ctographs which some Indian races inferior to them in
refinement had invented, the Peruvians had no means of sending a message
relating to tribute or the number of warriors in an army, or a date,
except the _quipu_. It consisted of one principal cord about two feet
long held horizontally, to which other cords of various colors and
lengths were attached, hanging vertically. The knots on the vertical
cords, and their various lengths served by means of an arranged code to
convey certain words and phrases. Each color and each knot had so many
conventional significations; thus _white_ = silver, _green_ = corn,
_yellow_ = gold; but in another quipu, _white_ = peace, _red_ = war,
soldiers, etc. The quipu was originally only a means of numeration and
keeping accounts, thus:

a single knot = 10
a double knot = 100
a triple knot = 1,000
two singles = 20
two doubles = 200
etc.

9. The great stone monuments described in our first section belonged,
according to some writers, to a dynasty called Pirua, who ruled over the
highlands of Peru and Bolivia long before the times of the Incas. That
early race had as the center of their civilization the shores of Lake
Titicaca.

10. _The Ancient Capital._--Cuzco, the center of government till the
time of the conquest by the Spaniards, and for a long time the only city
in the Peruvian empire, deserves a paragraph under the head archeology.
Its wonderful fortress has already been referred to, and there are other
Cyclopean remains, such as the great wall which contains the "stone of
twelve corners." Some monuments of the Inca period also attract much
attention, such as the Curi-cancha temple, 296 feet long, the palace of
Amaru-cancha (i. e., "place of serpents"), so called from the serpents
sculptured in relief on the exterior. Of these and other buildings
Squier remarks that the "joints are of a precision unknown in our
architecture; the world has nothing to show in the way of stone-cutting
and fitting to surpass the skill and accuracy displayed in the Inca
structures of Cuzco." To obtain the site for their capital the Incas had
to carry out a great engineering work, by confining two mountain
torrents between walls of substantial masonry so solid as to serve even
to modern times. The Valley of Cuzco was the source of the Peruvian
civilization, center and origin of the empire. Hence the name, Cuzco =
"navel," just as the ancient Greeks called Athens _umbilicu