The development of
writing is counted among the many achievements and innovations of pre-Columbian American cultures. Independent from the development of writing in other areas of the world, the
Mesoamerican region produced several
indigenous writing systems beginning in the 1st millennium BCE. What may be the earliest-known example in the Americas of an extensive text thought to be writing is by the
Cascajal Block. The
Olmec hieroglyphs tablet has been indirectly dated from ceramic shards found in the same context to approximately 900 BCE, around the time that Olmec occupation of
San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán began to wane.
[105]
The Maya
writing system (often called
hieroglyphs from a superficial resemblance to the
Ancient Egyptian writing) was a combination of
phoneticsymbols and
logograms. It is most often classified as a
logographic or (more properly) a
logosyllabic writing system, in which
syllabic signs play a significant role. It is the only pre-Columbian writing system known to represent completely the
spoken language of its community. In total, the script has more than one thousand different
glyphs although a few are variations of the same sign or meaning and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. At any one time, no more than about five hundred glyphs were in use, some two hundred of which (including variations) had a phonetic or syllabic interpretation.
Aztec codices (singular
codex) are
books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era
Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best
primary sourcesfor
Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices differ from European codices in that they are largely pictorial; they were not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives.
[106] The colonial era codices not only contain
Aztec pictograms, but also
Classical Nahuatl (in the
Latin alphabet),
Spanish, and occasionally
Latin.
Spanish mendicants in the sixteenth century taught indigenous scribes in their communities to write their languages in Latin letters and there is a large number of local-level documents in
Nahuatl,
Zapotec,
Mixtec, and Yucatec
Maya from the colonial era, many of which were part of lawsuits and other legal matters. Although Spaniards initially taught indigenous scribes alphabetic writing, the tradition became self-perpetuating at the local level.
[107] The Spanish crown gathered such documentation and contemporary Spanish translations were made for legal cases. Scholars have translated and analyzed these documents in what is called the
New Philology to write histories of indigenous peoples from indigenous viewpoints.
[108]
The
Wiigwaasabak,
birch bark scrolls on which the
Ojibwa (
Anishinaabe) people wrote complex geometrical patterns and shapes, can also be considered a form of writing, as can
Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia