Popular Philology? A London Carpenter’s 1820s Attempt to Decipher an “Inca” Quipu

Few London ship’s carpenters spent the 1820s quite like Alexander Strong. Between stints of manual labor, Strong devoted his evenings to making sense of a tangled bundle of knotted cords—purportedly an Andean quipu—from which, after years of solitary study, he became convinced he could read a Biblical history of the New World. Until recently, a short 1827 pamphlet was the only known trace of Strong’s “decipherment,” long dismissed by archaeologists as a fanciful misreading of a forged object. This paper draws instead on a more substantial source: Strong’s previously unexamined autograph manuscript. While earlier accounts have focused on Strong’s motivations, his flawed conclusions, or his place within the broader European history of mistranslating the Andes, I center Strong’s decoding method: how a semi-literate, working-class tradesman attempted to extract and translate hundreds of Latin words from the “Inca” cords in his possession. Examining this process shifts attention away from the truth-value of Strong’s claims and toward a broader consideration of the non-elite uptake of philological methods, the entangled histories of science and archaeological decipherment, and the place of three-dimensional texts within philology’s past and present.