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 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.