Featured article: "A Jaredite Writing System" by George Potter
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Harvard University archaeologists and mathematicians are
currently using super computers to decipher the ancient
Peruvian writing system known as Quipus. In my book Nephi in
the Promised Land, I documented that during the Nephite time
period ancient Peruvians had at least two writing systems, 1) a
hand-written language system and 2) the colored-string-knot
system-the quipus.
The Jaredites also had a written language, including one that
was recorded on metal plates. However, no evidence has ever
been found of an ancient American writing system that dates
back to the period of the early Jaredites. In fact, the only
civilizations in the Americas that date to the first 1,000 years of
the Jaredites in the New World are the civilizations that sprang
up along the Peruvian shoreline during the third millennium BC.
That was, until 2005 when SABC News published a release
entitled: "Caral: Ancient Peru City Reveals 5000-year-old
'writing'". The news release stated: "Archeologists in Peru have
found a 'quipu' on the site of the oldest city in the Americas,
indicating that the device, a sophisticated arrangement of
knots and strings used to convey detailed information, was in
use thousands of years earlier than previously believed."
The article continued: "But Ruth Shady, an archeologist leading
investigations into the Peruvian coastal city of Caral, said
quipus were among a treasure trove of articles discovered at
the site, which are about 5,000 years old. This is the oldest
quipu and it shows us that this society... also had a system of
'writing' [which] would continue down the ages until the Inca
empire and would last some 4,500 years," Shady said. She was
speaking before the opening in Lima today of an exhibition of
the artifacts that shed light on Caral, which she called one of
the world's oldest civilizations.[i]
Why is this discovery so important? The Book of Mormon states that ancient
Americans had a written language as far back as the third millennium B.C. Before
the discovery of the Caral quipu, archaeologists rejected this claim. Now it is a
documented fact.
[i] . Caral: Ancient Peru City Reveals 5,000-year-old 'writing', July 19, 2005, Source SABC NEWS,
http://incas.homestead.com/quipu/caral_oldest_quipu.html (assessed July 1, 2011).