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 Aztec |
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The Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, were the elite of a militaristic empire focused in Central Mexico when the Spanish conquistadores landed in America at the beginning of the 16th century CE. The Aztecs originated in the semi-arid environments of northern Mexico as one of the many barbarian or "Chichimec" tribes. They arrived at the fertile Valley of Mexico most likely during the 14th century CE, and found the land already settled and divided by city states. They built their city at the marshes of Lake Texcoco, and quickly adopted much of the culture and language of their new neighbors. As a result, the Aztecs adopted a writing system that had been used in Central Mexico for at least a thousand years before. This was written on media such as deer-skin and paper codices. However, when the Aztecs conquered all neighboring states in the early 15th century CE, they burned all their books. And, in turn, after the Conquest, Spanish priests burned innumerable volumes of Aztec codices. Therefore, no pre-Columbian book from Central Mexico has survived. All surviving documents about Aztec writing were composed after the Conquest and contained a mixture of Aztec glyphs and Spanish notes. There are a few codices made before the Conquest from the Puebla region in a somewhat different style known as the "international" Mixteca-Puebla, style. Interestingly, this same style might have been the source of Aztec writing. Ultimately, the Mixteca-Puebla style most likely came from Mixtec writing. The writing system of the Aztecs is very rudimentary. Its core consists of a set of calendrical signs and a vigesimal number system. Like other Mesoamerican people, the Aztecs used the 260-day sacred calendar, which in Nahuatl was called tonalpohualli. The tonalpohualli is essentially two parallel and interlocking cycles, one of 20 days (represented by "day signs"), and one of 13 days (represented by numbers called "coefficients"). The following are the 20 day signs in the Aztec sacred calendar. The Nahuatl names are in red, and their meanings in English are in blue.
A date in the tonalpohualli is composed of a day sign and and a coefficient. So, for example, the first day in the 260-day cycle would be 1 Cipactli. As both the day sign and the coefficient moves forward, the next day would be 2 Ehecatl. This goes on until 13 Acatl is reached, at which point the coefficient cycle loops back to 1, and hence the next day would be 1 Ocelotl. Similarly, upon reaching the last day sign on day 7 Xochitl, the day sign cycle goes back to the first sign, and the next day would be 8 Cipactl. The Aztecs had a 365-day solar calendar called xiuhpohualli, which consisted of 18 months of 20 days, and an unlucky 5-day period at the end of the year. However, they rarely recorded dates in the solar calendar on manuscripts, and never on monuments. In addition, like other Mesoamerican cultures, the Aztecs also employed the Calendar Round, a 52-year period created by interlocking the 260-day and 365-day cycles. A year in the Calendar Round was named by the tonalpohualli name of last day of the last month in the xiuhpohualli for that year. Because of the way the math worked out, only four day signs, namely Calli, Tochtli, Acatl, and Tecpatl, could be part of a year's name, and hence they were called "year bearers". Accompanying the year bearers were coefficients, which could range from 1 to 13. To distinguish Calendar Round years from days in the 260-day calendar, years glyphs were drawn inside rectangular "cartouches". A good example occurs in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, a document written after the Spanish Conquest but at a time when knowledge of the pre-Columbian culture was still available. In this document, Aztec years are correlated to Western Gregorian years.
Another example of year sign can be found on the coronation stone of Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin (Moctezuma II), which you can see at the Art Institute of Chicago's Art Access website. As you have probably gathered by now, Aztec numbers are represented by long sequences of dots. In general, the Aztecs almost exclusively used dots on manuscripts as well as on stone monuments, but the more ancient bar-and-dot system does make rare appearances on carved monuments as well, primarily due to artistic consideration. The dot system, while feasible for calendrical use (since no number will ever exceed 20), was impossible when dealing with accounting, especially since the Aztecs had to record large amounts of tribute frequently demanded from its provinces. The Codex Mendoza, another post-Conquest manuscript, depicted life in Central Mexico around the time of conquest and also contained a section on the tribute exacted by the Aztec Empire. To count items in excess of 20 efficiently, the Aztecs used glyphs for the numbers 20 (a flag), 400 (a feather), and 8000 (a bag of incense).
For example, the number 500 would be a feather and five flags (400 + 5 x 20 = 500). To indicate that the multiple glyphs forming a number belong to a single sign group, a line is drawn to connect all the glyphs. The line is then connected to the object it is counting.
The previous examples are taken from the Codex Mendoza, and they provide both the Aztec and Spanish versions of the information they are conveying. On the left, you can see the a bundle topped by a series of five flags, which is the number 100 (5 x 20), and is reflected by the Spanish caption "çient cargas de cacao", meaning "100 loads of cacao beans". In the middle, the Aztec representation is that of four flags and a bird, which is mirroed in the Spanish caption "ochenta pieles de pajaros deste color", or "80 pelts of birds of this color". And finally, on the right, the caption "cccc manojo de plumas coloradas" meant "400 bundles of red feathers" and is shown in Aztec as a schematic, black feather (400) with a bundle of red feathers. In addition to calendrical and numeric signs, a number of highly pictorial logograms were used to write down personal names, names of places, and historical events. For example, there are many records of the Aztec army conquering other cities documented in the Codex Mendoza. To show that a city has been conquered, the city's name is written next to the "conquered" glyph which is a temple (pyramid) in smoke and flames with its top toppling over. In the following example, the ancient cities Colhuacan and Tenayucan were shown to be conquered. And to drive the point home, Aztec warriors are shown with captives.
Since Aztec names tend to be composed of words in the Nahuatl language, names are often written as groups of highly pictorial logograms that make up the roots of the name. However, sometimes names also contain phonetic elements in the form of rebus writing to either disambiguate the reading, or explicitly spell out the entire name. The following is a small set of toponyms (place names) as found in various post-Conquest manuscripts. The first set of examples are names spelled out mostly by pictorial logograms.
Explanations for the previous example:
The following examples have more extensive use of phonetic elements in the form of rebus writing.
Explanations for the previous example:
You might find that from the above examples that the way to read place names is complicated and not straightforward to modern eyes. Signs could be polyvalent, such as the "hill" sign which can stand for both can and tepec. Glyphs in a place name are not always read in a linear fashion but could jump from one end to another. And sometimes, visual metaphors come into play, such as the position of glyphs itself representing a sound. It is true that for the most part this system did not record human speech or long texts, and it might seem to be not a true writing system. However, it does exhibit a lot of regular rules and conventions. The seemingly random reading order often can be inferred by the knowledge of language and naming convention. Signs used for phonetic values are not randomly drawn from the logograms but actually from a very predictable and minimal set. But, most of all, since the knowledge of the underlying language, Nahuatl, is essential to fully interpret the glyphs, the Aztec script most certainly classifies as a writing system. Despite the limitation of their writing systems, the Central Mexicans must have produced countless numbers of manuscripts with subject matters as diverse as time-keeping, astronomy and astrology, mythology, genealogy, and history, all attesting to the power of the written word. The toponyms in the previous examples were taken from Nombres Geográficos de México project website. Related links:
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