The Weirdest Language Of All Time Is FINALLY Being Deciphered
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
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When the Spanish Conquistadors encountered the mighty Inca empire, they found thousands of knotted-up ropes called quipus. Encoded in these quipus were tax records, census data, and the entire history of the Inca empire. But the secret to these ancient computers have been lost to time. Today, scientists are trying to crack the unbreakable code in these strings and bring the history of this great empire back to life.
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LINKS LINKS LINKS
www.theguardian.com/news/data...
www.iesalc.unesco.org/en/2022...
www.britishmuseum.org/blog/ev...
sacred-texts.com/egy/trs/trs0...
www.discover-peru.org/who-were...
www.worldhistory.org/Inca_Civ...
www.thoughtco.com/introductio...
www.thoughtco.com/introductio...
news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
www.peruforless.com/blog/quipu/
courses.lumenlearning.com/way...
lithub.com/how-the-inca-used-...
www.journals.uchicago.edu/jou...
www.sapiens.org/language/khip...
www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/...
www.si.edu/stories/why-langua...
www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...
nebula.tv/how-to-make-a-real-...
www.omniglot.com/writing/indu...
www.livescience.com/59851-anc...
eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infoped...
www.roots.gov.sg/en/stories-l...
www.bbc.com/travel/article/20...
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
1:48 - The Rosetta Stone
5:47 - History of Quipus
7:11 - Tangent Cam
7:31 - Quipu Creation Date
9:18 - Professor Gary Urton and Manny Medrano
12:36 - How To Read A Quipu
19:14 - Sponsor - Incogni 
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My wife is from Ayacucho Peru. Her first language is Quechua and my mother in law still only speaks Quechua. We plan on sending our daughter to live with her grandma for several months of the year until she can master it and keep it alive. It’s sad because speaking Quechua instead of Spanish is associated with being uneducated and unsophisticated so there really isn’t a push to keep it alive. Everyone that can tries to speak Spanish and forget Quechua.
Also, btw, the two different spellings are because the Spanish were trying to write down words in Quechua that have sounds that don’t exist in Spanish. Quechua has a sort of gutteral sounds that they often use a Q to represent, but there isn’t really a perfect way to spell it. My wife’s maiden name is Quispe which also uses that sound.
I'm a community interpreter for Spanish, so I often get called to interpret for Central American immigrants who speak Spanish as a second language, but their first is usually a form of Mayan. I don't deny my help, but I do encourage them to ask for a Mayan interpreter, I think just as any other language, theirs have a place in the world.
I feel you. I belong to the Apatani tribe, from India, and Hindi and English are slowly replacing our language. I am also doing my best to learn my language, keep it alive, and hopefully be able to pass it on to my kids.
I REALLY appreciate what you are doing.
Please Please Please send your daughter to learn Quechua! And, I assume your wife speaks Spanish, please have her speak to your daughter only in Spanish while you only speak English to her (unless you're fluent in another language too). My cousin (we're Cajun) spoke only Cajun French to his boys and their mom (Brazilian) only spoke to them in Portuguese. They grew up trilingual and now that they're older are multi-lingual because their brains were primed for language at such a young age.
I grew up speaking 3 languages (German, English and Serbian), with Sebian I also understand most of the Balkan languages. I work as a linguist / Translator. From my POV, although it is sad to lose languages, with each one we lose we actually grow closer as a civilization, more and more people speak the same language. It is also worth noting that out of the 6700 endangered languages, many are likely just glorified dialects rather than completely unique languages. Many are simply wrong forms of another major language (often the case in rural/less educated areas), that is why the "uneducated" stigma exists for many of these. So I for one embrace the gradual change. May of these languages are effectively useless today and would not have any value in the future, for example minor languages spoken by small cultures. In these cases, we often have a somewhat complete understanding of their history, so keeping the language alive is not very useful to anyone.
EDIT FOR THE HATERS:
Read my other comments before dropping any "You are racist" or any Balkan war related stuff, I made myself abundantly clear.
There isn't anything wrong with that, though. That's how Spanish became a thing, isn't it? What we call Spanish today is so radically different from what it was a thousand years ago. Latin mutated into many things before it became Spanish, and all of those intermediate languages are mostly dead. The same is true about most languages, and yes, that also includes Quechua.
And when I say "that also includes quechua", what I mean is that the Incas would come in, conquer a civilization, most times brutally (rape the women, kill the men, etc), and then whoever survived was forced to adopt Quechua. Their previous language, dead, forgotten.
That's the story of the world. And it makes perfect sense, humans need to progress, and you can't really progress if you're always trying to keep the past alive. If we all tried to keep all of our ancestor's languages alive, none of us would be able to talk with one another.
And, yes, speaking Quechua instead of Spanish IS a very clear sign of being uneducated and unsophisticated, just as speaking anything but Quechua was a sign of that back in the times of the Inca. Same as not understanding English today is a sign of being uneducated. Just as once Latin was the language of the uneducated, and the educated spoke Greek, and after that it was Latin for the educated, Spanish for the unwashed masses. Once French was the educated language, and English was for the common folks. That's how culture works.
The world would be an awful place if tradition was actually more important than progress.
I love how there's the universal human trait of recording information, but the WAY it is recorded is so varied across cultures.
I love the Egyptians method of only recording positive information.
All success and greatness over here! Lost what battle? Nothing to see, nothing to see!
reminds me of the ZSSR and North Korea's long aged recording of information@@brandonhoffman4712
It's far from universal, most human cultures in history relied on oral transmission of knowledge.
@@brandonhoffman4712 lots of lies as well
Remember, people who have a humongous enough ego to force others not only to worship them but also build temples for the very same, dare not have |ow|¡fes aka 'non-gods' upset them with their truth
Edit: it does baffle me how archeologists can take records from tombs & similar sources built by these very folks to glorify themselves, as facts/proofs
Universal? Sub saharan Africa called 😂
Subtle differences in worldview are sometimes implicit in a language. In English one might say "You are a student." whereas in Gaelic the sentence would translate as something like "There is a student in you." The English suggests that you are one member of a larger category (students), whereas the Gaelic suggests that "student" is one aspect of the larger reality that is you. It's a subtle but powerful difference in perspective.
gaelic one kinda makes sense still
Oh I love that! I like how it automatically suggests that you are much more than just one specific label :D
"There is a student in you." could also be more literal and mean they are cannibalistic and just ate a student...😲
That's interesting - and there might be many differences in languages that are not intuitive. For example in German the word "Student" means a person who is stuyding at a university.
