#quipus

>Moving on to abacuses.

>Suddenly hit with

The normal method of calculation in ancient Rome, as in Greece, was by moving counters on a smooth table. Originally pebbles (Latin: calculi) were used.

>Please tell me this isn't calculi as in calculus and the term means SMALL PEBBLE.

>Googles "calculus etymology"

mid 17th century: from Latin, literally ‘small pebble (as used on an abacus)’.

>God fucking damnit lmao.

Estudiante de Harvard ayuda a descifrar el misterio del código Inca contenido en los quipus. Manny Medrano muestra un modelo de nudos de un Khipu, un sistema de información que los Incas usaron para registrar datos. Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Durante siglos, Diego no pudo ser escuchado. Un campesino que había vivido en un pueblo remoto en el Imperio Inca, existía solo como un número…

Tributos en Khipus del Valle del Santa

Luego de la llegada de los españoles a los Andes en 1532, los khipukamayuqs nativos experimentaron un choque literario: al ser los escribanos locales de sus comunidades, aprendían con frecuencia las habilidades de lectura y escritura alfabética, pero al mismo tiempo seguían utilizando los khipus — artefacto con cuerdas anudadas— para el almacenamiento y transmisión de información. Nuestros…

A discovery in a remote village in the Andean heights of Peru suggests that the ancient Incas used their colored and knotted cord instruments to do more than count.

These tools, called quipus, used combinations of knots to represent numbers, and were used to carry inventories of corn, beans and other supplies. Spanish chronicles from the colonial era claim that the Quipus Incas also encoded…

I previously posted about an artist book in our collection based on the concept of Andean quipus. 

Terry Horrigan of Protean Press and Catherine Mutz collaborated on the book Quipu, which consists of a scholarly essay on quipus and a beautiful Turkish map foldout inspired by one of the quipus in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia y Arqueologia in Lima, Peru.

-John