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Quipu ( ), also spelled khipu (, ; , ), are record keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.
A quipu usually consists of cotton or Camelidae fiber cords, and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order and number. The Inca, in particular, used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in quipu cords. Depending on its use and the amount of information it stored, a given quipu may have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords.
Objects which can unambiguously be identified as quipus first appear in the archaeological record during 1st millennium CE,Urton, Gary. (2011). "Tying the Archive in Knots, or: Dying to Get into the Archive in Ancient Peru likely attributable to the Wari Empire. Quipus subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco of the 13th to 15th centuries, and later of the Inca Empire (1438–1533), flourishing across the Andes from to 1532. Inca administration used quipus extensively for a variety of uses: monitoring tax obligations, collecting census records, keeping calendrical information, military organization, and potentially for recording simple and stereotyped historical "annales".
It is not known exactly how many intact quipus still remain and where, as many were deposited in ancient mausoleums or later destroyed by the Spanish. However, a recent survey of both museum and private collection inventories places the total number of known extant pre-Columbian quipus at just under 1,400.
After the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, quipus were slowly replaced by European writing and numeral systems. Many quipus were identified as idolatrous and destroyed, but some Spaniards promoted the adaptation of the quipu recording system to the needs of the colonial administration, and some priests advocated the use of quipus for ecclesiastical purposes. Today, quipus continue to serve as important items in several modern Andean villages.
Various other cultures have used knotted strings, unrelated to South American quipu, to record information—these include, but are not limited to, Chinese knotting, and practiced by Tibetan people, Japanese people, and Polynesians. Quipu, page 99: " ... one can use the phrase chieh sheng chi shih, which means 'the memorandum or record of knotted cords,' to refer to how Chinese writing evolved before characters were invented."
To date, most of the information recorded on the quipus studied by researchers consists of numbers in a decimal system, such as "Indian chiefs ascertaining which province had lost more than another and balancing the losses between them" after the Spanish invasion. In the early years of the Spanish conquest of Peru, Spanish officials often relied on the quipus to settle disputes over local or goods production. The quipucamayocs could be summoned to court, where their bookkeeping was recognised as valid documentation of past payments.
Some knots — as well as other features, such as color, fiber type, cord attachments, etc. — are thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been deciphered. It is generally thought that the system did not include phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet. However, Gary Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could record phonology or Logogram data.Urton 2003. According to Martti Pärssinen, quipucamayocs would learn specific Oral tradition, which in relation to the basic information contained in quipu, and pictorial representations, often painted on Qiru vessels, similar to aztec pictograms, related simple "episodes".
In 2011, a potential match between six colonial-era Santa Valley Quipus and a Spanish colonial document from the same region was identified. Researchers believe this possible quipu-document match is the strongest Rosetta Stone-like connection currently known, which could offer key clues needed to unlock the full extent of the quipu code. Subsequent studies have built on the proposed quipu-document connection, suggesting that the binary manner by which cords can be attached to the main body of the six quipus may encode moiety affiliation, and, more recently, uncovering detailed Andean social structures encoded within the six quipus.
The lack of a clear link between any indigenous Andean languages and the quipus has historically led to the supposition that quipus are not a glottographic writing system and have no phonetic referent. Frank Salomon, at the University of Wisconsin, has argued that quipus are actually a semasiographic language, a system of representative symbolssuch as music notation or Numeral system relay information but are not directly related to the speech sounds of a particular language, (2025). 9781909188242, Ubiquity Press. ISBN 9781909188242 like and proto-writing.
Sabine Hyland claims to have made the first phonetic decipherment through her analysis of Epistle quipus from San Juan de Collata, Peru , challenging the assumption that quipus do not represent information phonetically. However, the quipus in question date to the colonial period and are believed to have been exchanged during an 18th-century rebellion against the Spanish government, suggesting that their encoding may have been influenced by the introduction of European writing systems. With the help of local leaders, Hyland argues that the names of the two Ayllu, or family lineages, who received and sent the quipus can be translated using phonetic references to the animal fibers and colors of the relevant quipu cords.
For example, if 4s represents four simple knots, 3L represents a long knot with three turns, E represents a figure-eight knot, and X represents a space:
The "reading" of quipu knots as numbers in the way outlined above is bolstered by the fortunate fact that quipus regularly contain sums in systematic ways. For instance, a cord may contain the sum of the next n cords, with this relationship being repeated throughout the quipu. In other cases, there are even cords which contain sums of sums. Such a relationship would be highly improbable if quipu knot values were being incorrectly interpreted.