Below the university the people are "Schüler". A totally different word.
But we get used to the meaning of "student" in english conversations. But some Germans might get it wrong.
@@richard--s Also, nouns in german have genders, so a Student and a Schüler both mean a male person. A female Student is a Studentin, a female Schüler is a Schülerin. A female group is Schülerinnen or Studentinnen and a male or mixed group is Schüler or Studenten. Trying to remove the gender of a person from the gender of a noun ist often done by transforming a verb to a noun. So one would not use Studenten and Studentinnen, but Studierende, meaning "the ones who currently study". Same can be done for almost every group of people doing anything. This is a political issue in germany, some do it, some won't, some feel forced to do it either way, most don't really care. But this is talked about more often in media than in real life and maybe in a few hundred years historians will study the "documentation" of a process, that isn't really there. And also it's common in german to make a noun from a verb to describe a group of people. It was used in music and poetry and even in documents for as long as the group of languages that later formed german exist. I really find that discussion that is so heated at the moment amusing, because people are so emotional about a topic they clearly know not much about.
Also, there a far more words for the different kinds of Schüler.
Grundschüler, Mittelschüler/Mittelstufler, Hauptschüler, Sonderschüler, Abiturienten, Maturisten, Berufsschüler...4 gramatical cases in singular, 4 gramatical cases in plural, and everything again for the female version, too. And every word means a different kind of Schüler... learning german is really fun...
When he got to texture conveying meaning, comparing it to Braille, it struck me how genius that is: quipu can convey information even if you are blind or deaf, discounting the colored strands for the former. The knots are spaced regularly and distinctly enough to read in the dark or the rain, silently. As elders slowly lose the use of their senses, they can still use the quipu until their hands can no longer make out the knots.
Yeah! And thats specially necessary in the latinoamerican continent because the weather changes drastricly. In one moment you are in the rainiest jungle on earth, one day of travel later now you are burning in the dessert, two days past and now is freezing cold at the andes mountain. There is an engineer i all humans that can decode a way out for everything
There's tv-show playing in a dystopic future where (almost) all humans are blind. It's kind of not problem because since everybody is blind, everything man-made is adapted to blindness, and the producers got input from blind people into the design. Letters still exist, and what do you know; they're basically quipu.
That's what I was thinking, ancient braille with knots
@@diegopena4773 lol youre absolutely tripping. I live in South America. Need to drive 4 hours to see a hill, 5 hours on a different direction to see the sea, 15 to see a mountain, and 18 to get to a jungle.
@@Joaking91 yeah i ment travel by car xd, its still much more varied than traveling across europe
"You're a language?"
"I'm a frayed knot...."
Ok, I'm done 😆
Good one!😂
*WHACK* With a rolled-up newspaper...
Sir, this is "Answers with Joe," not "Scott, Prop & Roll." 😉😁
🙉 🤣
🩷
Want to learn a new exotic language for free? No strings attached! But we promise it'll be "knots".
Im Peruvian and my grandpa was a historian he spend most of his life trying to understand quipus he wrote several books about it. It’s so exiting to know we are finally here 🇵🇪
What are the names of these books?👀
I'd read that. This is so fascinating!
Exciting*
¿Quién es tu abuelo?
It’s so sad that only 100 years before there was likely someone who could read and write them
As a fiber artist i can tell you something interesting about knots as records - when you unknot a previously knotted cord, you can easily see where the knots were. That’s built in tamper detection.
Im also a fiber artist - and as I started my first big project, a temperature blanket - I realized that's basically a written record of the local temperature, but in yarn. Its not as tacticle as this since its just differences in color, but if you used different stitches too it probably could be!
Hi, i'm a peruvian and i lived most of my life in pisac perú, alot of locals speak quechua and they actually teach it in some schools, not only that but if you're lucky, you can get "how to read a quipu" as a class asignment, but they only teach the numbers part, other than that, the locals are very welcoming and friendly
The idea that 6700 of our current 7000 languages are threatened is horrifying to me. I’ve been obsessed with languages since high school and one of the things that no one can really understand until they study a language to the point of fluency is that languages are not just a bunch of different words for the same thing. Every language is a different interpretation of the world. Every language has words that can’t be translated into other languages because that concept simply doesn’t exist outside of that language. Just think how many ideas and perspectives we will lose if those languages die out.
Hopefully with our current technology we will be able to preserve these languages in some way so that they never fully dissappear. We could collect/film many recordings of native speakers teaching us how to speak the language or even just of them conversing with eachother, though that would still rely a lot on translation, which like you mentioned isn't ideal. Maybe we could use AI language models to create chatbots based on endangered/extinct languages, allowing us to converse with it in those languages. We probably wouldn't have enough data for that, though, because of how rare the languages are, but maybe we could take a proactive approach and start collecting data for every single language that exists right now, and then in the future when some of them go extinct, we will have enough data to properly document and preserve that language for future generations. The only issue is that this wouldn't do anything for the languages that are currently close to disappearing, but it's better than nothing. Either way, it's certainly cool to think that maybe in the future it will be possible to preserve languages for thousands of years so that future humans can learn English or Spanish or Japanese and then actually converse with the ai as if it is person from the 21st century.
@@orchdork775 But for that somebody needs to fork out the money to go to every remote tribe and do lenghty work there.
And sadly, within our capitalist system, everything that does not directly result in profit for the ruling class has a low priority.
One of the most fascinating things about languages (and by extension, the tragic nature of losing these languages) is that the way a person learns and uses language can very much alter their perception of the world. Losing languages is losing a way of thinking as much as it is a loss of information. Mode of language shapes personal expectations of the world around us and how we react to stimuli presented to us and is very much subconscious in many ways. World perspectives of dead languages are gone forever because the psychology associated with growing up with that language can never be replicated. Even if you were able to decode a dead language completely, you can never replace the context in which those languages arose and shaped the way the speakers/writers saw the world as a consequence of their word use.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Ditto to all of that
Ah, the good old strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
As a farmer, the Inca have always amazed me with their agricultural achievements.
They way they integrated the terrace farming into the sides of mountain is inspiring and beautiful. Like functioning art. Impressive engineering by Llama and their own back/hands.
