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New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

kristopolous
39 replies
8h2m

There's so few surviving because guess what? European colonizers destroyed a bunch for religious reasons.

On the Mayan side the destruction rate is well north of 99%. To quote one of the bishops that did a book burning party:

"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."

Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science, philosophy ...

I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.

Hopefully some indigenous scholars managed to stash some in a cave or tomb somewhere 500 years ago and we simply haven't found them yet.

soyyo
10 replies
6h23m

Well the aztecs did the same before the europeans:

"Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

I dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something, but there is this tendency of picking historical eventsand judge them by todays standards, and is particularly egregious when it is only applied to just one side portraying others as innocent victims when they were actually doing the same thing.

enhancer
4 replies
4h44m

Also I'm getting tired of people using Europeans as a whole all the time when it's one particular country. How are Bulgarians, Greeks, Estonians or Swedes to blame for anything there. It's amazing. No one is blaming Japanese, Vietnamese or Malaysians for the Mongol invasions in Europe. It's beyond ridiculous.

huytersd
2 replies
4h3m

No one is blaming Eastern Europeans. Everyone knows they were not capable of carrying out colonization. They were the slaves used in the Arab world for a lot of antiquity.

jeltz
0 replies
28m

Italians and Spaniards were sold as slaves in North Africa and were still perfectly able to colonize.

ffgjgf1
0 replies
1h36m

The middle ages, not sure there were many East European slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia. Also plenty of them were “imported” into the Byzantine empire and Italy. After the Vikings Venice and Genoa mostly controlled the slave trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and also the Balkans (Venice had a massive slave market).

AlecSchueler
0 replies
3h4m

They said "European colonizers." That doesn't signify every European nation, but only those with colonialist histories.

sophacles
2 replies
6h8m

If alice murders bob, then charlie murders alice, 2 murders have been committed, indepdendent of one of the victims also being a perpatrator. Its still perfectly reasonable to be upset about the murder rate, and it's ok to be upset that alice was murdered.

hugetim
1 replies
4h58m

But is it reasonable to consider charlie worse than alice?

mmustapic
0 replies
4h43m

If you feel closer to Charlie, yes

kristopolous
1 replies
6h1m

I think the final group in the line deserves disproportionate blame for destroying the remaining collection.

No matter how I think about it, it seems like a more egregious act.

Pre-Colombian literature on philosophy, nature and governance would be quite a find. Hopefully there's many places yet to be searched.

To be speculative, if I was trying to hide books while being invaded, I'd bury them in a box in an old cemetery in a dry climate.

infoseek12
0 replies
3h17m

A cemetery would be a bad place for them as cemeteries tend to attract looters.

xyzelement
8 replies
4h22m

// Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science, philosophy

Perhaps having seen the Aztec human sacrifice, of children, the Europeans weren’t too keen to maintain these things.

lukan
7 replies
3h54m

Have you heard of the spanish inquisition? Or the general treatment of the pagans?

I do not think what we now call human rights mattered to them in any way.

It was a different and therefore enemy religion. It was beaten and then destroyed. That was the main thing. That they also happened to sacrifice humans was maybe a moral bonus to justify it, but destroying the cultural foundation of the culture you want to conquer was quite standard and old practice. Ask the druids for example.

Once a culture lost its foundation, it becomes way easier to control.

Also it is a proof, "see, your gods did nothing to protect you, they are powerless, like you. So joining us (means working for us) is your only option"

philwelch
5 replies
3h19m

Ask the druids for example.

Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.

AlecSchueler
2 replies
3h2m

Is human sacrifice the only practice that means a culture deserves to be eradicated or are there others?

xyzelement
0 replies
1h23m

I do think if there’s an objective thing that can condemn a culture, it’s willingness to sacrifice its children is that thing

And I do think this extrapolates to modern cultures, from slapping a suicide vest on a toddler, to “one child” policies to “children are bad for the environment” type movements.

philwelch
0 replies
1h21m

I think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated, not in the sense of killing everyone who practices that culture (of course the Spanish didn’t exterminate the Mexica either) but in the sense of converting or reprogramming them into a different culture. This is what was done to Germany and Japan after the Second World War for instance.

Literal human sacrifice is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Though I suppose in a broader and more metaphorical sense, Germany and Japan also practiced human sacrifice.

lukan
1 replies
2h45m

A) likely, but not really confirmed to be a regular thing by my knowledge.

What we know, we know mostly from the romans.

B) The romans practiced ritual murder (among other things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice to me.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20726130/

And yes, I can go on, but why? The point was not, that the druids were saints. (Btw. many of the christian "saints" were pretty bloody as well)

philwelch
0 replies
1h24m

The romans practiced ritual murder (among other things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice to me.

Yes, this is also how the early Christians felt, which is why they eradicated Roman paganism once they became the dominant religion within the empire.

Turing_Machine
0 replies
3h24m

Have you heard of the spanish inquisition?

Sure. As one of Neal Stephenson's characters observed, it's a measure of what utter shitheads the Aztecs were that when the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually got more humane. To name just one issue, the Spaniards weren't cannibals.

Ask the druids for example.

