Although counting with knots may seem alien and impractical to people living in the 21st century, using a quipu isn’t as confusing as it appears. Because the strings are arranged vertically ...

The Incas had a system of accounting that relied on the quipu. Cords of various colours were attached to a main cord with knots. The number and position of knots as well as the colour of each cord ...

While much of the world used stone tablets or other media that didn’t survive the centuries, the Incas used something called quipu which encoded numeric data in strings using knots. Now the ...