records of the production levels of farmers and artisans throughout the Inca empire. Some quipu may have represented maps of the pilgrimage road network known as the ceque system and/or they may have been mnemonic devices to help oral historians remember ancient legends or the genealogical relationships so important to Inca society. Experts suggest that the quipu may have been progressing towards narrative records and so becoming a viable alternative to the written language just when the Inca Empire collapsed.
Quipus made during the Inca Empire are decorated in at least 52 different colours, either as a single solid colour, twisted into two-colour "barber poles", or as an unpatterned mottled group of colours. They have three kinds of knots, a single/overhand knot, a long knot of multiple twists of the overhand style, and an elaborate figure-of-eight knot.
The knots are tied in tiered clusters, which have been identified as recording the numbers of objects in a base-10 system. German archaeologist Max Uhle interviewed a shepherd in 1894, who told him that the figure-of-eight knots on his quipu stood for 100 animals, the long knots were 10s and single overhand knots represented a single animal.
Inca quipus were made from strings of spun and plied threads of cotton or camelid (alpaca and llama) wool fibres. They were typically arranged in only one organized form: primary cord and pendant. The surviving single primary cords are of widely variable length but are typically about a half-centimetre (about two-tenths of an inch) in diameter. The number of pendant cords varies between two and 1,500: the average in the Harvard database is 84. In about 25 per cent of the quipus, the pendant cords
have subsidiary pendant cords.