Isn't it they who first domesticated the potato?
@@shruggzdastr8-facedclownyup, the potato is from South America
yeah but without a grinding wheel they could only do so much and never really could grow.......note corn meal is easily digestible while corn in curnel form....not so much.
@@shah9394 They didn’t have a need, they had a different process called nixtamalization. Mills are labour intensive, which is fine when you’ve got a windmill or a gristmill.
“There is no precise date when the technology was developed, but the earliest evidence of nixtamalization is found in Guatemala's southern coast, with equipment dating from 1200-1500 BC”
“Nixtamalized corn has several benefits over unprocessed grain: It is more easily ground, its nutritional value is increased, flavor and aroma are improved, and mycotoxins are reduced by up to 97%-100% (for aflatoxins).”
Considering that the Incan empire spanned over 4 climate zones, unlike any other ancient empire. You should reconsider your position on their accomplishments.
Not convinced?
“They developed resilient breeds of crops such as potatoes, quinoa and corn. They built cisterns and irrigation canals that snaked and angled down and around the mountains. And they cut terraces into the hillsides, progressively steeper, from the valleys up the slopes. At the Incan civilization’s height in the 1400s, the system of terraces covered about a million hectares throughout Peru and fed the vast empire.”
Written language has two main drivers: the need to enhance/expand our communication abilities, and the intrinsic desire to live forever and immortalize yourself in some form. Kinda sad that so many of those stories were casually destroyed like that.
I am from Peru. Thank you for making this video. You don't know how many times I've wanted to scrag some of my fellows because they try to deny that the Quipus are a writing system. Literally every time i hear that "our ancestors didn't have a writing system but were great either way" or that they were stupid because they didn't get to develop one, because yeah i heard that one too... i get mad, because it's simply most likely not true! Here everyone always says that the Quipus were only a counting and registering tool, no one ever divulgates that it was most probably also a writing system solely because it can't be translated yet. It's very annoying. Due to the will of certain people to be seen as factual and academic they don't talk about the writing system "theory" at all in museums and schools and most people don't know anything about it, even some university teachers apparently lack this information.
Not to mention that writing alone as a marker for civilisation ignores a lot of civilisations. When you look at the history of writing the innovation of it is actually very rare, there are only 4 writing systems that developed independently world wide within the last 12000 years, & even Europeans use a writing system that is borrowed; Latin Alphabet ultimately descends from Ancient Egypt via proto sinatic script.
Most people adopted writing systems that had been innovated in one of the 4 cradles.
They called mine a craft. 12/19/23 8am pst - Chanda Maggie 🤟
What's surprising about how this was forgotten is that in much of the old Inca empire, a lot of the culture is still very much alive. I backpacked through Chile, Peru & Bolivia in 2005. Huge numbers of people still speak Quechua, wear the traditional clothes and attend religious and cultural ceremonies. I suppose quipu literacy was not widespread, so the conquistadors were able to snuff it out.
Yeah, I think it was only a small class of people who could read it.
Before firearms built the current nation state governments had little incentive to teach the populace to read and write. It's easier to rule over people if you only allow the elite to use them. The incas were no different.
Your lack of knowledge is fooling you. I'll explain what you saw: Inca empire is not old, its 1400-1550. Quechua being spoken was a majority of the Peruvian population until the 1960's and mass migration to cities. All those clothes are European traditional clothes, and the ceremonies are Catholic ceremonies from hundreds of years ago that are still alive today.
Conquistadors used Quipu, its just easier to write, and so the native elites also abandoned the Quipu, since most were allied with the Spanish anyway.
@@celdur4635ma dude la ropa tradicional de las provincias no son europeas wtf
@@celdur4635 Oh no we've got a tradcath in the thread
If I'm not mistaken, the Spanish used the quipu and the Quipucamayocs to maintain records during the conquest. They had them directly translate the quipu into Spanish for their own documents that they held onto and used the quipu directly in the villages. And I'm fairly certain that they had portions of the bible translated by the Quipucamayocs and had them carried around because they resembled prayer rosaries. So we were aware that there are translations of them, but not necessarily how to translate them because the quipu that we needed were missing, destroyed, or were in the possession of museums but not realized for what they were.
That might prove very useful - if some person (or AI) could match a portion of a Quipu in the database to a portion of the Bible then we would have our Rosetta stone. A good way to start this would be to figure out the transliteration of common biblical proper names like Jesus, Mary, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John etc... into old Incan then search for sequences that might correspond to these in the Quipu database.
@@julesgosnell9791 You are on to something. However you need to keep in mind the layers of translation.
@@qrfarchaeology9391 true - you should perhaps take the Spanish names (with adjustments for the pronunciation of the period ) transliterate them into old Incan equivalent pronunciation then look for similar patterns in the db - thinking more about it, the longer the name the stronger any match would be, so something like Bethlehem, or Jerusalem would be a good candidate… Was it Jesuits in Peru ? If they had particular favourite verses of the Bible that might help - if they had long names in them. There is a lot to be learnt from the way that other scripts and codes have been cracked so this is worth studying too 😀
@@julesgosnell9791 You can use a quechua-spanish dictionary from 1586 called "Arte y vocabulario en la lengva general del Perv llamada Quichua, y en la lengua Espanola" I peeked it just right now, as it's free to download in the internet (just make sure to find the right version which has spanish-quechua and quechua-spanish), and there are biblical words for God (Dioſ), Angel (Angel), Saint virgin (Virgen ſancta), Christ (Chriſto) and more which got adapted, nevertheless there's not a rigurous phonetical description in these early texts. K wasn't used in spanish at that time but instead C for A, O and U (ka, ko, ku) and QU for E and I (ke, ki), while in quechua there are three types of K sound and another three for Q sound, one version is the spanish K, the other one is the english K (written in modern quechua as KH) and a clicking K written is modern quechua as K'. In the text, apparently, no matter if they are KA, KHA, K'A, QA, QHA or Q'A they all seem to be transliterated as simply KA.
I would unironically buy a quipu of the entire bible.
Magnetic core memory was one of the earliest forms of digital information storage. It consisted of woven wires strung with lots of tiny donut shaped magnets which could be flipped into off and on states, they would stay in their encoded states after the system turned off. Kind of cyclic how an early recorded language used lengths of rope and knots while early digital records weren't too dissimilar!
