• Khipu (Khipu)

Extent:
  • 1 item (a fifty-one strand Inca quipu) ; 78 x 101 cm.
Format:
Abstract:
  • The only known form of pre-Columbian "writing" in South America is the Incan quipu. Incan clerks, known as quipucamayo, were trained to record and translate these quipus as "memoranda or registers made from strands of cord, in which different knots and colors signify different things. It is incredible what they have comprehended in this way, for what books can say of histories, laws, ceremonies, and business accounts... is provided very precisely by the quipu," wrote a Spanish colonial observer. This 51-strand quipu is typical of surviving examples, which date from the 13th and 16th centuries.
Subject:
Edm rights:
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Curator's notes:

  • no text?
    Peru, before 1600, textile cords

    Khipu (or quipu) are comprised of colored, knotted strings, used to record various kinds of numerical accounts, possibly simple formulaic historical annals, or even, as some secondary records imply, poetry. Using mostly a base-10 positional system, such objects could have only a few, knotted cords or thousands of them; this one has 51. The earliest extant khipus date to the first millennium CE, and they remained in use until well after the Spanish conquest (1532–1572).

    Gift of Mrs. Gerard B. Lambert, in memory of Gerard B. Lambert, Class of 1908
    Princeton Mesoamerican Manuscripts, no. 5

    For further reading

    Benson, Elizabeth P. “The quipu: “Written” texts in ancient Peru.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 37, no. 1 (1975): 11-23.

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