Quipu (khipu)
A record made of knotted cords: a main cord with many cords hanging from it, whose knots, colours and positions stored numbers. The Inca state kept its censuses, tribute and stores on quipus (khipus); whether some also recorded words is still debated.
Meaning
Britannica describes the quipu as a long top cord with a varying number of pendant cords, used by Andean peoples from as early as 2500 BC and above all under the Incas. Numbers were tied in a decimal system: a single knot stood for 10 or a higher power of 10 depending on its distance from the top cord, a “long knot” wound two to nine times for the units 2 to 9, a figure-eight knot for 1, and an empty space for zero. More than 600 quipus have been found. Garcilaso de la Vega, who checked the quipus of his father’s Indian vassals, wrote that quipu means a knot and also an account, and that the colour of a cord told what it counted: yellow for gold, white for silver, red for soldiers.
Origin and history
Under the Incas the cords were kept by specialists, the quipucamayocs, “he who has charge of the accounts”, as Garcilaso translates it. He describes a census cord by cord: men of sixty and over on the first string, of fifty on the second, of forty on the third, down to babies at the breast, and the women counted the same way. He checked the tribute of his father’s Curacas against their knots when they came to Cusco at Christmas or on St John’s day, and came to read them, he says, as well as they did.
Did the quipus record words?
Britannica says that some, called narrative quipus, may have recorded sounds, but none has been deciphered. In 2017 the anthropologist Sabine Hyland of the University of St Andrews published two quipus kept by the village of San Juan de Collata, which its leaders let her study: letters made in the eighteenth century during a revolt against Spanish rule. She found 95 different signs in them, a number within the range of syllable-based writing systems, made with fibres of different animals that a reader has to tell apart by touch. The Harvard anthropologist Gary Urton, quoted by National Geographic, called the findings interesting but questioned whether they can be projected back into Inca times. He and his colleagues keep the Khipu Database, which records more than 500 quipus.
Read next
- Next in Andean and Inca symbolsPachamamaPachamama is Mother Earth in the Andes, honoured by Quechua and Aymara people with offerings buried in the ground, above all in August, when, farmers say, the earth is hungry and thirsty.
- The same shape in Animal symbolismBee symbolismIn ancient Egypt bees were said to come from the tears of the sun god Re. English folk custom tells the bees when someone in the family dies; Napoleon chose the bee as an imperial emblem, and Manchester and Utah use the bee and the beehive for industry.
See also
Inti (the Inca sun), Nazca lines, Nazca hummingbird, Nazca monkey, Nazca spider, Gateway of the Sun (the Staff God).
Sources
- Quipu, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
- First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, vol. II, by the Ynca Garcilasso de la Vega, Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales (Lisbon, 1609), translated by Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 1871 (Internet Archive full text), Hakluyt Society (Internet Archive), book VI, chapters VII–IX
- Lost writing of the Inkas discovered, University of St Andrews news, 2017, on Sabine Hyland’s study in Current Anthropology, University of St Andrews, news text
- Discovery may help decipher ancient Inca string code, National Geographic, April 2017, National Geographic, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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