Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A record-keeping device of the Inca Empire consisting of a series of variously colored strings attached to a base rope and knotted so as to encode information, used especially for accounting purposes.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Back to quipu...an article about the same research in the August 20-26 issue of New Scientist spells it "khipu" for both the plural and singular.
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A numbering system had been decoded, but now people are working on reading the khipu for far more than numbers.
Best American Science & Nature Writing 2008 julieandrews 2009
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What really cool things are we going to learn about the Inca when they finally crack the khipu?
Best American Science & Nature Writing 2008 julieandrews 2009
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The Incas of Peru, before the Conquest, had a whole system of “writing” based on a variation of knots in colored strings, the “khipu” or “quipu.”
Texture : A.E. Stallings : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007
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The first systematic analysis of the grammar of the khipu code did not appear until 2003.
Information, Culture, Policy, Education: Picking up the quipu belatedly 2006
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The first systematic analysis of the grammar of the khipu code did not appear until 2003.
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Making a khipu gives you a tremendous amount of appreciation for how khipu makers worked with threads.
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Since 2002, he and his colleague Carrie Brezine, a mathematician, have maintained the Khipu Database Project at Harvard University, which corrals all existing khipu scholarship in one online repository.
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ARCHAEOLOGY spoke with Gary Urton about mystified Spanish colonials, teaching Harvard students how to make khipu, and bringing tax records to the afterlife.
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Just throw down their khipu and run out of the room?
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