The Written Records of the Inca did not have what European/colonial world would recognize as a writing system. No carved stone, no
papyrus, no
wedges pressed into clay, no lines painted on potsherds.
A book called Narrative Threads, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, describes how a handful of scholars is working towards cracking the code. Recent excavations at the newly discovered ancient civilization of Caral have identified the oldest known quipu, dated to 4600 years ago.
However, Quipus have not yet been deciphered. Only some […Western...] educated guesses about what they represent have been attempted.
Certainly they were used for administrative tracking of tributes and records of the production levels of various farmers and artisans throughout the empire. The 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. They may even have those legends encoded in them; but the likelihood that they will every be translated is very small.
Quipus predate the Inca, and are known to have been crucial to the Chimú state operations. They may have been used by the Moche and Tiwanaku civilizations, although quipu from those societies have not as yet been discovered. The oldest known quipu was discovered at Caral, predating all of these societies, made about 4,600 years ago. - source
The articles below betray all that can't be accounted for, within qhipus and Incan society, by relying on western based systems of valuation and scientific method.
Most recently, only by trying to attibute a binary relation between more simple Quipas that were used to track the stores of nuts and food, are they hoping to 'crack the code' for more complicated Quipas that may have recorded the social history of the culture. But they are still relying on the assumption of what a language is, what it records and how it moves, on latin/western notions of language. Interpreting language through systems of equivalence and binaries becomes very evident in
Untangling an Accounting Tool and an Ancient Incan Mystery via NYTimes.
String, and Knot, Theory of Inca Writing (with text also included here) includes more nuances on all that is unknown and the resistance of Incan society to 'measure up' to western derivations of a so-called "complex society" by having no written language. The how of this language, does not move with rhythms contemporary anthropologists know how to move with.
Of all the major Bronze Age civilizations, only the Inca of South America appeared to lack a written language, an exception embarrassing to anthropologists who habitually include writing as a defining attribute of a vibrant, complex culture deserving to be ranked a civilization.
The Inca left ample evidence of the other attributes: monumental architecture, technology, urbanization and political and social structures to mobilize people and resources. Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the Maya of Mexico and Central America had all these and writing too.
The only possible Incan example of encoding and recording information could have been cryptic knotted strings known as khipu.
The knots are unlike anything sailors or Eagle Scouts tie. In the conventional view of scholars, most khipu (or quipu, in the Hispanic spelling) were arranged as knotted strings hanging from horizontal cords in such a way as to represent numbers for bookkeeping and census purposes. The khipu were presumably textile abacuses, hardly written documents.
But a more searching analysis of some 450 of the 600 surviving khipu has called into question this interpretation. Although they were probably mainly accounting tools, a growing number of researchers now think that some khipu were nonnumerical and may have been an early form of writing.
