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[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 26 May 2005, John Foust wrote:

> The point about the quipu is that their language and their encoding
> has been lost, and there seems to be many theories that assume
> they were purposefully encrypting the data and making it subject
> to retrieval and encoding through specialized human interpreters
> because of their perceived need for security and confidentiality
> of the information.  Some seem to believe they're a mixture of
> mneumonic and numeric data.

I've never read anywhere that the quipus were purposefully encrypted.
Only priests and such were allowed to know how to read them, that's all.
We actually do know how to "read" the information: the systems of knots
used to encode numbers was decoded long ago (they're actually encoded as
decimal!)  But we still don't know what those numbers mean.  Numbers
encoded onto a string made of alpaca's wool might represent how many
alpacas are in a particular herd.  Or a brown string might represent
baskets of potatoes, etc.  Also, the numbers might represent verses in a
song or even musical notes.  But any information that may have explained
the color coding scheme has destroyed by the stupid Spaniards.

> Who's to say that the future scholar is human?  Isn't it more likely
> that the future scholar will be a machine, a mutated Google
> hell-bent on spidering 20th century trivia?

Or maybe it'll be searching for cool music and games to download...

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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