He made graphs and compared the knots on the khipu to an old Spanish census document from the region when something clicked.
"Something looked out of the ordinary in that moment," Medrano said. "It seemed there was a coincidence that was too strong to be random."
He realized that, like a kind of textile abacus, the number of unique colors on the strings nearly matched with the number of first names on the Spanish census.
Source: Harvard student helps crack mystery of Inca code
Related Stories
The NewScientist has an update on the work to interpret the Inca khipus, or chains of knots, which are known to have been used for accounting. Now it is looking likely that the khipus were a full writing system containing narratives, but that they must be read through sense of touch not just vision.
Under strict supervision, Hyland set about photographing the cords, reviewing the manuscripts and taking notes. Each khipu had hundreds of pendant cords, and they were more colourful and complex than anything she had ever seen. It was clear the various animal fibres used could only be identified by touch. The villagers told her the khipus were the "language of animals" and insisted that the different fibres have significance.
Her analysis eventually revealed that the pendants came in 95 different combinations of colour, fibre type and direction of ply. That is within the range of symbols typically found in syllabic writing systems, where a set of signs (say, the letters C-A-T) aligns with the sound of speech (the word "cat"). "I thought 'Woah, could this be a syllabic writing system?'," says Hyland. She has since hypothesised that the khipus contain a combination of phonetic symbols and ideographic ones, where a symbol represents a whole word.
Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders.
Earlier in SN:
Harvard Student Helps Crack Mystery of Inca Code (2018)
Twisted Textile Cords May Contain Clues to Inca Messages (2017)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:07PM
Clearly, it wasn't the Inca.
That's the real "Incan" mystery.
(Score: 4, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 19 2018, @08:10PM (23 children)
She told him that it was a record of everything that had happened since the Spanish came.
The priest burned it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:47PM (22 children)
Not sure how funny that is. Priest didn't want the world to know how badly they treated the natives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:56PM (21 children)
Good riddance to both empires.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 19 2018, @09:15PM (20 children)
Citation needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @09:24PM (19 children)
Oh. It's Runaway1956.
Let me help you out, know-nothing fool. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 19 2018, @09:43PM (18 children)
Ignoring your acid tongue, for the moment -
So, we can agree that the Aztec and the Maya were also savages, but the Iroquois nations were not? Nor were the Seminole?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @09:56PM (3 children)
I'm reading this exchange, and I feel I am missing something here.
Would anybody mind letting me in on the secret? What is Runaway trying to say? What is the other AC trying to say?
I don't go to InfoWars or whatnot. Hell, I don't even read WaPo any more. It's all shit. So it seems like I'm missing some kind of meme here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @11:43PM (2 children)
everything was fine in america before eurepeans showed up sadly this also remains true until today
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @01:20AM
So, no. Not everything was fine.
In fact, everything is about a billion times better for people now on just about every measurement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:35PM
Everything was not fine. Nations in the Americas fought. There were natural disasters. People were enslaved, sacrificed, slain in warfare. But they also traded widely with each other, built great works, developed cultural refinements in art, engineering, science, and the like. We know this because we can look at the architectural record. Unfortunately, how they felt about it was not widely recorded, and the few civilizations in the Americas who did develop writing and record their history lost huge chunks of it to the Spanish. There are only a few Mayan codices that survived the mass burnings, and a greater, though far from extensive, collection of work from the Aztecs.
In other words they did the same things human civilizations did elsewhere in the world, but most of that depth was lost to the advent of Europeans in the Americas. The best current consensus is that pathogens unwittingly brought by the Europeans wiped out millions of Americans before the first conquistadors ever stepped foot on land. We don't yet know, though, if those pathogens were introduced by the tentative first contacts with the Spanish, the Basque fisherman who had discovered and voyaged to the Grand Banks before them, or the Vikings who we know for sure were at L'Anse aux Meadows and interacting with the Beothuks far earlier. But the Americas the conquistadors eventually arrived at were already extensively de-populated and broken.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday January 19 2018, @09:59PM (8 children)
While we're at it, why don't we throw the Mongols, the Philistines, the Carthaginians, and the Bavarians into your comparison? Since we've already abandoned any semblance of geographic or temporal similarity, let alone cultural similarity.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 20 2018, @02:43AM (5 children)
All of those mentioned were native to the Americas, at about the same time. All of those mentioned suffered devastating diseases soon after the the European arrived on the continent. All of those mentioned suffered exploitation, warfare, and even enslavement at the hands of the white man. If you can't see the semblance between the Inca, the Aztec, and the Iroquois, it's because you're not even trying.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Saturday January 20 2018, @03:43PM (4 children)
North, South, and Central America are very different places, and the Maya, Aztecs, and Iroquois all existed centuries apart from each other. I thought everybody knew that.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 20 2018, @04:50PM (2 children)
I very strongly disagree. In fact, you can make a moderately long journey on your next vacation, and meet full blooded Iroquois, Aztec, AND Mayan people. If you're satisfied with half breeds, it won't even take a moderately long journey - you can find them all over the United States, today.