The Apollo Project engineers approve of this message!
Also the closely related core rope memory, where the weaving itself was the data input, resulting in a read-only memory.
Interestingly, African slaves also used a type of "knot" system when braiding each other's hair. The different designs braided into the hair gave instructions for escape routes and other secret messages to be passed along. This video had me thinking about that.
How do you transmit the message Black Lies Matter?
Sure...
WOW! Really?
Yes. These knots are like a wool punch card/abacus
However I think it would be forgotten after the Mexica Introduced the amatl/books because is easier.
Impressive, the Inca's had multithreaded applications long before we did. Too bad everything had to be written in knot net, and the only date type you could effectively work with were strings.
😂
🤓
BRILLIANT! 👍👍
Of chords someone was bound to make a pun or two. Wrap it up.
groan
I wish I'd learnt about Quipus when I was doing my linguistics degree. As you said, the implications on how we define "writing" are monumental. Its tragic when a language or writing system is lost like this.
This is Waitaha language. They still speak and use the quipu knot language here in NZ.
The "Cloud people" and come heads of the Paracas culture are their decendants and ancestors.
They are the stone workers of ancient Africa, Americas, and Rapa Nui.
@@Maungateitei Why does Joe say that people are struggling to translate it, then?
@@orchdork775 The politics of western European exceptionalism.
And New Zealand Political system where since the 1970s the existence of the indigenous peoples, that are well documented and still have organised tribes such as the Ngati Hotu has been denied.
Despite their records of 500 thousand year occupation of New Zealand being carve into the stone, any of the scientific records of their history and language are not allowed to be discussed, to protect the private ownership of NZ by the British Crown under the "right of conquest", "pact of the two invading nations" deal between the Maori and English invaders who teamed up to end the 1500s to 1800s "Maori Wars" period, in which over half the countries forests were burnt, and 99% of edible species were eaten to extinction by the arms race of breeding with captured indigenous slaves, that had many of the "Maori Warrior" caste fathering thousands of children.
@@Maungateiteiwhere is all this info found, any documentaries ? Books?
Why? Were you going to use it to write your diary? No? I get preservation but this isn't tragic and you aren't special for caring about something like this. Stop the bull.
As a Peruvian I highly appreaciate this video and your content. It is sad that loads of information had been lost but it gives hope knowing that there are still intelectuals trying to decipher quipus.
Good video. Along with the Rosetta Stone, another critical ancient text that IS an absolute banger is the Behistun Inscription - written in Elamite, Akkadian, and Old Persian, which allowed scholars to translate the vast wealth of Akkadian tablets and other sources we have from Mesopotamia [along with [cuneiform] Elamite and Old Persian records of course].
I remember first learning about Quipu in the 80s cartoon, "Mysterious Cities of Gold." They find a golden quipu, and the Inca girl Zia is the only one who can read it. The whole series was part history, part Native American anthropology, part science fiction (ornithopter, fusion reactors, Atlantis, all in the 1500s) and as a tiny child unable to even read yet, I loved the idea of a textile reading system.
That was such a great cartoon! We were very fortunate to grow up watching it.
It was awesome! A very thoughtful cartoon.
That was my favorite show when I was a kid, and I've yet to see a series with an ending that perfect-then again I'm speaking of Season 1.
Googles "Mysterious Cities of Gold."..... HOLY CHRIST!! you just unlocked one of the earliest memories i had, and i'm 42. Here i thought the flashes of memory of some cartoon was when i was really young was just the product of my imagination
@@chrisholdread174 So glad we could help!
I'm 44. It holds a similar grip on me and has a special nostalgia all of its own.
Such an amazing series and there were many more planned that never got off the ground.
Can’t believe that student was able to even partially decipher a centuries old language over spring break! Some much you can do when you put your mind to work! Great video as always
Impressive indeed. Thought it's not a language but a writing system
You should read Watson's book on how the DNA code for amino acids figured out. The Nobel prize article was just about page and half or so long in 'Nature'.
To be fair, it sounded like he "only" deciphered their numbering system.
@@rodjacksonx for quipus* It is consistent with Quechua language's decimal numerrals
I feel like these things should be public instead of private, so everyone who wanted to could have a go at it. You never know if someone from a random town in a random country could be the one to decipher it.
Having a language be recorded by knots in ropes and strings is quite unique, and it's always amazing to me how early cultures recorded things.
Ogham for example, is an early Irish method of recording language where it was recorded _on the corners_ of standing stones or doorways. Like, you'd make marks on one side, the other, or both, for different letters.
Because it's so unique and different, for the longest time it was thought to just be ritualistic decoration, not an actual recorded language. Most languages we know are either written on flat paper or cloth, or impressed upon flat tablets; but Irish Ogham was entirely different, just like this Incan Quipu.
Tom Scott has a great video on Ogham titled:
᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜
It's 770 AD, you've spent the last few hours adding the names of recently born children to the census. A woman walks in with her child, she tells you his name and you begin tying your knots. Only when you make the last loop and the entire line tangles itself up do you realize your mistake. Bobby tables strikes again.
Oh! I am a woman who hand spins with a drop spindle, mostly sheep wool, but I've tried other fibers. It's a visceral experience, and I am convinced that it is vital to the human experience. Some archeological evidence goes back over 30K years. A person versed in fibers can glean so much from a string, thread, or yarn. I've long followed the lore surrounding Quipu.
I wonder if the original inventor might have been a blind or hard of vision person. This seems like a very vision impaired friendly system for storing and reading information.
Isn’t there a board that is coronated with the alpha bet
Twenty-odd years ago in my North American archeology class we got on the subject to quipus, and that particular moment I decided, "I'm sure it's a textile language record / system, not just an accounting system". I was basically told, "yeah sure, think big,kid"... so I'm chortling in my head rn thinking about how right I was whenever somebody else told me I was crazy. That you can't encode that much information in that method, etc. I've seen people encode crazy amounts of information in patterns in knitwear, so yeah. And when you think about it, binary code actually started because people modeled it off of the warp and weft of a loom, the way they wove the copper wire over and under to create the data for the data cards. So anybody who says this is impossible is basically an idiot.
I know; strong words, but it frustrates me when people simplify this amazing ancient concept because they can't expand their minds enough to understand it... Or because they've mentally oversimplified ancient civilizations as less inventive and intelligent than humans are in current society.
