Quipus could unlock mystery of Incas

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LIMA, Peru -- To the casual observer, they appear to be little more than multicolored tangles of arm-length strings. But a growing number of experts think that "quipus" might hold the secrets of the Inca Empire.

The Incas built the greatest pre-Columbian empire in South America, unifying Andean cultures from what is now Colombia to Chile for about a hundred years before they fell to Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s.

They left extensive roads, irrigation systems and imposing stonework, including the mountaintop citadel of Machu Picchu.

What they apparently did not leave behind was a written record of how it all worked -- a gap that has puzzled anthropologists who see written language as a key requirement of great civilizations. That's where the quipus, or knotted strings, come in.

Quipus have been tying up British textile engineer William Burns for half of the nearly 50 years he has lived in Peru.

"Walking around museums with my daughters, I became fascinated with the Incas," Mr. Burns said recently at his home in Lima. "There is something for everyone, and I was drawn to the fibers."

In his book "Decoding the Quipus," published here in Spanish this year, Mr. Burns suggests that the colors and configurations of the knots are a phonetic shorthand for the Quechua language still used in the Andes.

Spread out on display, a quipu -- also spelled khipu -- looks something like a hula skirt, with a horizontal main cord and dozens to hundreds of knotted, multicolored pendant strings made of cotton and wool.

Spanish chroniclers wrote that Inca quipu makers "read" the strings to early colonial overlords keen on cataloging their spoils. But Spanish colonists destroyed most of the quipus, and researchers have been unable so far to match a colonial-era transcription to any surviving quipu.