Aztec script

Aztec
Script type
Pictographic and logosyllabic
CreatorThe Nahua peoples
Period
Most extant manuscripts from the 16th century
DirectionTop-to bottom, left-to right
LanguagesNahuatl
Related scripts
Sister systems
Mixtec
Unicode
Not in Unicode
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Aztec or Nahuatl script is a pre-Columbian writing system used in central Mexico by the Nahua people in the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods consisting of a mixture of ideograms, a syllabary, and rebuses. It was originally thought that its use was reserved for elites; however, the topographical codices and early colonial catechisms, recently deciphered, were used by tlacuilos (scribes), macehuallis (peasants), and pochtecas (merchants).

Some experts believe that no authentic precolonial Aztec codices (amoxtli) survived the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire because conquistadors burned countless codices because they considered them idolatrous and almost all extent codices consist of reproductions, censored or altered versions, or postcolonial creations that blend the Aztec script with colonial Nahuatl orthography, Spanish, or Latin. These documents also tend to utilize illustrations resembling Medieval European artforms and generally describe Aztec society in a negative light with a focus on the existence of human sacrifice and cannibalism. However, a significant genre of codices do not discuss these topics and only contain the Aztec script accompanied by indigenous illustrations, leading other researchers to view them as possible examples of precolonial works.

Origin

Mesoamerica is one of the four places to independently develop writing along with Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt. The oldest evidence for writing in Mesoamerica occurs in the Cascajal Block, a serpentinite block from the first millennium BC inscribed with an unknown writing system.

The Aztec writing system derives from writing systems used in Central Mexico, such as Zapotec script. Mixtec writing is also thought to descend from Zapotec. The first Oaxacan inscriptions are thought to encode Zapotec, partially because of numerical suffixes characteristic of the Zapotec languages.

The Maya script consists of a similar mixture of logograms and a syllabary, which has led researchers to suspect that the two groups interacted with one another and influenced one another's writing system during the Maya Classical era and Mesoamerican Postclassic period.

Disappearance

Aztec script fell out of use due to colonial, ecclesiastical, and governmental authorities, with the help of the local inhabitants who were indoctrinated in Spanish culture. The evangelizers classified Aztec script as a creation of the devil and considered syllabic ideographic symbols as intangible characters. The Old Library of Texcoco, which according to various contemporary sources, contained a larger literary, technical and historical collection than the Old Library of Tenochtitlan, was destroyed by the colonial government under the orders of the religious Juan de Zumárraga, who collected the Aztec documents to be incinerated. The use of Aztec and other precolonial scripts remained banned until the independence of Mexico, after which Mesoamerican scripts had already disappeared centuries before.

Decipherment

The decipherment of Aztec script began with studies by Zelia Nuttall during the late 19th century using surviving documents from the region surrounding Lake Texcoco such as the Codex Vergara, a codex with high levels of phonetic glyphs.

Aztec syllabary (according to Lacadena and Wichmann, 2004)

Structure and use

The Aztec script was a pictographic and ideographic proto-writing, augmented by phonetic rebuses. It also contained syllabic signs and logograms. Although Western languages distinguish between the painted and the written, Aztec script does not have such a distinction, showing both continuously. There was no alphabet, but puns also contributed to recording sounds of the Aztec language. While some scholars have understood the system not to be considered a complete writing system, this is disputed by others. The existence of logograms and syllabic signs is being documented and a phonetic aspect of the writing system has emerged, even though many of the syllabic characters have been documented since at least 1888 by Nuttall. There are conventional signs for syllables and logograms which act as word signs or for their rebus content. Logosyllabic writing appears on both painted and carved artifacts, such as the Tizoc Stone. However, instances of phonetic characters often appear within a significant artistic and pictorial context. In native manuscripts, the sequence of historical events is indicated by a line of footprints leading from one place or scene to another.

The ideographic nature of the writing is apparent in abstract concepts, such as death, represented by a corpse wrapped for burial; night, drawn as a black sky and a closed eye; war, by a shield and a club; and speech, illustrated as a little scroll issuing from the mouth of the person who is talking. The concepts of motion and walking were indicated by a trail of footprints. The illustration of concepts with graphic expressions contributed Aztec religions to denotation of roles and characterestics of deities in their pictures. An Aztec deity has different combinations of signs establishing a certain homogeneous meaning, rather than the use of a specific representation. Thus, each graphic sign on the picture of deities is an element of the divine personality.