Edit: also, everyone should read 1491. Life-changing.
It's funny, textile arts as a "feminine" art were so underrated. But it's so interesting. I heard of someone using crochet to model topology concepts and build hyperbolic shapes. This in turn made it so easy to understand how wormholes would work based on the idea that space may have hyperbolic topology
Should have responded with that all of human knowledge, science and culture can be encoded with ones and zeroes, why would quipus be any different?
@@nixi7688 That is absolutely fascinating. Nowhere near the same level, I always thought it fascinating that different textile artforms have been used by women for generations to pass down their stories (quilts, etc) in patriarchal societies that only recorded male authors. One of the most beautiful is that quilted lifestory of the Queen Liliuokalani, a very meta example of that erasure.
The problem would be information density, would be fascinated to know how it compares to written text
there are so many variables that it could be high
In 2005, 21 quipu from Puruchuco were examined, and the ones that weren't just for local use shared a non-numeric three-knot sequence that may have been a place-name designation for Puruchuco. If so, it is the first deciphered word in pre-Conquest quipu.
In a book series I love called 'The Kingkiller Chronicles' theres a language called yllish which utilised 'story knots' before other forms of writing were made. I loved the idea of a physical language like this and how it was used in everyday objects in the book such as the pattern on a ring or a braid in ones hair. Its really cool to see that this is an actual part of our history.
I recently watched a video from Chinese Cooking Demystified where the host said something that has really stuck with me, when you learn a language, you make it harder if not impossible to exoticize the people that speak it, when we lose a language we lose the human connection we might have had with a culture
It's part of the CCP censorship strategy, though, for the language to be purposefully difficult to understand by foreigners. "The China Show" gave a great example, where a "weather balloon" company's website set to English looked normal, but then when set to "Chinese" the site was one plastered with the hammer/sickle symbol and boasting about the military capabilities of these "weather balloons" to carry payloads like weapons of mass destruction.
Hong Kong children are apparently taught Mandarin, not Cantonese. Eventually, the younger generations will not be able to communicate with their elders. I watch "Cooking with Lau", and the son can only speak Cantonese, so when he travelled to Beijing with his Dad, his Dad had to act as translator.
This is a great channel, those people showing how to make food are really great teachers
I grew up in the US speaking a Vietnamese dialect. Never heard it spoken outside of my family and never bother to teach my kids b/c I believe it is a dying language. I visited my hometown in Vietnam for the first time in 44 years and was shocked everyone in that Village speaks that "dying" language!
Well, keep in mind that just because one village keeps a language for two more generations doesn't mean it's NOT a dying language.
hey joe... we're going to have the same problem of lost historical data in the digital age as well..
over just the last 40 years, we've been through 8" floppys, 5 1/4" floppys, 3 1/2" floppys, zip disks, jaz disks, bernoulli disks and more,
even if you still have the drives that used those disks, no modern computer has drivers to talk to the drives to read the disks and access the data.
a variation on the concept of 'language' but similar in the concept of loss of information.
Your explanation of why losing languages matters was beautiful. Many talk about how language shapes our thoughts (only slightly true), but the more powerful argument is that connection to our past. I have a love of languages, and the biggest draw is that connection to other people, to other times. I speak a fairly small language (Latvian--about 3.5 million speakers globally), and the connection I feel to others who know it when we're talking about simple things is far more powerful than the words being stated.
This video was incredibly fascinating! Never new about Quipus, and now I'm very interested in them.
for the past year, I've been writing a fantasy novel where knotting quipus is the main form of writing for the fictional civilization. It's been cool to see that so much work is being done to decrypt them!
I'd be interested to learn more about that fantasy novel!
I would love to see the book Ulysses by James Joyce written in a Quipu.
There's a show called "See" eith Jason momoa where they use knotted ropes as their "written" language, really cool!
The tv series See used this as their “written” language as they were all born without sight. I loved this concept and had no idea it was based on this!! Fascinating stuff! Thanks for sharing
Didn't know of the series. The idea likely derives from H. G. Wells' novel, "The Country of the Blind."
A mountaineer enters a remote village, where all inhabitants are blind from birth. The villagers find his behavior bizarre, and take needed action.
Dang. I read that novel once, probably 50 years ago. What was old is new again. I guess I can stop worrying about my memory.
See was so good.👍
I can’t believe Joe did not mention this series in his video, as it totally relate to the video
I've been looking for you 😆 love that show
Your comedy was perfect for this episode. Also “he needed harder than any nerd has ever nerded in the history of nerdom,” was an understatement.
2:34 There's so much more to it than that. Language isn't just a way to communicate, it's a window into how entire cultures view the world. This leads to a totally different life experience and way of thinking. Losing that is not only a shame regarding the history of it, but it makes people more narrow minded, which in turn will result in less creativity and problem solving.
This is why you can't just translate to learn a new language, you have to change your thought process altogether. It's pretty cool stuff.
Its ironic a knot is an old fashioned memory aid, so a language of knots being forgotten just seems to be fates cruel streak flexing
I was obsessed with Quipus as a child (thank you autism and The Mysterious Cities of Gold cartoon). I tried to make up my own language to write in knots. However, it was the 80s and I was like 8, so it’s not like there was any information I could find, so I just experimented. It was heaps of fun. And I never forgot about it. Apparently that show is why my generation (in Australia at least) all want to go to Macchu Picu (to say nothing of the influence of Monkey, you know what I’m talking bout Xers).
I was actually wondering why I met so many Australians in Peru.
@@octosquatch. Yeah, it was always my dream to go there too, but I don’t walk well anymore, unfortunately. Australia seems to have adopted things as zeitgeist that didn’t have that much impact in their country of origin. For example, The Goodies, Doctor Who, Mysterious Cities of Gold, Monkey (Magic) from Japan, Catweazle, Worzel Gummidge, The Wombles.
There might be more cult classics that I’m unaware of, because during this period we lived in the outback and only received one tv station (ABC). When we first moved to the town, we still had switchboard operators and wind up phones and two-digit phone numbers (in 1982).
Mind. Blown. In computation, we call human text input a "string" of "characters". I never thought I would see a tangible string describing actual characters.
For quipus being used for official records I like the idea they could use the same one as a living record. Like in the sheep counting example, someone sells 100 sheep to a neighbor just retie the knots for each and the record is updated.