The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were horrified by their cruelty.

iperboreo
4 replies
5h32m

I don't justify this, but perhaps also this should be mentioned:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-withdraws-19-ml...

and if you will say that I take this out of context, well, also do you. And actually I think my case is stronger.

I would say more, but on this forum one should be very careful about what one says (actually I think that this post will not stay here for long, regardless).

dziulius
3 replies
3h58m

Or maybe people here are not brain-dead and russian propaganda does not fly here. It's not like russians occupied bunch of Ukrainian territory and started burning books there.

iperboreo
2 replies
3h41m

You are flattering yourself. The level of US people's acquaintance with anything outside of their country is well known across the world, and I am afraid that the information you get from your media is not as informative as you think.

On my cell phone I have a video of some polish mercenaries (or volunteers) burning Russian church books, laughing and obviously pleased about what they are doing. I will share it with you if you want.

In Kiev, not long ago, a monument to Pushkin was taken down. Bulgakov is practically forbidden. I will stop here.

dziulius
1 replies
2h21m

Have you stopped for a moment to consider why it’s happening? Every single person in former eastern block (including me) is sick of russian propaganda and being ruled by them for last few hundred years. War in Ukraine was a great excuse to get rid of russian sh**.

iperboreo
0 replies
15m

I will point to the fact that before the collapse of Soviet Union, most Ukranians did not see any difference between them and Russians, and most of them voted for keeping Soviet Union intact in the referendum held on 17.3.1991 (as in most other USSR republics), ignored then by Yeltsin and other people who wanted to get their share of power sponsored by US. The division between Russia and Ukraine, as far as I know, was mostly administrative. In Odessa and Kiev people laughed at ukranian nationalism, which was then confined to L'vov and such places.

As for "hundred of years", Russia was seen as liberator by the same eastern Europe when it fought against the Turks and nazi Germany, was seen as oppressor in some of Caucasus and in Poland, which in their turn thought it was their right to take the land of barbaric Russians. And in the Baltic states there are sources from the 16th century (Guagnini, an italian at the service of Polish court) which describe the Lithuanian Vitold governing Russians in Vilnius, stating that there seem to be more Russian Orthodox churches in Vilnius than catholic ones (and Guagnini cannot be suspected in sympathy to Russians).

So you see, you simplify history, and you do so, I think, first because you don't read, and then because your own country just changed one empire for another.

kristopolous
1 replies
6h43m

Sure it's still happening. Seems to be less common. That's a good thing.

gradschool
0 replies
5h4m

I think it continues to happen in forms we don't easily recognize because of our biases. When Google tried to scan every book in existence, the copyright lobby put a stop to it because of "intellectual property rights". Nobody's claiming that Sci-hub is sacreligious, but it's on our cultural gatekeepers' hitlist all the same. I suspect that future generations will view these events in the same light as the destruction of the Mayan codices or the library of Alexandria.

Amezarak
0 replies
6h57m

Details:The National Resistance Center has reported that the Russians are using the pretext of removing "Nazi literature" to explain their actions, while the list of such literature includes all books in Ukrainian. In doing so, the occupiers are repeating the practice typical of Nazi Germany.

Ah, that's the justification. I've never understood the official Russian "denazification" position; it should be clear to them no one now or ever is going to take it seriously, why continue with this absurd pretense?

That said, in this case it's more barbed than the article suggests. As part of denazification, the Allies did destroy books. To suggest book destruction is what typifies Nazis is absurd unless we also call the Allies Nazis.

As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship

That said, Aztec culture was full of horrors we can now no longer even imagine, paling even before the Nazis. To the extent the destruction of codices was deliberate, much of what went on would have seemed to be a relatively necessary de-Aztecification.

127
3 replies
7h3m

Painting all the peoples in Europe as colonizers is such a lazy thing to do.

EA-3167
0 replies
4h2m

It does seem to be painting with an overly broad brush to talk about "Europeans" (which covers everyone from Portugal to greater Russia) when it was a very small group of Spanish conquistadors and priests who actually did all of what we're discussing.

And frankly the Wikipedia article talks specifically about "Spanish" invaders, and the word "European" isn't even in the article. I'm not sure why you think that link supports the idea that someone other than the gp here turned "Spanish" into "European colonizers".

AlecSchueler
0 replies
6h51m

They said "European colonizers" not "Europeans."

nathancahill
1 replies
1h53m

One of the greatest tragedies of human knowledge loss. Right up there with the library of Alexandria. The 4 remaining Maya codices are a wealth of information. Imagine if we had the rest.

ffgjgf1
0 replies
1h33m

library of Alexandria

Its importance and size are massively over-emphasized though. We aren’t even sure if that were that many books left there when it was supposedly destroyed.

txutxu
0 replies
6h30m

Also non-colonizer Europeans, for the same religious reasons, did burn more knowledge (and persons) here, in their own towns.

Most of the history that we got, is what those ancestors did leave in their writings.

Today the inquisition simply consists of our beloved governments, covering up their dirty dealings, and telling a different story in the media, media dominated to the most inquisitorial extreme.

