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posted by martyb on Friday January 19 2018, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the knotty-problem dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 20 2018, @04:50PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 20 2018, @04:50PM (#625191) Journal

    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]

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:22PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:22PM (#625312) Journal

    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:

    Broken spears lie in the roads;
    We have torn our hair in our grief
    The houses are roofless now, and their walls
    Are red with blood.

    Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
    And the walks are spattered with gore
    The water has turned red, as if it were dyed
    And when we drink it,
    It has the taste of brine

    We have pounded our hands in despair
    Against the adobe walls,
    For our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead
    The shields of our warriors were its defense.
    But they could not save it.

    We have chewed dry twigs and salt grasses:
    We have filled our mouths with dust and bits of adobe.
    We have eaten lizards, rats and worms
    When we had meat, we ate it almost raw.

    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

    by meustrus (4961) on Monday January 22 2018, @02:52PM (#626079)

    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?