Some data items are not numbers but what Ascher and Ascher call number labels. They are still composed of digits, but the resulting number seems to be used as a code, much as we use numbers to identify individuals, places, or things. For example, Carrie J. Brezine decoded that a particular three-number label at the beginning of some quipus may refer to Puruchuco, similar to a ZIP code.
In 2003, while checking the geometric signs that appear on drawings of Inca dresses from the First New Chronicle and Good Government, written by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in 1615, William Burns Glynn found a pattern that seems to decipher some words from quipus by matching knots to colors of strings.
The August 12, 2005, edition of the journal Science includes a report titled "Khipu Accounting in Ancient Peru" by anthropologist Gary Urton and mathematician Carrie J. Brezine. Their work may represent the first identification of a quipu element for a non-numeric concept, a sequence of three figure-eight knots at the start of a quipu that seems to be a unique signifier. It could be a toponym for the city of Puruchuco (near Lima), or the name of the quipu keeper who made it, or its subject matter, or even a time designator.
Beynon-Davies considers quipus as a sign system and develops an interpretation of their physical structure in terms of the concept of a data system.
Khipu kamayuqkuna (knot makers/keepers, i.e., the former Inca record keepers) supplied colonial administrators with a variety and quantity of information pertaining to censuses, tribute, ritual and calendrical organization, genealogies, and other such matters from Inca times. Performing a number of statistical tests for quipu sample VA 42527, one study led by Alberto Sáez-Rodríguez discovered that the distribution and patterning of S- and Z-knots can organize the information system from a real star map of the Pleiades cluster.
Laura Minelli, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at the University of Bologna, has discovered something which she claims to be a seventeenth-century Jesuit manuscript that describes literary quipus, titled Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum. This manuscript consists of nine folios with Spanish, Latin, and ciphered Italian texts. Owned by the family of Neapolitan historian Clara Miccinelli, the manuscript also includes a wool quipu fragment. Miccinelli claims that the text was written by two Italian Jesuit missionaries, Joan Antonio Cumis and Giovanni Anello Oliva, around 1610–1638, and Blas Valera, a mestizo Jesuit sometime before 1618. Along with the details of reading literary quipus, the documents also discuss the events and people of the Spanish conquest of Peru. According to Cumis, since so many quipus were burned by the Spanish, very few remained for him to analyze. As related in the manuscript, the word Pacha Kamaq, the Inca deity of earth and time, was used many times in these quipus, where the syllables were represented by symbols formed in the knots. Following the analysis of the use of "Pacha Kamaq", the manuscript offers a list of many words present in quipus. However, both Bruce Mannheim, the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan, and Colgate University's Gary Urton, question its origin and authenticity. These documents seem to be inspired freely by a 1751 writing of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero.Domenici, Viviano and Davide, 1996
Quipucamayocs were from a class of people, "males, fifty to sixty", and were not the only members of Inca society to use quipus. Inca historians used quipus when telling the Spanish about Tawantin Suyu history (whether they only recorded important numbers or actually contained the story itself is unknown). Members of the ruling class were usually taught to read quipus in the Inca equivalent of a university, the yachay wasi (literally, "house of teaching"), in the third year of schooling, for the higher classes who would eventually become the bureaucracy.
Christian officials of the Third Council of Lima banned and ordered the burning of some q uipus in 1583 because they were used to record offerings to non-Christian gods and were therefore considered idolatrous objects and an obstacle to religious conversion.Frank L. Salomon, 2004: The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village; Duke University Press;
Anthropologists and archaeologists carrying out research in Peru have highlighted two known cases where quipus have continued to be used by contemporary communities, albeit as ritual items seen as "communal patrimony" rather than as devices for recording information.Peters and Salomon 2006/2007. p. 41. The quipu system, being the useful method of social management it was for the Inca, is also a link to the Cuzco census, as it was one of the primary methods of population calculation.D'Altroy, Terence N. (2001). 234–235 This also has allowed historians and anthropologists to understand both the census and the "decimal hierarchy" system the Inca used, and that they were actually 'initiated together,' due to the fact that they were 'conceptually so closely linked.'
