Inca’s Recording System

① While Egypt had hieroglyphs on paper and stone and Mesopotamia had cuneiform pressed into clay, the Inca appeared to lack a written language that we would recognize.This has always been a puzzle to archaeologists, who habitually assume that advanced civilizations must have had some system for their central administration to keep track of what went on in its empire. The only possible Incan system of recording information might have been the mysterious knotted strings known as Quipu.

② A typical Quipu consists of several twisted plaits of strings that descend from a single unified string. Each descending string is dyed in many different colors, are twisted to the right or left, and have a wide variety and number of knots tied in them. Cord color, cord length, knot type, knot location, and cord twist direction together hold information that was once readable by several South American societies.

③ The main content of Quipu are numbers which are expressed by knots on a section of rope. Unlike our “Arabic” numbers which uses ten different symbols for each digit , Quipu makers tied multiple knots in a tight sequence to represent a “digit”. Digits can range from no knots representing zero to nine knots representing nine. Multiple sequences of knots represent a number larger than ten. The number , for example, would be represented as three sequences of knots, the first one with three knots, the second with two knots, and the last one with one knot. In this sense, Quipu was a positional ten-based numeric system that, instead of being encoded in written symbols, is encoded in knots.

④ Three different kinds of knots are used in Quipu. Commonly, the single knot (S) is used to represent the value of one except in the very last position, where two different knot types are used. The last position employs the figure eight knot (E) to represent the value one and the multiple four-turn long knots (L) to represent values higher than one. In other words, the figure eight knot and the four-turn long knot are both used to signal the end of a numbe.

⑤ During excavations in the 1950s, a cache of Quipu was discovered in an urn near the ruins of the Puruchuco palace, a major regional and administrative site in the central highlands of the Inca Empire. A recent research into this collection of Quipu showed that it contains some form of hierarchical accounting information. Scholars divided these Quipus into three groups: levels I, II, and III. Level I Quipus have six sections, level IIs have three,and level IIIs have only one. On all levels, these sections, almost always, have the same number of pendant numeric cords arranged in the same color pattern, implying that they all record the same set of goods. If one adds up numeric cords in the same position across different sections of a level I Quipu, the sum is equal, or very close, to a single numeric cord in the same position in one section of a level II Quipu. Similarly, level II numeric cords sum up to a single level III numeric cord. This tells us that the accounting information is being summarized at an increasingly higher level, with the level III Quipu most likely representing the grand total of goods.

⑥ In addition, level II and III Quipus also have what is called “ introductory segments”. In every introductory segment, there is always a pendant cord that contains three figure eight (E) knots. Since figure eight knots only serve as the number one in the last position on a Quipu number, a sequence of three figure eight knots is clearly not a number. In fact, it is argued that the sequence might represent the name of the town and that the information is there so that when the Quipus would be passed to administrators outside of Puruchuco, it would still be identifiable as Puruchuco’s Quipus. Other explanations point to the information that must be stored there, such as what kind of thing is being counted, and possibly, for what period of time.

——2011年01月15日北美考试机经

The word “hierarchical” in Paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to ____ .

A. with numerous numbers

B. with different levels

C. ancient

D. varied

核心词汇：

词汇练习：

阅读下列句子，用所给单词（或词组）的正确形式填空：

twisted encode cuneiform excavation sequence

1. The Romans called the shape cuneus and this gives the script its name of ____. (TPO-26: Sumer and the First Cities of the Ancient Near East )

2. At the upper timberline the trees begin to become ____ and deformed. (TPO-1: Timberline Vegetation on Mountains )

3. When researchers had one year olds imitate an action ____ one year after they first saw it, there was correlation between the children’s verbal skills at the time they first saw the event and their success on the later memory task. (TPO-21: Autobiographical Memory )

4. Whether people can remember an event depends critically on the fit between the way in which they earlier ____ the information and the way in which they later attempt to retrieve it. (TPO-6: Infantile Amnesia )

5. The flotation samples from the ____ allowed botanists to study shifts in plant-collecting habits as if they were looking through a telescope at a changing landscape. (TPO-20: Early Settlements in the Southwest Asia )

参考答案：

1. cuneiform 2. twisted 3. sequence 4. encoded 5. excavations cJgbYh26F6uWtj1d+clLEtA10BeMgPAKb+ETWXHKcspdPZ5LTUxDM+QYOaOB3Prt