История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 58 стр.

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UNIT 8

HOW ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS DEVISED

WRITING SYSTEMS

Records made of knotted strings

High in the Andes Mountains, an old man fiddled with a bunch of coloured,

knotted strings and racked his brain to interpret the meaning of the knots. If the old

man made even the slightest error of interpretation, his punishment could be death.

Message of the belt

The Inca peoples who inhabited what is now Peru from around AD 1000

used these knotted cords to record important data from each district in the inca

empire. The knots at the end of a string represented single units, above them tens,

above these hundreds, and so on. Each differently- coloured cord represented a

commodity, such as gold, maize, cattle or spears.

In North America too, native peoples used available materials to convey

information. Wampum belts, made of shells, were exchanged between tribes to

mark agreements, to record events or to send messages.

The belts, made from shell beads strung together in rows, could be as long as

6ft (1.8 m).Designs varied from tribe to tribe, but white belts generally expressed

good things, such as peace and friendship, whereas black belts ( made from the

purple shell ) meant bad news. A black wampum marked with a hatchet in red

paint signified war.