In his book, Signs of the Inka Khipu, being published next month by the University of Texas Press, Dr. Urton said he had for the first time identified the constituent khipu elements. The knots appeared to be arranged in coded sequences analogous, he said, to "the process of writing binary number (1/0) coded programs for computers."

When someone types e-mail messages, they exist inside the computer in the form of eight-digit sequences of 1's and 0's. The binary coded message is sent to another computer, which translates it back into the more familiar script typed by the sender. The Inca information, Dr. Urton said, appeared to be coded in seven-bit sequences.

Each sequence could have been a name, an identity or an activity. With the possible variations afforded by string colors and weaves, Dr. Urton estimated, the khipu makers could have had at their command more than 1,500 separate units of information. By comparison, the Sumerians worked with fewer than 1,500 cuneiform signs, and Egyptian hieroglyphs numbered under 800.

http://www.livescience.com/history/ap_050811_incaknots.html

There are between 650 and 700 khipu in museums, he explained, and about two-thirds of them have the knots organized in a decimal system indicating their use in some sort of accounting.

But the remaining khipu have knots in other patterns, perhaps a form of written language, if the researchers can work it out.

"We think those may be the narrative ones, "Urton said. "The identities attached to those knots may not be numerical. If we can use the numericals to account for objects, that may give us clues to how they were assigning identities to objects,'' he said, citing such items as llamas, gods, defeated cities and warriors that might have been counted.

If they are able to find such words, then they could look for those words in the narrative khipu.

What is missing is something like the Rosetta stone, which allowed Egyptian hieroglyphics to be deciphered when researchers realized it contained identical text in three languages, two of which could still be understood.

THE QUIPU KNOTTED STRINGS
http://www.cristobalcolondeibiza.com/2eng/2eng15.htm
In Fusang: Chinos en América antes de Colón, pages 52-55, Gustavo Vargas Martínez brings up an intriguing subject that would seem to point to yet another cultural link of enormous significance in the life of pre-Columbian South America. He says that ‘special mention should be made of the knotted strings, since not only are they an element of analogical confrontation, but basically, they also represent an acquired system that has to be learnt. In his book, Histoire de la Chine the eminent Jesuit Chinese scholar, P. Martin (*) had already remarked on the ancient Chinese system of knotting strings, many years before the appearance of writing. They used to place the knots at specific intervals, make use of different colours and, by carefully following agreed rules, they created a sign code substituting other ways of counting and writing'. What is most astounding, says Vargas, is that ‘an identical system was discovered among the Incas, so sophisticated that it was used as an official register for their annals, State accounts, astronomical observations, rates and taxes and even as a means of communication, since it was used to carry news and message over long distances'. Among the Incas these strings were called quipus, and the Chinese called them qi pui, ‘back memorising'; in China today the same system is known as chie sheng. It is perfectly obvious for anyone to see that the quipu is a forerunner of the abacus (**), in common use all over Asia up to the present day.

(*) Martin Marini was born in Trent, Austria, in 1614. He died on June 6 1661 in Hangtschen, China.

(**) The abacus is made up of a square with ten parallel wires, each with ten movable beads, and is used in Asian schools to teach children how to count.

However, it was Alexander von Humboldt (Atlas geographique et physique du Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris, 1811) who saw the connection between the South American quipus and the Asians, and the Chinese in particular. He uses this analogy as a base to suggest there had been Chinese migrations to the ‘east of California' during the sixth and seventh centuries, which is precisely when the old Chinese books tell of Hui Shen's journey to Mexico.









Dr. Virgilio Roel Pineda explains how another problem arose when they discovered that the writing was based on only ten signs or letters instead of the 26 or more letters used in western languages. Burns eliminated all vowel sounds from his model, as in the case of Hebrew and Arab writing, which are made up solely of consonants. Then Burns went about cutting down the number of consonant signs by excluding those with similar sounds. In this way he was left with 10 consonants, which took on meaning when he associated them to the colours of the quipu strings and he discovered that the geometrical signs accompanying Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala's Nueva crónica de buen gobierno offered a coherent writing system. Burns' book offers us proof of the existence of this form of expression; he sets out his lines of research and includes the decoding of ten of these quipus.