Mysteries of Inca tablets and citadels

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Italian engineer Nicolino De Pasquale, completely unknown in scientific circles, has solved perhaps one of the long-standing mysteries of the Inca civilization - how they performed complex calculations.

When the Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro deceived and then strangled the last Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1533, the Inca Empire was a state unparalleled in size on this planet.

An even more outstanding feature of this civilization was that the Incas were almost the only of the great cultures of the Bronze Age that did not create a written language. At least, this was generally accepted until recently, since historians did not have any written documents of this culture.

It was only relatively recently that researchers discovered that kipu - a bizarre, nodular letter used by the Incas to hold large messages and bookkeeping in their memory - actually contains, perhaps, an advanced, hidden script based on a seven-bit binary code within it.

But until recently, no one has been able to explain the meaning of the rectangular Inca tablets known as yupana.

Diverse in size and shape, these yupana are often interpreted as “stylized models of fortress”. Some researchers have attempted to view them as a counting board like an abacus, but how arithmetic operations were performed here remained completely unclear.

And just recently in Italy, engineer De Pasquale, who in life is very far from the secrets of the pre-Columbian civilizations of America, received a book about mathematical riddles as a birthday present. As one of the puzzles, it offered an incomprehensible drawing from a Spanish manuscript of the 16th century on the customs, customs and culture of the Incas - an array of rectangular cells in five rows and four columns.

In the rightmost cell of the bottom row there is one circle, in the next cell there are 2 circles, in the third 3, and in the last cell of the row there are 5 circles. An engineer who understands something in mathematics quickly realized that the number of circles in the cells is the first elements of the Fibonacci sequence - 1, 2, 3, 5, … - where each subsequent number is the sum of the two previous ones.

It took Pasquale less than an hour to establish that the puzzle matrix really is a kind of abacus, but the calculations here are based on base 40, and not like in the usual decimal system.

That is why, in fact, scientists for a long time did not manage to correctly interpret the meaning of the yupan tablet, since they tried hard to tie the calculations on it to the base 10 (there is a lot of historical evidence that the Incas used the decimal number system). De Pasquale, in defense of his hypothesis, demonstrates that base 40 calculations are noticeably faster, and the result is easily reduced to base 10.

But the most important thing is that nearby (as is often the case with discoveries) in Florence there was simultaneously an exhibition "Peru, 3000 Years of Masterpieces", the curator of which, Antonio Aimi, is well acquainted with the mystery of Yupane. Aimi obtained images of 16 of these tablets, which are stored in various museums around the world. And all of them, despite their different form, worked very well as a "calculator" according to the De Pasquale system.

Another indirect confirmation of the hypothesis about the numbers of the Fibonacci series is provided by the records of the Spanish monk Jose de Acosta, who lived among the Incas from 1571 to 1586: “To see how they use a different type of calculation, using maize grains, is a complete delight … They put one grain here, three somewhere else and eight, I don't know where. They move the grain here and there, and as a result, they carry out their calculations without the slightest mistake."

Among scientific specialists, the discovery of the amateur De Pasquale caused a lot of controversy, and opinions, as usual, were divided. Even the proponents of the new hypothesis, most notably Aimi, admit that there is no reliable historical evidence to support the Inca base 40 system of calculus.

For complete confidence, it is necessary, as he put it, "Rosetta Yupana", by analogy with the Rosetta stone, which contained the same inscription in three different writing systems and played a decisive role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs by Francois Champollion …

Nicolino De Pasquale & Antonio Aimi. "Andean Calculators"

CITADEL TUNNELS

Spanish archaeologist Anselm Pi Rambla, using the latest technology to explore the structures of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire, discovered a long tunnel at least 2 kilometers long underground.

The tunnel connects the Temple of the Sun (Coricancha) with the Sacsayhuaman fortress and, according to measurements and calculations of archaeologists, may form part of a large unified system of galleries, halls and spring sources located under the sacred city of the Incas.

Pi Ramba is part of the major archaeological project, Viracocha, launched by the Peruvian government in August 2000. On his last important discovery, the Spanish scientist made a report to the Commission on Culture of the Peruvian Congress, noting that new data "can change views on the history of Peru."

According to the results of underground radar scanning, the tunnel unites into a single complex the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Viracocha, the Huascara Palace and several other important structures of Cusco. Scientists even know the exact location of one of the entrances to this tunnel - in the Sacsayhuaman fortress - where it was deliberately walled up by the authorities in 1923 to prevent adventurers from disappearing into the dungeon.

Geophysical underground scanning radars make it possible to determine the depth of the identified objects, and in this case the tunnel goes down very deep - about 100 meters, which raises questions about the culture that created such a grandiose structure.

Pi Rambla himself believes that this is the legendary underground citadel of Cuzco, built in the era long before the Inca Empire and mentioned in ancient Indian legends recorded in the historical chronicles of Garcilaso de la Vega and Cieza de Leon. Excavation and exploration of the citadel is scheduled to begin this May (2003).

PROYECTO KORICANCHA

los tuneles de los andes y el oro de los incas