Open To Interpretation

Notes: well, it's late, and a late search turned up a couple things I don't want to lose...if I had a whole lot of funds, I'd snag this!

Pre-Columbian Inca clothes poncho for child in fabric

3 500 €

https://furnishyourcastle.com/prod/pre-columbian-inca-clothes-poncho-child-fabric_2452.php

unquote

bit much!...it's for a child, and has the step fret design...well, let me work backward the steps that brought me to it...before that I was looking at a checker board tunic...the checker board was the emblem of the Inca army...all the soldiers wore it...

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This fine tapestry-woven garment features identical black-and-white checkerboard designs on front and back, inside and out, with a red, V-shaped yoke and meticulously embroidered finished edges. Worn by men over a loincloth, such garments were one of the primary markers of identity in the Inca Empire. This type of tunic was first mentioned in 1532 by Francisco de Jerez, secretary to the conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Jerez described the fateful meeting between Atahualpa, the Inca emperor, and Pizarro's small band of men in Cajamarca, Peru, noting that the first regiment of the Inca army wore checkerboard livery.

Cloth was of profound importance in Inca culture: no political, military, social, or religious event among the Inca was complete without textiles being exchanged or gifted, burned or sacrificed. Fine tapestry woven tunics would have been bestowed on warriors who distinguished themselves on the battlefield, or given as diplomatic gifts by Inca rulers in their campaigns to expand their vast empire. Ownership and use of tapestry tunics would have been closely controlled by the Inca state, and only those upon whom such gifts were bestowed were allowed to wear them. The Inca also exerted tight control over the production of tapestry tunics, and surviving full-size examples display remarkably little variation in size.

Inca tapestry tunics were woven as a single panel with single-interlocking joins, with the neck slit held closed by a temporary weft yarn that was removed after the weaving was complete. Once the finished weaving was cut from the loom, all seams and selvage edges were completely covered with fine double faced embroidery. The seams were concealed with a precisely repeated series of multicolored bands of different widths. Along the bottom, just above that embroidered edge, a zigzag line was created with similarly colored yarns. The precise meaning of this zigzag line is unknown, but it was of such importance that it was included in depictions of royal tunics in one of the earliest illustrated manuscripts concerning the Inca Empire (Guaman Poma de Ayala 1615-1615).

hmmph...looted the mets whole caption...it's very good!...gives a sense of how important textile emblems were...in reading, I find the many tribes under the Inca's control each had to wear distinctive clothing, especially hats...nowadays we see the designs as decorative, decorative in the way our clothing is...but to the people under the Inca control, the designs were all important...if you wore the wrong designs, you would be punished...the Inca were obsessed with keeping track of everyone...I don't know if it so, but after considering what I learned about Khipus tonight, and how everything was counted, I have this suspicion that each Inca person had numbers, and they will have been incorporated in the textile designs of the clothes they wore...oh. that's maybe not so, but have a look at this tunic...each different square might represent a different tribe...a tribe's particular design...

the Kahn page on this, there are lots of sites, had it that it probably belonged to a ruler...and it depicts his dominion, the tribes he rules, each with its representative tunic, I think, maybe, insomuch the army's tunic is there...are the squares little tunics?...a dogear...and a step back from this was a fellow named Urton who has the idea that some of the Khipus were mnemonic devices for story telling of myths and such...commonly known is the Khipus are for counting...the story telling ones have knots and things in a more random way that makes no sense for counting...the Inca's had a base ten counting system just like ours, sorta...different knot tying for 1 on up...zero was a gap between knots, so they knew how to use zero like we do...

For tax purposes annual censuses were regularly taken to keep track of births, deaths, marriages, and a worker’s status and abilities. For administrative purposes populations were divided up into groups based on multiples of ten (Inca mathematics was almost identical to the system we use today), even if this method did not always fit the local reality. These censuses and the officials themselves were examined every few years, along with provincial affairs in general, by dedicated and independent inspectors, known as a tokoyrikoq or ‘he who sees all’.

"neat...that khipu in the Bolivia museum has step frets..."...the clip has stills of different khipus, and a few had like textile upper portions...thinking on this, as they look odd, I wonder if these were cannibalized from textiles...unraveled into the long khipu strings, some of the original textile left at the top...I dunno...but one, said to be in the Bolivia museum, has greek keys, and, and, the step fret...though a different 'take' on step fret design...even has what looks to be an eye...and shaped like the chicken looking critters above...I could take pic with my camera of the youtube paused...it's late!...it's at the 32:58 mark...

oh!...I found a trick, I think...how cool!...I paused the clip, right clicked for a copy menu...and it doesn't let one pic copy, but one can get the ulr for that particular pause of the clip!...so just click on that, and there it is!...the step before that one was islands in Mayan myths...there is a whole bunch about sacred Mayan islands...for tomorrow afternoon during the game...I'm thinking that the step fret belonged to one particular tunic design...to one particular tribe under Inca rule...oh, a reach for sure!...Update:...well, for goodness sake...I found it...again at the met...