Oh, the Mayan EMPIRE, and the Aztec EMPIRE were both destroyed, just as surely as the Iroquois nation. But, the people are still there.
Nor are the three nations separated by as much time as you seem to think.
Iroquois, 200 BC to present - that is, the nation still exists, on paper, if not in fact.
Mayan, 2000 BC to 900 - officially, but the people survive today.
Aztec, 1325 to the arrival of the Spanish - and again, the people survive today.
https://mayaazteccomparecontrast.weebly.com/ [weebly.com]
I'm not finding a decent timeline of the Iroquois nation, because they all start with the arrival of the English. Like - there weren't any Iroquois in America, until the English arrived. This page, for instance, gives a little lip service to the existence of the Iroquois prior to the white man's arrival - https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/environmental_center/sunbury/website/HistoryofIroquoisIndians.shtml [bucknell.edu]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:22PM
That's right. I'd also mention that they had high achievement in culture, too. The Aztecs had their own form of poetry, Flower Songs, in Nahuatl, their language, some of which survive today [gutenberg.org]. An elegy, written about the fall of Tenochtitlan, is heart-wrenching:
Imagine if the reverse had happened and we knew very little about the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans. That's about the scale of what humanity lost in the empires of the Americas.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday January 22 2018, @02:52PM
Apparently the gaps between years 900 - 1325 does not count as "centuries" to you.
And I thought we were talking about societies, not some frankly offensive 19th century racial concept. You can find plenty of "full blooded" and "half breed" people of the Mongol, Philistine, Carthaginian, and Bavarian races now too. They wouldn't call themselves that any more than someone indigenous to the Yucatan would call themselves Mayan.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:11PM
They are very different places, but we know from the archaeological record that they had contact with each other. They have found copper from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan all over the place, obsidian from Yellowstone all over the place, and jade from Meso-America all over the place. Moreover, the pervasive presence of maize as a staple says they did. In short, they had extensive trade networks.
It wasn't all land-bound, either. The Inca had ocean-going craft and traded up and down the Pacific Coast. The Caribbean peoples sailed and traded from Florida to South America.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @03:12AM
Don't forget the Greeks. Beyond the philosophers they tended to be barbaric, war loving, baby eating bastards.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:10PM
And you can't leave out the Romans.
Via: http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html [demon.co.uk]
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:06PM (4 children)
Were the Aztecs and Maya savages, though? The Romans massacred lots of people in the arena and on lots of other occasions, but we call them civilized. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice for religious reasons, but somehow that makes them savages, despite their other accomplishments in architecture, literature, mathematics, engineering, and in every other measure of civilization.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 20 2018, @10:48PM (3 children)
Yes, the Romans were savage. They sat in their arenas, watching people fight for their lives, for no better reason than entertainment. The OP to whom I originally responded phrased his own post to indicate that the Spanish were savages, and that the Native Americas were pretty savage as well.
Fact is, we live in a pretty unique time in history, in which most of the western world enjoys especially civilized conditions. Almost all of our children live to adulthood - that is enough to make us stand out, all by itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @02:47AM (2 children)
Dying as a gladiator was a way to fix before death a dishonorable situation, such as being captured on the battle field.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 21 2018, @06:55AM (1 child)
That may be true for some of those who died in the stadiums. It doesn't explain any of those who were tossed into the ring with lions, or wolves, such as the Christians, for example. People were dragged back from Africa, Asia, northern Europe, the British Isles, and fed to the entertainment machine. As for warriors, they may have observed any of dozens of religions, or no religion at all. Being fed to the entertainment machine was of no religious value to them. I'm afraid you're looking for a simple explanation for a complex situation.
A bloodthirsty audience demanded entertainment and distraction, so people and animals alike were fed to them, lest they find time and motivation to revolt.
