Four Mesoamerican Writing Systems

As a culture area, Mesoamerica includes central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and much of Honduras. Not all of Mesoamerica, however, shows evidence of prehispanic writing. From north to south—which is the order in which we will discuss them in this volume—there were four major systems. These were (1) the Aztec system, focused in the Basin of Mexico, which spread with the Aztec empire; (2) the Mixtec system based in southern Puebla and northern Oxaca; (3) the Zapotec system, concentrated in the area running from the Valley of Oaxaca to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; and (4) the Maya system, which covered the whole area from eastern Chiapas and tabasco to western Honduras (Fig. 2.8).

In this volume we will compare the way the Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya states used writing to address a whole range of topics, such as royal marriage, descent and the ancestors, accession to the throne, territorial boundaries, welfare, and so on. It should be stated at the outset, however, that there are several obstacles to this comparison.

A second obstacle is the difference in the medium employed by the scribe. The Zapotec and maya writing systems are known primarily from carved stone monuments, while the Aztec and Mixtec systems are known primarily form painted books made of cloth, bark paper, or animal hide. These different media resulted in different kinds of texts. We should stress that these differences should not be take to mean that the Aztec and Mixtec did not have stone monuments, or that the Zapotec and Maya did not use painted books. They did, but the bulk of the texts that have survived to be studied are primarily carved in one case, painted in the other.

Finally, a major obstacle to any comparison is the great difference in quantity of texts from one system to another. There are few thousand Maya monuments, featuring hundreds of glyphs, many of which are repeated scores of times so that their meaning is relatively clear. On the other hand, there are so few Zapotec monuments with lengthy texts that an estimated 35 percent of the glyphs occur only once. The Spaniards knew the Aztec so well that we can use their sixteenth-century writings to help translate Aztec texts; the Spaniards knew much less about the Zapotec and Mixtec. The disparities in information are so great that there has been a temptation on the part of some epigraphs to interpret calendric and non-calendric signs as if they were just like those of the Aztec. As we shall see-especially in chapter 4—this is a mistake.