Lynne’s answer to “Hi, I just finished your book. The section on Khipu immediately reminded me of the Chinese knot sys…” > Likes and Comments
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This is fantastic. Thank you so much for going to so much trouble. It is greatly appreciated. Time to start reading what you have sent!
Lynne
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This is fantastic. Thank you so much for going to so much trouble. It is greatly appreciated. Time to start reading what you have sent!Lynne
The quote I had in mind was from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 80: "Let people return to making knots on ropes, instead of writing." That’s the only reference, but I found a couple of (unfortunately old and racist) journal articles which describe the use of knotted cords in ancient China and other cultures:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1497058
https://books.google.com/books?id=O7M...
These also contain information on notched sticks used for carrying messages and keeping track of debts.
I also found a Chinese source with illustrations:
http://hanziyuhanziwenhuaxueyanjiu.h....
I can’t speak for its veracity (my Chinese is quite limited) but it argues that Chinese writing emerged directly from the rope system. In the first diagram, the top two rows of knots show how numbers were encoded. The knots in the bottom row do not represent numbers; in fact, they bear remarkable similarity to known characters in the oracle bone script, which are shown directly above for comparison. There are citations at the bottom as well. If this is not a fabrication the implications are very interesting indeed!