In 2004, the archaeologist Renata Peeters (of the UCL Institute of Archaeology in London) and the cultural anthropologist Frank Salomon (of the University of Wisconsin) undertook a project to conserve both the quipus in Rapaz and the building that it was in, due to their increasingly poor condition.Peters and Salomon 2006/2007. pp. 41–44.
The archaeologist Gary Urton noted in his 2003 book Signs of the Inka Khipu that he estimated "from my own studies and from the published works of other scholars that there are about 600 extant quipu in public and private collections around the world."Urton 2003. p. 2.
According to the Khipu Database Project undertaken by Harvard University professor Gary Urton and his colleague Carrie Brezine, 751 quipus have been reported to exist across the globe. Their whereabouts range from Europe to North America and South America. Most are housed in museums outside of their native countries, but some reside in their native locations under the care of the descendants of those who made the knot records. A table of the largest collections is shown below.
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While patrimonial quipu collections have not been accounted for in this database, their numbers are likely to be unknown. One prominent patrimonial collection held by the Rapazians of Rapaz, Peru, was recently researched by University of Wisconsin–Madison professor, Frank Salomon.Salomon, F (2004).
Quipus are now preserved using techniques that aim to minimize their future degradation. , and special collections have adopted preservation guidelines from textile practices. (2025). 9781003358787, Routledge. ISBN 9781003358787
Environmental controls are used to monitor and control temperature, humidity and light exposure of storage areas. As with all textiles, cool, clean, dry and dark environments are most suitable. The heating, ventilating and air conditioning, or HVAC systems, of buildings that house quipu knot records are usually automatically regulated. Relative humidity should be 60% or lower, with low temperatures, as high temperatures can damage the fibres and make them brittle. Damp conditions and high humidity can damage protein-rich material. Textiles suffer damage from ultraviolet (UV) light, which can include fading and weakening of the fibrous material. When quipus are on display, their exposure to ambient conditions is usually minimized and closely monitored.
Despite best efforts, damage can occur during storage, or be from the result of earlier conservation efforts. The more accessible the items are during storage, the greater the chance of early detection. Storing quipus horizontally on boards covered with a neutral pH paper (paper that is neither acid or alkaline) to prevent potential acid transfer is a preservation technique that extends the life of a collection. The fibers can be abraded by rubbing against each other or, for those attached to sticks or rods, by their own weight if held in an upright position. Extensive handling of quipus can also increase the risk of further damage.
Quipus are also closely monitored for mold, as well as and their . As with all textiles, these are major problems. Fumigation may not be recommended for fiber textiles displaying mold or insect infestations, although it is common practice for ridding paper of mold and insects.
Conservators in the field of library science have the skills to handle a variety of situations. Even though some quipus have hundreds of cords, each cord should be assessed and treated individually. Quipu cords can be "mechanically cleaned with brushes, small tools and light vacuuming". Just as the application of fungicides is not recommended to rid quipus of mold, neither is the use of solvents to clean them.
Even when people have tried to preserve quipus, corrective care may still be required. If quipus are to be conserved close to their place of origin, local camelid or wool fibres in natural colors can be obtained and used to mend breaks and splits in the cords. Rosa Choque Gonzales and Rosalia Choque Gonzales, conservators from southern Peru, worked to conserve the Rapaz patrimonial quipus in the Andean village of Rapaz, Peru. These quipus had undergone repair in the past, so this conservator team used new local camelid and wool fibers to spin around the area under repair in a similar fashion to the earlier repairs found on the quipu.
When Gary Urton, professor of Anthropology at Harvard, was asked "Are they quipus fragile?", he answered, "some of them are, and you can't touch them – they would break or turn into dust. Many are quite well preserved, and you can actually study them without doing them any harm. Of course, any time you touch an ancient fabric like that, you're doing some damage, but these strings are generally quite durable."
Ruth Shady, a archeologist, has discovered a quipu or perhaps proto-quipu believed to be around 5,000 years old in the coastal city of Caral. It was in quite good condition, with "brown cotton strings wound around thin sticks", along with "a series of offerings, including mysterious fiber balls of different sizes wrapped in 'nets' and pristine reed baskets. Piles of raw cotton – uncombed and containing seeds, though turned a dirty brown by the ages – and a ball of cotton thread" were also found preserved. The good condition of these articles can be attributed to the arid climate of Caral.
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