Comment #2: What makes me appreciate this civilization the most is that they independently invented checksums 14:50 . That is a very advance method of maintaining data integrity. This is something typically only used in computers.
That's freaking amazing!!
Totals have been used by a lot of accountants over the years
You are getting ahead of yourself. A checksum is not genuinely important here, because any alteration of the data means the entire file has obviously lost data and is broken (= the cord is literally ripped in half). This isn't the same as with digital files, who may have flipped bits where it's impossible to tell whether the bit is supposed to be there or not -- thus, the necessity of checksums.
In reality, this almost certainly was just to sum it up.
Excuse me, I didn't want to infringe on your observation so hard, but I really dislike it when other programmers and IT guys try to cast the concerns of the past into the same IT mould. It makes it seem like you have a limited horizon and limited appreciation for the beauties of other crafts.
Aren't these types of things considered one of the most basic ways of error detection? These probably have been developed or adopted by many cultures and have been used by these cultures for thousands of years.
Double entry bookkeeping was around for hundreds of years before computers. It is based on a built in check system.
Checks are essential whenever more than one person is handling the data.
(I was an accountant for 40 years. When I started my career in 1970s everything was written down by hand. Computer based systems are significantly less accurate.)
You’ve never used an abacus, have you? It’s all about check sums.
This must be the inspiration for Yllish in Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles. I remember finding the idea of a knot-based writing system really fascinating, and to hear that it was actually a real system is super cool
Exactly what I was thinking... Yllish Knots... Go figure.
Same
I couldn't stop thinking this over the whole video.
Clicked on this video because of that!
Yep! It is!
I use simple versions of this for counting distances and other things. Mine is a bit faster because I use beads but this means the recordation is not as perminant. More recently I used it to record shovel test pits I did a day and their hole number. After watching this I realized I can record a whole crew's actvity throughtout a day with it.
As for recording someone's whole life on a string, I think it it would make sense to think about what kind of information would be recorded on a "whole life document" and consider what could be encoded on a string, things like dates, relationships, income, and perhaps even address.
Something I've thought about with quipus is their potential to map things in terms of distance or relation to geographical features like ridges and drainages.
Its kinda been a blessing in disguise the Rosetta stone was so "long" and went on and on about the pharaoh and the gods because that gave more information to help learn how to read a beautiful language. So much has been learned from that one tablet. So much history has been leaned because of it. It has been invaluable. That would be a cool video idea. Individual items that provided the most to historical and or scientific knowledge.
i’ve always wondered if the stone was written by one person, or a group of people? assuming it was one person, that person somehow knew how to write in all 3 languages!
Are you stringing us along here?
You're right, Quipus are fascinating.
He’s knot lyin’
This is quality sh*tposting.
So, does this mean the people who are trying to figure out quipus are string theorists?
@@joescott Aye, certified top shelf Sh!tposting.
I can knot believe this.....
You may find the North American Northeastern Woodlands' peoples' use of wampum for record keeping and, functionally, writing, interesting as well. Some 19th century historians/ethnographers made reference to tribal record keepers consulting these notes, treaties were often made with wampum belts, strings of wampum were used like a teleprompter in some ceremonial speeches, and so on.
Nice, thanks for pointing that out!
I have also seen references to "a bundle of notched reeds" along the east coast. John Lawson described visiting several different villages where they consulted a bundle of notched reeds and then told him the same history of their people, in his book "A New Voyage to Carolina" which was published in 1709.
There's also the Micronesian stick charts telling how Ocean currents work, which would also be fun to cover, no? And the thing is those charts are used to teach children, but not used at sea... Ever since I heard about Polynesian navigation I had a ton of respect for them.
For those who haven't seen one or heard it explained--you're in for a treat.
Joe! This is very interesting and fresh content! I had no idea there was such a thing even though in my youth I was fascinated with ciphers and encoding. Now I much to think about and relate to other things!
Interesting information regarding the word Inca, had never hear of that before. It sounds like how the word minos means king in the ancient Greek dialect that was used on Crete but then got turned into the name of one specific king, the legendary one with the Minotaur that was turned into one of the judges in the underworld. It too then became the name for the early Cretan civilization as a whole, Minoan.
😮
Oh, great example!
Same with Angola. It was the title of the king, not the name of the country.
Further etymology is still uncertain. Leading expert Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino thinks the word comes from the extinct puquina language
SO fun. Love the idea of communicating in this fashion. If you'd grown up with knot-tying-color-coding and animal-hair-texture et cetera as accounting/informing, it'd be second nature--like an abacus, but with much more nuance and complexity. It's a tough puzzle, but it'll be fascinating to learn from. Thanks, Joe!
When you learn a new language you learn new ways to express yourself. As a person who writes computer code for a living I can confirm that this extends into technology. Different languages give additional ways to approach a problem. Learning OOP methodologies made me a much better Perl coder - and thus improved my Sys Admin scripting.
18:55 deserves more love. That joke was worth clipping as a short
I became intrigued by quipus after watching the Apple TV+ sci-fi series 'See.' The show portrays a future world after an apocalypse where people have lost their vision, considering sight a myth.
Thats the first thing I thought of after watching this video. Loved 'See', but assumed while watching it the "knot-writing" was just a sci-fi hand wave to incorporate a writing/communication system into a blind and post apocalypse world. Crazy to find out it was real.
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. I was truly in awe of it. That being said, this is next level
Yes! The first time I saw it in the British Museum there were small children climbing all over it. Last time I was there it had a large Perspex case on it, which made me feel better. Actually it’s not marble but granodiorite, which is an igneous rock similar to granite. Very interesting video. So much history will be lost if those languages disappear.
I wonder if it's possible to do something comparable today.
Like showing a word, then the lip movement and breath and last a symbol of the object or activity.
The Behistun inscription is similarly incredible and important
More videos like this, please! This was fascinating.
Thank you so much for making this video, Joe ❤
I am fascinated with the idea of "things we used to know." Those Incas weren't some far off distant species, they were us, and we were them. We knew all of those things at one point, and we have just lost it to time.
Just like how ancient horse and bison species looked, how and when we got to the Americas, what happened to the Neanderthals. All of these things are things our direct ancestors knew, likely never to be known again.
