"developing a language of knotted strings known as quipo, which has yet to be decoded"
Sigh, not this crap again. I bought a book in Arequipa or Cusco back in 2004 or so that described in detail a large amount of quipu that had been found in the area. Just reading the Wikipedia article would have been enough for this author to debunk this Incan mythical nonsense. It's pretty widely settled now that quipu are a system for counting and bookkeeping and is not a writing system in the sense that it translates words or sounds into written equivalents. E.g. you had to know that red knots represented mules and yellow ones baskets of corn (it's obviously much more complex than this). It's still a writing system and indubitably very useful and ingenious for and of the Incans, but we do know a bunch about it.
Sigh, not this crap again. I bought a book in Arequipa or Cusco back in 2004 or so that described in detail a large amount of quipu that had been found in the area. Just reading the Wikipedia article would have been enough for this author to debunk this Incan mythical nonsense. It's pretty widely settled now that quipu are a system for counting and bookkeeping and is not a writing system in the sense that it translates words or sounds into written equivalents. E.g. you had to know that red knots represented mules and yellow ones baskets of corn (it's obviously much more complex than this). It's still a writing system and indubitably very useful and ingenious for and of the Incans, but we do know a bunch about it.