Inca Tokapu Design • Russwurm

Inca Tokapu Design

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What is a tocapu?

This page collects some information about tocapus.

Tocapus (in this case of the Incas) are graphical symbols. Some call it the letters or writing system of the Incas but this is not proven and seems just hypothetical as of now.

Tocapus are typically found on textiles but are not limited to it - so there are tocapus found painted on various materials and tocapu like inscriptions can be found on stone as well. Still the most impressive ones can be found on men's tunics, so called "uncus".

How does a tocapu look like?

The tocapu is typically a square and mostly abstract sign. In general a tocapu is composed of geometric figures like:

  • squares
  • diamonds
  • rectangles
  • lines
  • rhomboids
  • rectangles
  • and combinations of all of them

At the moment it looks like there are not too many active pages about it and I am definitely missing nicely done graphics about them. Over here I am just presenting a couple of tocapus found on old Incan textiles.

Some technical stuff?

All tocapus over here are created in Adobe Illustrator and exported as SVG.

Using SVGs gives the option to reuse the tocapus easily for different uses. By using SVG is it pretty simply to adjust the coloring of tocapus to your specific need. This is especially useful because the same kind of tocapu can be found in different color schemes.

Over here I just want to combine them to get an authentic (and cool looking) template for printing some T-shirts.



Try it out yourself on the tocapu generation page:




Additional Information

Some additional information can be found on the following sites:

Tocapu PDF