What do u mean, when our ancestors got to the Americas, what happened to the neanderthals? There were no neanderthals in the Americas. But the mega fauna in every area did go extinct in the Americas, Australia , etc.....after the arrival of humans into their ecosystems.
@@masstv9052Yeah those were supposed to be separate examples, sorry! There is debate about how long homo sapiens have been in the Americas based on geological and anthropological evidence, and some debate over what happened to the Neanderthals (whether they died naturally, interbred, were outcompeted, etc.). I didn't mean for those to be related!
The library of Alexandria...
@MrScorpianwarrior I wasn't aware there was a debate over the Neanderthals, I'm pretty sure we're fairly confident we definitely interbred with them, and now they no longer exist, so either all pure breads of both kinds died out, or we simply mixed and we are what happened to Neanderthals.
There were no Neanderthals or horses in the Americas. The first humans arrived about 15,000 years ago, and horses were bought by the Spanish
Fascinating. The suggestion of 3-D aspects blew me away. Sort of how italic and bold text, or text in all caps, perform the same function in print.
Great stuff, as always. First I've heard of these fascinating objects.
What an interesting way to record things. I’m adding this video to my Amazing Language playlist and subscribing to your channel.
Joe is practically at the 7nm process node level of deep think to include a macrame plant hanger in the shot while discussing information storage encoded on ropes tied together with numerous knots. I can only imagine what he has stored in "plant hanger". He's just taunting us by including it in the shot. Its like the famous 340 cipher. Next level Joe.
1:48 I had that conversation with my mother some time ago. She was excited by the idea of a universal language, I didn't think it was so great but I couldn't put my finger on why until my niece intervened, saying: the first and fundamental way to get closer to a culture is to learn its language. And yes, that was it. The way a people approach life and see the world are expressed in their language. For example, do nouns like moon or cat or zebra have gender? (in my language they have it, and it completely changes the way we think about those things) and that is a tiny example.
A people originally from this area (South America) to refer to the past, points forward (because the past is in sight) and to refer to the future, points backwards (because we cannot see the future, like the things behind our backs). ) This also gives us an idea of time passing from behind to front over us, instead of us traveling along it like a path. How many things like these are lost when a language is lost?
I think it might have been Australian aboriginals.......
Because they were nomadic, and often in the desert where there's no landmarks, so to always no which direction they are traveling without having to keep thinking about it, & not get distracted and lost,
their grammar/language , developed to use certain words/grammar in every sentence, that was both a direction in relation to the sun (almost like how other languages use gendered words), but would also refer to things that have no relation to direction.
So as they're just speaking to each other about food, objects, etc..... certain words, or pronunciations would be used indicating what direction they are currently facing or traveling.
So while like an animal might have a single word, things like verbs and such would have four different pronunciations/words, that show which way they are currently facing or walking.
And they don't have to think about their direction since they just naturally change it as needed when they're speaking.
And when speaking about the past or future, they would use their words for the direction the sun rises to represent the future, and the direction the sun sets to represent the past.
And it's kinda hard to comprehend for non native aboriginals, who are trying to learn their language. But it comes naturally to native speakers, and non native speakers have to learn a different way of thinking when they learn the language.
@@masstv9052 The truth is that I am quite convinced that the people I am referring to are from the American South, but, in any case, this particularity in relation to "back/forward" and "past/present" must have arisen in more than a group of people around the world, and on the other hand, your conjecture about being nomadic and the way of feeling space and time is super attractive.
I started to think languages, origins, and use of the words differently after watching Manhunt: Unabomber. Something I didn't expect, but it had some great explanations even when using just one language with added new words on each area. One of my favorite shows.
My country's old language Old Norse is fairly well documented, and it is very interesting to see what words the monks had to come up with, once the North got Christianized. Because that tells us that words and thus concepts, for these things didn't exist before that.
A profound example is "evil". It simply didn't exist. You had words for being selfish, for being a nuisance to society, for not keeping your word, for not respecting other people.
These are focused on refusing to follow social rules in a society where people depend on each other.
Another example is "suffering". There was "being subjected to" and "going though."
Suffering as the idea of being harmed and the focus is on your feeling of hurt and being weakened by it, was completely foreign to them.
Bad thing happened, and you dealt with it, or you died.
The monks redefined the first one, so you got something like "being subjected to -ness".
No it doesn't completely change the way you think about things. Your social class affects the way you think more than your language does, you have been told stories of diversity being amazing and reality doesn't bear that out especially in a world with the internet. "Diversity" just seems to cause more problems because it lowers trust and people try to justify being racist but it is okay because of their skin color they are allowed to be racist or can't be racist.
It used to be that different places had different ways of doing things and the world was much more basic. These different ways of doing things and thinking might have been useful before the tech revolution of the past 100 years but now they are pretty useless. Stop it with the bullsh*t religious level mumbo jumbo.
A very interesting video especially if the viewer likes a great mystery.
I also love the way Joe talks and paces his delivery.
I loved this episode. Great summary. Certainly one of the world's great puzzles.
My daughter just competed for a college scholarship based on loose info puzzles and an interview at Northern Michigan. These are the brains being cultivated in the schools that can! I always love your stuff and I bet you will have one more subscriber.
I believe the reason that there are two different spellings is that quipu is the more traditional spelling based on Spanish orthographic conventions, while khipu is based on the revised spelling system that is supposed to more closely reflect the native pronunciation. The new spelling system was adopted by the Peruvian government in 1975 and if I'm not mistaken, it's now illegal in Peru to spell indigenous place names with the old Spanish system on official maps.
There are different dialects of Quechua as well, as different as Spanish from French or English from Norse.
Damn! That's a really great law, same how in Java it's mandatory (If I'm not mistaken) to write street names in Javanese alphabets, not only latin.
Very interesting subject, thank you for making this video about it. When you mentioned the 3D writing type it made me think of sign language, as they have multichannel signs, that are one sign that expresses a saying or a feeling or expression. I love your video 😍
Quipus are fascinating and a brilliant way to record information. Thanks for sharing your interest in them, Joe!
It really goes to show we need all kinds of brains to make progress happen. this guy just took this class as an elective and made a huge breakthrough because he was able to look at the problem from another perspective! That's awesome!!
Referring to them as "computer" makes me think of the early space program, using cord rope memory.
cord rape memory?
