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Quipus are the mysterious bundles of colored and knotted threads that served as the Inca empire’s means of recording information

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问题     Quipus are the mysterious bundles of colored and knotted threads that served as the Inca empire’s means of recording information. The code of the quipus has long since been forgotten, and the only major advance in understanding them was the insight, made in 1923, that the knots were used to represent numbers. The quantity and positioning of the knots, at least in certain quipus, is agreed to represent a decimal system.
    A new and possibly significant advance in deciphering the quipu system may now have been gained by two Harvard researchers, Gary Urton and Carrie J. Brezine. They believe they may have decoded the first word—a place name—to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo), and have also identified what some of the many numbers in the quipu records may be referring to.
    Though a single word would be just the first step in a very long road, it would open the possibility of discovering a whole new level of meaning in the quipus. It could also resolve a longstanding controversy by establishing that quipus included a writing system and were not just personal mnemonic devices understood only by the person who made them, as some scholars have maintained.
    That in turn would help explain the "Inca paradox," that among states of large size and administrative complexity the Inca empire stands out as the only one that apparently did not invent writing. The paradox would be resolved if indeed the quipu encodes a writing system as well as numbers.
    The Harvard researchers also have ideas about the nature of the item being so carefully tallied in the quipus under study: units of labor, like an ancient time log. The Inca empire, which lasted from about 1450 to 1532, depended on tribute levied in the form of a labor tax. Because of the importance of the tax for building the imperial roads and other public works, both the requisition and delivery of the labor days owed in tax were likely to have been carefully recorded by the Inca bureaucrats. Quipus were used both by high officials to issue instructions and by lower officials to report what they had done. It is easy to imagine a diligent accountant wanting to compare the outgoing quipu, or a copy of it, with the incoming response quipu.
    Since the quipu could represent instructions sent to the ruler of Puruchuco from the provincial governor, or accounting records sent from Puruchuco to the governor, it would have been useful for the records to carry a tag identifying the place they referred to. As it happens, all the quipu in the two top summarizing layers carry an initial set of knots designating three ones, as if 1-1-1 designated the place name for Puruchuco. The lowest level quipus do not carry this ZIP code, perhaps because they never left Puruchuco and so didn’t need one. If this interpretation is accepted by other scholars, it would be the first meaning beyond the number system to be identified in quipus, Dr. Urton said.
    Galen Brokaw, a quipu expert at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said it was plausible to suggest the numbers being tallied in many quipu referred to the labor tax. Dr. Urton’s identification of 1-1-1 as a place name would, if confirmed, be "a substantive contribution to understanding how quipu worked," Dr. Brokaw said. The proposal is fascinating, he said, but hard to verify because the provenance of most quipu is unknown.
    Only 700 or so quipus have been preserved, since the Spanish destroyed them as a matter of policy. About two-thirds are clearly numerical records, with knots placed in a series of levels, each corresponding to a power of 10. But scholars have been baffled by the nature of the remaining third, which embody some different meaning.
    Those who believe the nonnumerical quipus were just personal mnemonic devices cite a 17th-century Jesuit chronicler who reported that each quipu maker could understand only his own quipu, not those of others. But the chronicler may have been misinformed, Dr. Urton wrote in his book Signs of the Inka Khipu, because his report was made 70 years after the Spanish authorities in Lima had condemned quipu as idolatrous in a decree of 1583 and had ordered them burned.
    Dr. Urton believes that the Puruchuco hierarchy of quipus would have been made by different people and hence show information passing between them via quipu. This would be a significant finding, if true, since it points to the quipu encoding generally understood signs, not a personal set of signs.
Based on the latest discovery by Harvard researchers, quipus might be all the following EXCEPT______.
选项 A、an approach to exchange information between individuals
B、a system of numbers
C、accounting records of labor tax
D、a form of instructions or reports by bureaucrats
答案B
解析
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