A glyph could be used as a rebus to represent a different word with the same sound or similar pronunciation. This is especially evident in the glyphs of town names. For example, the glyph for Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was represented by combining two pictograms: stone (te-tl) and cactus (noch-tli), and the relative direction of below (-ti-tlan).

Aztec glyphs do not have a set reading order, unlike Maya hieroglyphs. As such, they may be read in any direction which forms the correct sound values in the context of the glyph. However, there is an internal reading order in that any sign will be followed in the direction being written by the sign for the following sound.

Numerals

The Aztec numerical system was vigesimal as was the Mayan numerical system. They indicated quantities up to twenty by the requisite number of dots. A flag was used to indicate twenty, repeating it for quantities up to four hundred, while a sign like a fir tree, meaning numerous as hairs, signified four hundred. The next unit, eight thousand, was indicated by an incense bag, which referred to the almost innumerable contents of a sack of cacao beans.

Historical

Aztecs embraced the widespread manner of presenting history cartographically. A cartographic map would hold an elaborately detailed history recording events. The maps were painted to be read in sequence, so that time is established by the movement of the narrative through the map and by the succession of individual maps.

Aztecs also used continuous year-count annals to record anything that would occur during that year. All the years are painted in a sequence and most of the years are generally in a single straight line that reads continually from left to right. Events, such as solar eclipses, floods, droughts, or famines, are painted around the years, often linked to the years by a line or just painted adjacent to them. Specific individuals were not mentioned often, but unnamed humans were often painted in order to represent actions or events. When individuals are named, they form the majority of the corpus of logosyllabic examples.

Testerian catechisms

The Testerian catechisms were manuscripts on Catholic theology written in Nahuatl using the Aztec script authored by Spanish friars beginning with Jacobo of Testera. Here is a sample text from the Codex Mexicanus, a Testerian catechism:

