Practice question · Multiple choice
What was the khipu, and why does it matter?
Hints
- Colour, position, and knots.
- It let ten million people be censused with no script at all.
Show the answer
D. Knotted cords that ran an empire's records without writing
Why
The khipu ran the census, tribute, and storehouses of a 4,000-km empire on knotted cords, a standing rebuke to the assumption that record-keeping requires writing. We increasingly suspect it encoded more than numbers.
Practise The Americas: Mesoamerica and the Andes
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