Alec visits the Gold Of the Incas Exhibition

This weekend we visited the Gold of the Incas exhibition in Canberra at the National Art Gallery.

My favourite pieces were from the Moche tributes especially the  portrait head stirrup vessels (Ceramic  AD 100-800) the details were amazing.

There was an interesting artifact on display called a Quipu from the Huari Culture

Quipu600-1000 ADThe quipu or khipu is both ordinary and mysterious. Made from cotton or wool knotted cords, it was the backbone of the bureaucratic and centralised Inca Empire, used to record amounts of goods and numbers of people. Computations were decimal, the highest knot standing for one, the next for 10, then 100, 1000 and so on. Each ruler, governor, commander and village chief had a quipucamayoc, the quipu-teller. The sons of the nobility studied to read a quipu in their training college, as it was always necessary to know the truth of the quipu-tellers’ numbers. Used for keeping records, the quipu was also a mnemonic device. Different dye colours, lengths of cords, types of knots, weaving direction and number of plies all changed meaning. The size varied from a few cords to more than a thousand. No-one nowadays can read a quipu.
Recent research, particularly from that of Gary Urton, as well as Marcia and Robert Ascher, suggests that quipus were used for narrative as well as statistical information.1 Perhaps place names, stories of battles, genealogies were ‘read’ by the quipu-tellers. Quipus were used by the Incans for census taking, for astronomical and calendrical information—very important in an agricultural economy—and to account for loads of maize, flocks of llamas and bottles of chicha or corn beer due as tribute. They must have been universally legible, as the road messengers transported them around the empire.
Spanish colonisers witnessed quipus being used, although the native system was soon replaced by written records. In 1533, the first year of the occupation, Hernando Pizarro, brother of the conqueror Francisco Pizarro, told of how he and his soldiers removed firewood, llamas, corn and chichafrom an Inca storehouse, ‘and the native accountants recorded the transaction on a knotted-string recording device’, untying some knots on 
the deposit section, and retying them in another section.2 
The Spanish soon suppressed the quipu as part of the idolatrous Inca religion, and now only about 750 are known to survive.