Inca Quipu Accounting Cords

Timeline

1. c. 1200–1438Central Andes · PeruAndean polities such as the Wari and Chimú already used knotted cords to record goods and labor service, providing a local traditional basis for the Inca Empire's unified encoding system.
2. c. 1438–1532Cusco · PeruThe empire established professional quipu managers who recorded population, produce, and storage with decimal knot spacings; provinces regularly sent cord-bundle archives to the capital, supporting wide-area governance without a written script.
3. 1532–1580Colonial districts of Peru · PeruConquistadors burned large numbers of quipu archives and forced the use of Spanish written records, interrupting the reader tradition; surviving quipu became important specimens for archaeological and ethnographic study, and recent scholars have attempted to reconstruct their numerical and narrative encoding rules.