Incan Counting System Decoded?

Discovery News ^ | Feb 3 2004 | By Rossella Lorenzi

[NotQuiteCricket]

Do a google image search on water erosion, and wind erosion - then take a gander at the erosion on the sphinx.

[BigBobber]

Establishment's three-step reaction to any profound new idea:

1) It can't be true.
2) We knew it all along.
3) We thought of it first.

[NotQuiteCricket]

That went over my head so bad, it didn't even touch my bouffant (a la Marge Simpson) hair do.

:)

[elli1]

I wonder why they didn't do what the scandinavians did with reindeer, and use deer for draft animals?

Probably had almost everything to do w/ the mountainous terrain where the Incas lived (Andes). Pack animals are just more suitable for that sort of terrain. Annual aver. rainfall at Machu Picchu (lost city of Incas) is approx. 85 inches. Translation--lots of road & bridge maintainence; narrower roads & bridges require less effort to build & maintain. Also, a good deal of the farming was on narrow mountain terraces, not the ideal situ for draft animals & plows. Even today, the Sherpas rely extensively on the yak as a pack animal in the Himalayas.

The other thing is that when you live in the mountains, if you invent the wheel, you also gotta' invent brakes. Coulda' been a case where all the Incan mechanical genuises kept getting killed in cart crashes...

[aculeus]

"The fact that an explanation can be constructed for one or even several yupana that conforms to this theory of a base 40 numbering system amongst the Incas is of some modest interest."

Translation: "Who does this smartass outsider think he is, solving problems we professionals have failed to figure out?"

[Oatka]

Where do you suppose we got our base-12 system?

The biblical Nefilim (those who from Heaven came). Read the 12th Planet. Some wacky stuff but other claims make more sense than a lot of the stuff we're fed today.

Also 12 is prevalent in religion, as in the 12 gods of the Greeks, 12 Holy Imams of Islam and the 12 Apostles. A little further afield are the 12 signs of the Zodiac, etc. etc.

All the more interesting since you'd think we'd have used 10 from the beginning (fingers on both hands probably the first calculators).

Why does our current numbering system go to 12 before we start using the "teens"? Why not an eleventeen and a twelveteen?

Finanally, veering off topic, just HowinL did the ancients know that the precessional period of earth (slow periodic wobble in the Earth's axis) was 26,000 years? Who is counting?

[Restorer]

Two-wheel chariots and carts are quite usable on open plains and steppes, even without roads. Of course, when it rains their mobility goes down dramatically.

[elli1]

Huge difference. Numerical and language systems are quite arbitrary. The wheel and other physical systems are not.

True. However, my point was that the invention of the wheel was a lower tech achievement than (apparently) the numbers system of the Incas and that it is short-sighted to measure a civilization's techonological worthiness soley on whether or not that civilization used the wheel.

[PRND21]

Interesting...thanks!

[Don Joe]

I confess I was thinking of North American (i.e., "American") Indians when I was musing over the topic.

[edsheppa]

it is short-sighted to measure a civilization's techonological worthiness soley on whether or not that civilization used the wheel

Yes one must look at the big picture and clearly the wheel was not their sole technical or cultural lack else their civilization would not have been vanquished so quickly by a much smaller force at arms.

[Cronos]

And how well-developed could their civilization have been when they didn't know about wheels?

TRue, but the Egyptians built the pyramids without wheels and the Sumerian city states were founded without wheels. Pack animals would have made more sense than wheels for trade in the Andean mountainous terrain.

[Cronos]

Yeah, that base 12 got me too. We use the base 10, decimal system because that's the basis for the Indian numerals we use (1,2,3,4...) and it seems easier to us. The Binary system (base 2) is used for computers as they were based on switches which had only two options ON and OFF (1 and 0). The Sumerians and Babylonians used a base 12 system I think because they're the ones who divided a circle into 360 degrees and the year into 360 days. Our concept of time is based on the Sumerian (pretty old huh?) so we have 12*2 hours a day, each hour made of 12*5 minutes, each minute made up of 12*5 seconds. beyond that it's all decimal....

[Cronos]

oh and there's also the base 8 and 16 (octal and hexadecimal) systems which are related to the binary.

[Cronos]

OTOH, it sure as heck took a long time for ''superior cultures'' to decipher the Incan calculator

Quite correct. THey may not have had any use for a wheel in mountainous terrain. the Sumerians and Indo-Europeans who used the wheels in their chariots would have found it useful in the flatlands of northern India, the Msopotamian valley and the steppe region. The Inuit (Eskimos) would have had no use for the wheel either.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

oh and there's also the base 8 and 16 (octal and hexadecimal) systems which are related to the binary.

You can do base anything if you have a reason for it.

You can do base 37218934 if you want.

[Cronos]

Oh yeah you could, but I was just answering the question you raised about the historical basis for a base 12.

[Elsie]

360 is pretty close to our present 365.24xxx days per year.

I wonder how much mass change of our planet there'd have to be to get the year to have 360 days in it?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

It couldn't be that the Spaniards might have understood the system incorrectly. After all, we know how interested they were in cultural understanding:

Only recently (past 10 years IIRC) did we find out that the Maya understood and were using the concept of zero long before the Spanish knew about it. Most records were wiped out, those that remained were unreadable because the Spanish wiped out the readers when they killed off the upper class and religious class. Lots of things were lost forever.

But then the Spanish didn't come for mathematical exchanges or medicinal knowledge. They came for gold and conquest. And they got what they came for.

[MonroeDNA]

PhD's who study this for a living are going to have three cows:

1. It was decoded by a lowly BSEE.

2. He is not in their field.

3. They couldn't think of it first.

The dude is going to get trashed.