JS001 - Catalog Information

This large, impressive khipu is purported to have been discovered in a burial at the coastal site of Ancon, near Lima, Peru. The random appearance of the cords and knots indicates that it is a narrative khipu, a less common type than the administrative ones. Both khipu forms were in contemporaneous use because they conveyed different kinds of information.

Narrative khipus differ in construction from the standard decimal-format type by having thickly spun, Z-plied cords; an array of pendant and subsidiary cords in a variety of colors; and a profusion of knots placed seemingly at random rather than in separate, decimal-valued tiers.

“This khipu was recorded by Julia Strauss as part of her Undergraduate’s Thesis for Linguistics at Harvard University. (Knotted Thoughts:  An Investigation Towards the Potential for Encoding Language in Inka Khipus - Harvard College, Cambridge, MA - March 2019)”  That investigation studied three potentially non-numeric khipu, including KH0001 (UR176), UR193, and this khipu - JS001.

Ashok's note: Intriguingly this khipu shows 0 Ascher summation relationships, not even trivial ones.

The Brooklyn khipu’s cord organization system is unusual because it contains one pendant cord – cord 65 – that carries an unusually large number of subsidiary groups: 17 subsidiaries, many of which have their own subsidiary cords, resulting in 40 cords attached to cord 65 alone.

There are 11 single knots in the primary cord at 11.5 cm
At 60 cm (final end of large cord group) there is an 11L knot (Z, twist, axis down).