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Spurred in part by recent insights from textile scholars, Urton has been mounting the most sustained, intensive attack on the
khipu
code ever performed. In
Signs of the Inka Khipu
(2003), Urton for the first time systematically broke down
khipu
into their grammatical constituents, and began using this catalog to create a relational
khipu
database to help identify patterns in the arrangement of knots. Like cuneiform marks, Urton told me,
khipu
probably did begin as the kind of accounting tools envisioned by Locke. But by the time Pizarro arrived they had evolved into a kind of three-dimensional binary code, unlike any other form of writing on earth.

The Aschers worked mainly with
khipu
knots. But at a 1997 conference, William J. Conklin, a researcher at the Textile Museum, in Washington, D.C., pointed out that the knots might be just one part of the
khipu
system. In an interview, Conklin, perhaps the first textile specialist to investigate
khipu,
explained, “When I started looking at khipu…I saw this complex spinning and plying and color coding, in which every thread was made in a complex way. I realized that 90 percent of the information was put into the string
before
the knot was made.”

Building on this insight, Urton argued that
khipu
makers were forced by the very nature of spinning and weaving into making a series of binary choices, including the type of material (cotton or wool), the spin and ply direction of the string (which he described as “S” or “Z,” after the “slant” of the threads), the direction (recto or verso) of the knot attaching the pendant string to the primary, and the direction of the main axis of each knot itself (S or Z). As a result, each knot is what he called a “seven-bit binary array,” although the term is inexact because
khipu
had at least twenty-four possible string colors. Each array encoded one of 2
⁶
× 24 possible “distinct information units”—a total of 1,536, somewhat more than the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and more than twice the approximately 600 to 800 Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic symbols.

If Urton is right,
khipu
were unique. They were the world’s sole intrinsically three-dimensional written documents (Braille is a translation of writing on paper) and the only ones to use a “system of coding information” that “like the coding systems used in present-day computer language, was structured primarily as a binary code.” In addition, they may have been among the few examples of “semasiographic” writing—texts that, unlike written English, Chinese, and Maya, are not representations of spoken language. “A system of symbols does not have to replicate speech to communicate narrative,” Catherine Julien, a historian of Andean cultures at Western Michigan University, explained to me. “What will eventually be found in
khipu
is uncertain, but the idea that they have to be a representation of speech has to be thrown out.”

Not all researchers embrace Urton’s binary theory. In an interview, Brokaw argued that “there is no way to reconcile it with the decimal code in which the
khipu
[also] clearly participate.” In addition, he said, Urton’s ideas have little support in ethnographic data. But Brokaw was much more enthusiastic about other Urton
khipu
work. Working with Harvard mathematician-weaver Carrie J. Brezine, Urton used the new
khipu
database in 2005 to identify seven
khipu
that seem to represent a hierarchy of accounting records. Found half a century ago in the home of a
khipukaymayuq
in Puruchuco, an Inka administrative center near modern-day Lima, the
khipu
seemed to be created in levels, with the numerical values on lower-level
khipu
adding up to those on higher-level
khipu.
Fascinatingly, some of the knots in the top-level
khipu
seem not to be numbers. Urton and Brezine argued that these anomalous introductory knots most likely served to indicate the origin of the seven
khipu,
Puruchuco. The knots, if Urton and Brezine are correct, would be the first-ever precisely deciphered “words” in
khipu
“writing.”

Writing and reading are among the most basic methods of transmitting information from one person to another. In cultures throughout the world, this procedure is fundamentally similar. One reads a parade of symbols, taking up information with the eyes; emphasis and context is provided visually, by changing the size and form of the symbols (printing in italics or boldface, increasing or diminishing the font size, scattering words or characters around the page). All European and Asian cultures share the common experience of reading—sitting in a chair, the book in one’s lap, wagging the head from side to side (Europe) or up and down (Asia).

Because Tawantinsuyu existed only for a few centuries, it is widely assumed that the Inka
khipu
built on other, earlier forms of writing that had been developed in the region. And these cultures were unique, if Urton is right. Their books were loose bundles of string—more practical, in some ways, than paper scrolls or books, because less susceptible to water damage and physical pressure. They were read both tactilely, by running the fingertips along the knots, and visually, by looking at the colors of the strings. And whereas the choice of letters and words at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph exercise little constraint on physical connection to those at the end, the choices made by the
khipu
maker at the beginning of a string could not be undone halfway through. As a result, each
khipu
pendant provided a burst of information at the beginning that was refined further down the string.

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies’ exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.” Similarly, Urton told me, binary oppositions were a hallmark of the region’s peoples, who lived in societies “typified to an extraordinary degree by dual organization,” from the division of town populations into complementary “upper” and “lower” halves (moieties, in the jargon) to the arrangement of poetry into dyadic units. In this environment, he said, “
khipu
would be familiar.”

