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
(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]