Key To Lost Inca Language Sitting On A Shelf For 136 Years

The linguistic “Holy Grail” that could reveal the lost language of the Incan empire has just been discovered gathering dust on a library shelf.   How many esteemed scientists, famous authors and exalted men from great universities, for 136 years walked by the nondescript shelf that silently held its priceless contents?  An old, long forgotten book and a woven ball of secretly coded knots made of string awaited only the most worthy of researchers to discover its true value.  

It would take a scientist and an author, a woman and a man to look beyond the Google world, digging up their treasure with trowels made of books and speech.  The Costa Rican team of Philologist Ahiza Vega and Author José León Sánchez after years of researching indigenous peoples in their home country may have exposed the secrets of not only the Incas but other Mesoamerican civilizations as well.  Unlike the Aztecs and the Mayans who left behind impressive stone structures covered in hieroglyphs, the Incas melted into time with no written stone records and no written language.   The indigenous Talamanca people of Costa Rica, whose descendants still reside near the Panama border, also shared the same Incan situation; functioning without an alphabet.   

A skeleton key woven from string is what will unlock the secrets of the Incan language and it was made in Costa Rica.  This codec device known as the Quipu (Khipu) was utilized in many Latin American pre-Columbian societies.  An intricately knotted group of strings or cords, a Quipu was used to record everything that needed to be counted e.g.; numbers of crops, taxes, land ownership, precious metals, census data, etc.  Dr. Gary Urton, Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies at Harvard, postulates after decades of research that the elaborate string-works of the Quipu’s array of intricate knots was based on a 7-bit binary system.  In 2002 Dr. Urton and Carrie Brezine established the Khipu Database Project where various data from the Quipu cord anomalies of color, fiber and knot patterns are stored.  It is becoming more commonly believed that the Quipu knots contain more than just accounting data.  They may also be programmed in a universal language that could have been used throughout the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica and perhaps even Asia.  Because Quipus were found at the 4600 year old Caral, Peru site and in China, scientists now realize that some accounts of origins and contact, previously thought not to have taken place between ancient civilizations, may have to be revised.  

Despite all of the international research, the essence of the intricately knotted code of the Incan Quipu has still remained hidden, perhaps until last week.  The aforementioned team Vega/Sánchez discovered their “Rosetta Stone” while conducting research amongst mountains of data in the largest library in the world, The Library of Congress in Washington D.C.  Their five-year project has been to uncover information about the written and spoken language of the indigenous Talamanca people of Costa Rica.  Vega and Sánchez were interested in writings from an American geologist named William More Gabb who, in 1873 spent three years in Costa Rica studying the geography, geology and resources of the Talamancan region. Persistent rumors about gold being discovered in Talamanca inspired the Costa Rican government to hire Gabb for the expedition. 

Gabb conducted his research, map making and interacting with the Talamanca people.  He easily learned their language and customs and recorded it all in a detailed book that was quite a treasure trove of cultural information.  However, what has the entire archaeological world on Tilt is the fact, unknown until now, Gabb had hired a Talamancan who still knew the secret language of the Quipu to transform all of his natural history notes and research from his journal into the ancient language of the knotted strings. So 136 years later, the William Gabb book entitled, “On Indian Tribes and Languages of Costa Rica” was sitting right next to the tightly knotted matching Quipu when Vega and Sánchez found it on that library shelf in Washington D.C. not long ago. 

Not quite as heavy as the granite Rosetta Stone, the William Gabb book and Quipu companion nonetheless should plug a gaping hole of lost historical knowledge from the land of the Giant Condors.  It’s hard to wrap a “modern” western head around how advanced the Incan world actually was.  It becomes even more difficult to understand from this same perspective how such a grand empire with its four provincial governors and a king replete with an army could function without a written alphabetical language.  The Incan society stretched about 2485 miles in length, had 18,000 miles of roads, suspension bridges, irrigation canals, a robust economic engine with an artisan trade business in ceramics, gold items and textiles and stunningly designed monumental buildings with a maize and llama-centric food industry.  

How ever they managed their extraordinary success, it all came to a halt for the Incas as well as the entire Latin American cultures including the indigenous populations of Costa Rica who were over matched and subjugated by 400 years of Spanish Conquest and inquisition.  An unfortunate part of this religious/cultural “mind meld” was that the Jesuit missionaries destroyed as many of the Quipus as they could find, believing they were part of Incan pagan worship.   

What remained of the ancient Quipus were approximately 600 of the sacred devices that were hidden under houses and other secret places.  Discovered by archaeologists and thieves, they now reside still indecipherable in museum cases all over the world.  William Gabb was hired to look for Costa Rican gold and actually found something no amount of gold could ever buy-knowledge, history and language.   

With renewed optimism, we now will be waiting impatiently to hear a bit more of the mysteries of past Humankind from the new caretakers of an old book and a ball of knotted strings.

http://incas.homestead.com/quipu/quipu_san_cristobal_rapaz_oyon_video.html (video)

Sources:

http://tiny.cc/qw0sx “Pioneering Contributions of William M. Gabb to the Geology and Mapping of Costa Rica”--Central American Studies Yearbook, Vol 25 number 002, University of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica, 1999  oscarf@cariari.ucr.ac.cr

http://tiny.cc/fzju1 

http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/urtsig.html 

http://archaeology.about.com/od/americanancientwriting/a/quipu.htm 

http://tiny.cc/anz7g 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system   

http://agutie.homestead.com/files/Quipu_B.htm