At the same time, Urton and other
khipu
specialists have been searching for an Inka Rosetta stone—a colonial translation of an extant
khipu.
One candidate exists—maybe. In 1996, Clara Miccinelli, an amateur historian from the Neapolitan nobility, caused a stir by announcing that she had unearthed in her family archives both a
khipu
and its Spanish translation (it encoded a folk song). But because the putative
khipu
isn’t made the same way as other surviving
khipus
and the same documents also claim that Pizarro conquered the Inka empire by poisoning its generals with arsenic-adulterated wine, many U.S. scholars have questioned their authenticity. Angered by the doubts, Miccinelli has thus far refused to let non-Italian researchers examine the documents, although she did allow an Australian laboratory to evaluate their age with a mass spectrometer. (The results, published in 2000, suggest that they are from the fifteenth century.) Because of the controversy, most researchers have been, according to Brokaw, “strategically ignoring” the Italian documents, at least for the present.

More widely accepted are the thirty-two
khipu
found in a tomb in the Peruvian Amazon in 1996, one of which Urton tentatively deciphered as a census record for the area in late pre-Hispanic times. With the help of a MacArthur fellowship he received in 2001, he has been searching Peruvian archives for something with more narrative content to match against the other
khipu—
a quest, according to Julien, that “has a chance of bearing fruit.” If Urton’s quest or others like it are successful, she told me, “We may be able to hear the Inkas for the first time in their own voice.”

I asked what she thought that voice might sound like—the voice of people attuned to tension and cloth, people who saw the stones of the world charged with spirit, people who had never seen animals larger than a llama, people who broke the world into complementary halves and thought more in terms of up and down than north and south, people who took in information about the world through their fingers.

“Foreign,” she said.

APPENDIX C

 

The Syphilis Exception

No one doubts today that European bacteria and viruses had a ruinous effect on the Americas. So, too, did African diseases like malaria and yellow fever when
they
arrived. The question inevitably arises as to whether there were any correspondingly lethal infections from the Americas, payback to the conquistadors. One candidate was long ago nominated: syphilis.

Syphilis is caused by
Treponema pallidum,
a wormlike bacterium that writhes in corkscrew spirals on microscope slides. The disease occurs in four different forms, and syphilis researchers disagree about whether the various forms are caused by different subspecies of
Treponema pallidum
or whether
Treponema pallidum
is not actually a single species but a brace of slightly different species, each responsible for a different set of symptoms. One form of infection is bejel, which creates small, coldsore-like lesions inside and around the mouth; it mainly afflicts the Middle East. The second, yaws, found in tropical places worldwide, infects cuts and abrasions and causes long-lasting sores. Neither disease spreads to bone or nerves, and they rarely kill their victims. Syphilis, the third form, is another matter. Passed on mainly by sexual contact, it inflicts genital rashes and sores before it apparently disappears, relieving sufferers but silently—and often fatally—infecting their hearts, bones, and brains. (The fourth form, which exists mainly in Mesoamerica, is pinta, a mild skin infection.)

The first recorded European epidemic of syphilis erupted in late 1494 or early 1495. In the former year, Charles VIII of France led fifty thousand vagabond mercenaries from every alley of Europe to attack Naples, which he desired to rule. (He used mercenaries because even at the dawn of the sixteenth century most European states did not have the resources to support a standing military.) Charles conquered the city only to learn after he had occupied it for a few months that the various Italian statelets were massing against him, aided by a big contingent of Spanish troops. Struck with fear, the king ignominiously fled with his men in the spring of 1495. Both entry and exit were accompanied by sack, pillage, wanton slaughter, and mass rape. Somewhere along the way
Treponema pallidum
wriggled into the bloodstream of Charles’s retreating mercenaries. The most widely suggested source is their Spanish attackers, with transmission occurring via the women violated by both sides. Whatever the case, Charles’s army disintegrated as it fled, shedding companies of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective means for spreading syphilis over a large area is hard to imagine. Within a year cities throughout Europe were banishing people afflicted with the disease.

Did Columbus bring the disease from the Americas, as the timing of the first epidemic suggests? There are three main arguments to support an affirmative answer to this question and an equal number against it. The first on the pro side is the sheer deadliness of the disease—early records indicate that syphilis then was even more ghastly than it is now. Green, acorn-size boils filled with stinking liquid bubbled everywhere on the body. Victims’ pain, one sixteenth-century observer noted, “were as thoughe they hadde lyen in fire.” The fatality rate was high. Such deadliness fits in with the notion that
Treponema pallidum
was new to Europe. Orthodox Darwinian theory predicts that over time the effect of most transmissible diseases should moderate—the most lethal strains kill their hosts so fast they cannot be passed on to other hosts. Thus syphilis, then wildly virulent and lethal, acted like a new disease.