Codex Mexicanus Nahuatl Transliteration Nahuatl Transcription English Translation
 nel to o tzin to te iyō DIOS MAHTLĀCTLI ONNĀHUI (In i)nelto(ca)tzin totē(cu)iyō Dios mahtlāctli onnāhui. Here are his revered things, our Lord God, of which there are 14.
 CHICŌNTETL ch(i) te ch po to te iyō DIOS te ta (In) chicōntetl i(tech)tzinco pō(hui) totē(cu)iyō Dios Te(ōtl tē)tatzin. Seven belong to him, our Lord, God the Father.
 ihu(i) a OC CHICŌNTETL te ch(i) po to te JESUCHRISTO oquich Īhuā(n) oc chicōntetl (i)tech(tzinco) pō(hui in) totē(cuiyō) Jesuchristo (inīc) oquich(tli). And the other seven belong to him, our Lord Jesus Christ as a man.
 CENTETL nel to o CA e hua tzi to te JESUCHRISTO to pa (Inīc) centetl (i)neltoca ca (y)ehuātzi(n) (in) totē(cuiyō) Jesucristo topa(mpa). The first believed thing: It is him, our Lord Jesus Christ who serves us.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Lacadena, Alfonso. "Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing" (PDF).
  2. ↑ Escamilla, Marlon V.; Fowler, William R. "Paisajes rituales nahua-pipiles del postclásico en la Costa del Bálsamo, El Salvador". Entorno (in Spanish) (53): 67–75.
  3. ↑ Corral, Aurelio López (2011). "Los glifos de suelo en códices acolhua de la Colonia temprana: un reanálisis de su significado". Desacatos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales (in Spanish) (37): 145–162. doi:10.29340/37.293. ISSN 2448-5144.
  4. ↑ "Tribute Roll". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved 2024-06-05.
  5. ↑ Alberú Gómez, María del Carmen (2012). Relación de Michoacán y Códice Florentino: la huella medieval en dos códices del siglo XVI'. Barcelona: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. p. 161.
  6. ↑ Murray, Stuart A. P. (2009). Library, the : an illustrated history. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. pp. 136–138. ISBN 9781628733228.
  7. ↑ Pastor, Marialba (1998). "El sacrificio humano: justificación central de la guerra". Las teorías de la guerra justa en el siglo XVI y sus expresiones contemporáneas. pp. 233–248. doi:10.4000/books.cemca.586. ISBN 978-2-8218-2795-0. Retrieved 3 May 2015.
  8. ↑ Léon Portilla, Miguel. "El Tonalámatl de los Pochtecas (códice Fejérváry Mayer)". Arqueología Mexicana (Edición Especial Códices).
  9. ↑ "'Oldest' New World writing found". BBC. 2006-09-14. Retrieved 2008-03-30. Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 900 BC, new evidence suggests.
  10. ↑ "Oldest Writing in the New World". Science. Retrieved 2008-03-30. A block with a hitherto unknown system of writing has been found in the Olmec heartland of Veracruz, Mexico. Stylistic and other dating of the block places it in the early first millennium before the common era, the oldest writing in the New World, with features that firmly assign this pivotal development to the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica.
  11. ↑ Justeson (1986, p.449)
  12. ↑ Taube, Karl (2000). "1". The Writing System of Ancient Teotihuacan (in Spanish). Vol. Ancient America 1. Center for Ancient American Studies. p. 51. ISSN 2007-3690.
  13. ↑ Arbagi, Michael. "The Catholic Church and the Preservation of Mesoamerican Archives: An Assessment" (PDF). minds.wisconsin.edu. Retrieved March 7, 2024.
  14. ↑ Florescano, Enrique (10 November 2000). "El canon occidental versus el mesoamericano". La Jornada. Retrieved 26 October 2016.
  15. ↑ Nicholson, H.B. (1973). Benson, E.P. (ed.). Phoneticism in the Late Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican Writing System. pp. 1–46.
  16. ↑ Dehouve, D. (2020). THE RULES OF CONSTRUCTION OF AN AZTEC DEITY: CHALCHIUHTLICUE, THE GODDESS OF WATER. Ancient Mesoamerica, 31(1), p.20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536118000056
  17. 1 2 Zender, Marc. "One Hundred and Fifty Years of Nahuatl Decipherment" (PDF). The PARI Journal.
  18. ↑ VanEssendelft, Willem (May 2011). The word made stone: deciphering and mapping the glyphs of the Tizoc stone (PDF). Harvard Special Collection: DingoFence. p. 86. Archived from the original (PDF) on Feb 2, 2014. Retrieved 2012-10-15.
  19. ↑ Bray, Warwick (1968). Everyday Life of The Aztecs. Dorset Press. pp. 93–96. ISBN 9780880291439.
  20. ↑ Dehouve, D. (2020). THE RULES OF CONSTRUCTION OF AN AZTEC DEITY: CHALCHIUHTLICUE, THE GODDESS OF WATER. Ancient Mesoamerica, 31(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536118000056
  21. ↑ Dehouve, D. (2020). THE RULES OF CONSTRUCTION OF AN AZTEC DEITY: CHALCHIUHTLICUE, THE GODDESS OF WATER. Ancient Mesoamerica, 31(1), p.20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536118000056
  22. ↑ Dehouve, D. (2020). THE RULES OF CONSTRUCTION OF AN AZTEC DEITY: CHALCHIUHTLICUE, THE GODDESS OF WATER. Ancient Mesoamerica, 31(1), p.20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536118000056
  23. ↑ Spinden, Herbert J. (1928). Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America. New York. pp. 223–229.
  24. ↑ Vaillant, George C. (1941). Aztecs of Mexico. pp. 206–209.
  25. ↑ Boone, Elizabeth H. (1996). Aztecs Imperial Strategies. pp. 181–206.
  26. ↑ Morín González, Aidé (2005). "Catecismo testeriano: una lectura de evangelización" (PDF). XVIII Encuentro de Investigadores del Pensamiento Novohispano. Retrieved 2015-12-11.
  27. ↑ Tesoros de papel: documentos del Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex (in Spanish). Museo Soumaya. 2006-01-01. ISBN 9789687794334.
  28. ↑ Zamora, Alonso (2022-02-16). "A Christian prayer in Aztec hieroglyphs: An epigraphic analysis". Tlacuilolli. Retrieved 2026-11-09.

Notes

Further reading