Doesn't that sound a lot like America today, and "reality" television?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @03:50AM
Let's be clear about past civilizations. Life was brutal and short and the people of that age were born to it.
My Grandfather was Ojibwa Indian, his mother ran from the tribe up in Michigan.
The American Indian way of life was brutal and extreme to us modern types.
Their favorite pastime was torture. Every tribe did it. It was considered a great honor to not scream out as you were tortured to death.
An just about all tribes would eat the person that did not scream out, to absorb some of his strength. Some tribes only ate strips of human flesh but most were cannibals.
They tortured and brutalized anyone they got a hold of. On raids they typically killed everyone except for young boys, who were indoctrinated into the tribe. They kept slaves and brutalized Them. Women were second class citizens and basically slaves to the men and performed most of the labor.
It was their way. And the way of many human tribes and cultures. The Romans were civilized by comparison. But were still a brutal culture compared to what we have today.
The American Indian never invented the wheel, they didn't have draft animals and for most of their entire culture never had horses. They would run entire herds of buffalo over a cliff and harvest the best parts.
They were a brutal people as were so many other civilizations at the time. Life was short and hard and they survived by taking what they needed and never looking back. Just like every other group of humans.
We are in a Much better place these days. And, more and more, we're thinking globally in regards to the environment and other cultures. We are growing and getting better all the time. As group the graph is spiraling upward.
As I learned from my Grandfather: Do the best you can when you can. It is all that is asked of you. Hopefully you've left it a little better than when you showed up.
We kinda seem to be headed that way.
As an aside this also explains how you can have American Indians with blond hair and blue eyes. My Grandfather always insisted that they had to be captured Viking children. He grew up around a tribe of Indians and they had a few things to say about the past. One of them was that those Norseman were never able to grab a foothold. The Indians wouldn't allow it.
Interesting if true. I believe it, though.
Apologies for the Long post.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday January 19 2018, @08:17PM (7 children)
Er, what? Does anyone have any idea what that means, and how did it help him translate anything?
Were the strings part of a census? Why would frequency of Spanish names have anything to do with Incan strings? I feel like a lot is missing from the article.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Friday January 19 2018, @08:30PM (1 child)
It's a load of crap.
There is no information in the article.
The paper "is coming", i.e not even submitted.
And the author can't articulate their findings in a few lines despite not needing to use any specialist language to do so.
Also, as a mathematician, I'll tell you that the result can't be statistically significant and you could find a million correlations as-good-as, if not better, than what he claims to have found.
But it's a nice way to get free press when websites like Soylent link it in without any further discussion, analysis, links or references.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday January 19 2018, @09:31PM
>The khipus were similar and came from a burial site in a river valley on the north coast of Peru. Urton had
> previously discovered that the Spanish document referenced 132 taxpayers in a village.
>Altogether, the six khipus had 132 six-cord groups.
It takes a genius to put two numbers together! I'm glad nobody moved or died between the two sets of data.
From there, I will posit that the knots represent the amount of cash people paid, not their names. Prove me wrong.
> “There were so many different combinations of colors, whether solid colors or two colors spun together,”
> Medrano said. “This looked like there was enough diversity in here to encode a language.”
No, shit, Sherlock! The Incas
How could it possibly be that this medium would have enough diversity to encode a language? I'm so glad nobody thought about it before, not even the TV show I was watching as a kid (in which the Inca girl read khipus every other episode). We are so blessed to have Harvard geniuses who are so highly capable of correctly explaining their passion to journalists...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
Well, for starters, the names on the Spanish census weren't Spanish names, but Incan names. Ie. the Spanish took a census of the Incas.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday January 20 2018, @01:05AM
Ohhh, okay, that makes slightly more sense of it. Not much, but slightly more.
Still seems extremely tenuous.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday January 19 2018, @08:32PM (1 child)
Very odd. Does not appear to be newsworthy at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:43PM
Concur. How about a nice crunchy "breaking news" aristarchus submission, instead?
(Score: 5, Funny) by MostCynical on Friday January 19 2018, @09:31PM
headline needs correction.
Should read "Student Pranks Boston Globe"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @09:04PM
42
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @11:09PM (1 child)
Harvard can have its sports and academics, Yale will always be first in gentlemanly club life.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday January 20 2018, @12:14PM
Who gives a fuck? Wake me up when there's a story from MIT or Stanford.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?