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The Inca Empire kept its records on quipu, bundles of knotted cords that stored numbers such as taxes, census counts and the contents of storehouses.

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A quipu is a main cord with anything from a few to thousands of cords hanging from it. On the accounting quipu, knots worked like written digits: a knot's height on the cord showed units, tens, hundreds or thousands, its type showed the number, and colours and groupings showed what was being counted. Trained record-keepers called quipucamayoc made and read them, and Spanish officials still relied on them for years after the conquest began in 1532. Knotted records are older than the Inca: the first certain examples come from the Wari Empire, around AD 600 to 1000. Several hundred quipu survive, mostly in museums. Researchers, including Gary Urton of Harvard, have gathered them into databases to test whether some also recorded names or stories.

Türkçe oku
İnka İmparatorluğu kayıtlarını quipu denen düğümlü ip demetlerinde tutardı. Vergiler, nüfus sayımları ve ambarlardaki mallar bu düğümlere işlenirdi.

Quipu, bir ana ipten ve ona bağlı birkaç taneden birkaç bine kadar sarkan ipten oluşur. Hesap tutmaya yarayan quipularda düğümler, yazılı rakamlar gibi işlerdi: düğümün ip üzerindeki yüksekliği birler, onlar, yüzler ya da binler basamağını, düğümün türü sayının kendisini gösterirdi. Renkler ve iplerin gruplanışı da neyin sayıldığını belirtirdi. Quipuları, quipucamayoc denen eğitimli kayıt tutucular hazırlar ve okurdu. İspanyol yöneticiler, 1532'de başlayan fetihten sonra da yıllarca bu kayıtlara başvurdu. Düğümlü kayıtlar İnkalardan da eskidir: kesin olarak bilinen ilk örnekler, MS 600–1000 dolaylarındaki Wari İmparatorluğu'na aittir. Günümüze birkaç yüz quipu ulaştı; çoğu müzelerde. Harvard'dan Gary Urton gibi araştırmacılar, bazı quipuların ad ya da öykü de kaydedip kaydetmediğini anlamak için bunları veri tabanlarında topladı.

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