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Ancient Incan Mystery Unraveled

By Kanika Gupta | Update Date: Jan 11, 2016 12:33 PM EST

Mysterious find unearthed by the archaeologists of Peru will help the unravel the greatest puzzles of all times, how to read the knotted string records that were called Khipus and maintained by the Incas. The site where the ancient discovery is made, Incahausi, is located 100 miles south of Lima. For the first time have the discovery of several khipus have been made in place where they truly belonged, in this case, an agricultural product storage house where they seemed to have been used for the accounting purposes. Some of these khipus found in 2013 at the site were buried deep under the remaining parts of produce that was at least hundreds of years old, that was fairly preserved due to extremely arid desert conditions, reported New York Times. This discovery is very crucial because before this, all the khipus that were ever discovered were found in the graves where they were buried with the scribes who were not only the users but also the creators of the device.

"We can look at how the chili pepper khipu differs from the peanut khipu and from the corn khipu in terms of their colour and other characteristics. We can build up a kind of sign vocabulary of how they were signifying this or that thing in their world," said Gary Urton, a leading expert on khipus who is studying the new trove with Alejandro Chu, the archaeologist who led the excavation. So far, 29 khipus from Incahausi, about 500 years old, have been kept in a brick house in Lima. This house belongs to Patricia Landa, an archaeological conservator. It is Landa's job to take these khipus, that are found in jumbled and rolled up form, and clean them as well as untangle them so that he researchers can use it for deciphering purposes, said the Hindu

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