Actually, the key to unlocking the rosetta stone and understanding hiroglypics, was the fact that a derrivation of the language was still being spoken in a place of worship that was visited by one of the people trying to decode the stone. While it was only a spoken language, it was close enough structurally, that combining the stone and the language, made it possible to decypher the hyrglyphics.
No spoken language, no ability to read hyroglyphics.
World's oldest computer programming language
I remember learning about quipu at school ~20 years ago. There was a photo with an annotation that to this day this language has not been deciphered. I accepted that it's one of those lost secrets we'll never uncover, so hearing about this is very exciting, even if it's just the beginning.
You almost caught me with that ad transition at the end. It would be cool to show them how modern databases work
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
“Hey cool metal suit bro” that line killed me 😂😂😂
Interestingly, the native hawaiians used a version of the quipu for map making
THIS
@@lulumoon6942 what’s really interesting about that is that the rapanui did too, which would mean both may have had contact with the Incan people. Let’s also not forget that Hawaii was one on of the later islands to be discovered and settled by the Polynesians.
@@Louzahsol There's so much about the Polynesian diaspora and early contact by all sea faring cultures that we know little of!
@@lulumoon6942 it was actually my focus during my anthropology schooling. The art from the pacific is what really caught me because it is such a massive part of their societies
@@Louzahsol was my minor, and the art of navigation in the Pacific cultures is 😍
This is super cool. First time I heard of Quipus was when I played Death Stranding which makes sense with the themes of that game. They remind me of ranger beads. I used to be in the army and we used ranger beads for land navigation. Similar to quipus we used beads on strings to keep count of distance travelled. One row of beads was used for every kilometer and another set of beads were used for every 100 meters. Knots sperate the 2 sets of beads and you slide the beads up or down as you travel. Kinda similar to an abacus as well. Like a quipu and abacus combined
Thus is fascinating. Thanks for sharing this info with us!
Fascinating! I came across quipos years ago in a very old encyclopedia and was always mystified by the idea of a string language.
I heard about Quipus a long time ago and always assumed that they would be really complicated - apparently KNOT :-) Thoughts:
- I'm surprised that Inca's used base-10 - I think the Mayans used base-20 - so perhaps they both invented their own maths independently from each other
- Are we to credit the Inca's or their forebears with the invention of '0' ?
- Quipus could be read in the dark 🙂
- 95 symbols is probably enough for a syllabary and a few other perhaps logographs, numbers, punctuation marks etc... With a big enough corpus to analyse you might be able to begin to read these quipus
- it sounds like each Quipu may have needed some variable extra contextual knowledge about e.g. string colour, material etc to fully understand its meaning - this makes things harder...
- it sounds like Quipus may have developed in much the same way as Cuneiform - originally to record numbers, later somehow making the leap to sounds
"95 symbols is probably enough" -- Well, considering we're literally communicating via machines translating binary, yes, 95 is definitely more than enough.
yeah, 95 is mroe than enough for every noise a mouth can make the I.P.A. International Phonetic Alphabet
I had to google it,
butyeah that makessence
So far we understand the communication was as hard as the Roman empire with China. When Spaniards arrived to Panama the Inca empire was like a mythical place, and only because the few traders that would get through ships in the ocean to there.
I'm sure Mayans used '0' in their math. I clearly remember from the exhibition I saw long time ago.
@@rodjacksonxknotting in binary would be impractical 😂
14:50 The Totalizer Line = A CheckSum!!! It confirms the value of each line communicated.
If your checksum doesn’t match, you mistook one of the previous values. This is awesome!
Amazing!! The placement and types of knots remind me of an abacus. Thank you for this great video!! And, yay, "1491" is a marvelous book!
What a fascinating tale, from so many perspectives.
Thank you.
I highly recommend you read "The Inca Spy", a novel by Rafael Dumett (I hope it is translated into English). Set up in the times of the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors to the Tahuantinsuyo, it tells the story of a fictional quipucamayoc working for the last Inca. It really takes you back to that time and provides a probable explanation to the history, complexity, importance and final outcome of the quipus and their quipucamayocs
This may sound pessimistic, but even if the numerical system is standardized across Quipu, isn't it unlikely that the other data is? I mean, as far as I know all languages that use the Latin alphabet use Arabic numerals, but they're still different languages. I could see the Inca having an incentive to standardize things, but if Quipu predated the Inca, the task of standardizing would be monumental. What if every village had its own system of encoding ideas, and some were a lot more complex than others? It could have been more of a memory aid to supplement an oral tradition, meaning once the oral tradition was interrupted, most of the meaning would be lost forever.
I can hardly believe you just did a piece about Quipu U R awesome Joe. I have an indigenous feeling that the more we uncover/recover about Quipu the more amazing secrets it will reveal. Ty
Wow. This was fascinating. What a rich language . You make it clear and fun. Thank you
This makes my handspun yarn I make feel even more like it “speaks”. Flipping awesome video, Joe! Thanks 🙏🏻
In FDNY, the "Search Rope" is used as a tool for search and rescue in large open areas. It's DEFINITELY based off of this as each knot, on a search rope, represents a direction and distance in the "black/smoked out" building where searching for victims in a large open area (large office space, depot, wal mart/target type store) is necessary and you cannot see anything whatsoever and cannot use a wall as a point of reference of direction. The knots are our "eyes" in this situation. This was super interesting. Thank you!
This video is absolutely fascinating!
This is incredible video. So much information. Well done 👍 liked
I first learned about quipu in the 80s from a weird little cartoon called The Mysterious Cities of Gold. There was a young Inca girl who was the only one who could read the quipu, thus making her indispensably important.
Important clarification: the Inca is not the name for the people, Tehuantinsuyo was their name for the group, Inca was the name for Tehuantinsuyan leaders
Edit: I wrote this before finishing the video, I'm glad you touched on this
Tawantinsuyo. That's the correct spelling.
Very cool video! Love learning about this fascinating language, and the part about it being a three-dimensional writing system is really interesting to me- how many ways could we involve the sense of touch in our writing, in everyday life?
TY for bringing this to the public's attention.
Along with Rosetta the decoding of Linear B is a story well worth researching.
Agreed
Maybe one of these Quipus contain the entire string theory 🤔
Great content btw, as always 😉
or the entire 丝/糸 theory
So happy this video popped up on my feed!
This is awesome!! I was hoping this was a thing out in the world and I'm glad it is. How unique