At least in Spain, videos are deleted, the monetization of certain channels on social networks is cancelled, forwarding of certain content on WhatsApp is rate-limited, and today, Telegram is closing in Spain, while all the ministers, the president and their families are involved in continuous corruption scandals, forgiven by judges who have been put in position by the same politicians.

Politicians forgiving the robbery of politicians, while TV only talks about the color of the air (if they don want to be reported and economically punished).

Journalists without a journalism career, who only look with a magnifying glass to the families of the monarchies, but totally forget forever about the families of the hundreds (thousands?) of Spanish politicians and ex-politicians.

Journalist without a journalism career, who try to tell us that life has increased a 6% (hello, do you mean that what previously did cost 1 Eur, now costs 1 Eur and 6 cents? where? basic education mathematics, please?)

The same supposedly lefty politicians, who criticize priests, are worse than priests, in this inquisitorial sense.

Something I ask myself... if the history that we got, was what the priests did write or didn't burn... what history will get about us, people in 500 years? That lies published in the media? 24 different versions of the same fact? Nothing at all if it's about ministers stealing public money? Whatever the generative AI tells them?

YurgenJurgensen
0 replies
7h21m

I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.

Well, about that...

GnarfGnarf
0 replies
4h56m

The Franciscan priests deserve eternal ignominy for destroying these priceless and irreplaceable books.

otras
10 replies
19h6m

The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa

It’s fascinating to imagine the journey of these books throughout the years. Kept in a basement somewhere? Passed down from generation to generation for safekeeping?

Reminds me of the Sarajevo Haggadah, surviving from the 1300s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Haggadah

UberFly
9 replies
16h33m

I always wonder just how much like this gets thrown away through the generations.

ductsurprise
8 replies
11h3m

... and the lost MicroSD cards grandma has been holding onto for you.

We will leave next to nothing.

prmoustache
7 replies
8h18m

I went back to printing photos on a regular basis.

It is relatively easy to select the best and edit photos every other day on vacations or at home for printing. It is however a major PITA to do that for hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. Thus I am still too lazy to have a look at those 20 years gap where the only pictures I took were digitized and are stored on a hard drive and remote backup.

tomek_ycomb
2 replies
6h15m

I told my [family member] this for years she should edit her digital photos. She said, no, my 40k pictures are a retirement project. Then I said <<you'll be overwhelmed by that many photos>> and actually I was wrong.

AI photo stuff massively improved, and all her bad photos were very easy to sort in Picasa and bring down to a reasonable 5k or so photos to put into albums over few years of retirement.

serallak
1 replies
3h36m

Of course Picasa is one of Google abandoned projects...

sethammons
0 replies
3h8m

I'm still sore about Picasa. while it was great to use, it lost a few years of photos that I hadn't backed up outside the service. Figured it was online and safe.

YurgenJurgensen
2 replies
7h17m

I would print more photos if I could find a printer that didn't actively hate me. Even the ink tank one I got turned out to have non-replaceable waste ink sponge with an internal counter that will brick the unit long before it wears out.

ramses0
0 replies
6h48m

Color Laser. Rumor is that HP-M254DW is great b/c it's before a lot of E15N has taken place (enshittification... we should numberize it!). I got mine used off Craiglist nearing 10 years ago and it's been a pretty serious workhorse, along with pretty decent "trash" picture output.

I say trash b/c home printed photos on regular paper are never going to compete with your local CVS/Walgreens prints (which I do batches about 2-3 times per year, putting them in letters / christmas cards).

...but if I'm willing to wait for really good prints, I've had a great experience with "PersnickityPrints" who I tried after a local pharmacy print shop gave me an envelope of my wedding prints where some of the fancy B&W ones showed ~2mm chromatic aberration (hence: all the photos were misaligned / mis-calibrated).

Persnickity basically says: "you take the photo, we print the photo!" ...no auto-redeye reduction, no trying to make the colors pop, and they calibrate their machines at least once per day as opposed to once a month or whatever the generic pharmacy places do.

1) Color Laser for "tossable" printouts. 2) Walgreens + Mobile App for "5 copies to send in letters" (pick up in ~1hr, ~$0.20 per print, often less). 3) Persnickity for 8x10's, custom paper, cards, or if I'm planning ahead. (~$0.40/print, modulo shipping, etc).

prmoustache
0 replies
32m

I have a canon Selphy for 10x15 format as well as a Kodak Mini Shot Saqure "instant camera" that I really use as a printer for square polaroidlike photos from the smartphone. I also own a Fujifilm Instax Wide and an old Polaroid 600 that I converted to rechargeable batteries so that I can buy the slightly less expensive I-Type films. Between the Polaroid and the Instax, I take an average of maybe 2 instant pictures per week, maybe more during Christmas period or if I have family visiting me. Sometimes pictures that I don't keep but just gift to friends I am meeting with. All in all 2 pictures per week is just around 100 pictures. 2 packs of 10 Instax Wide cost me around 20€, a pack of 8 polaroid I-Type is much more expensive, around 17€ but I don't think spend more than 150€ a year on those anyway. Both printing with the Selphy/Kodak and taking instant pictures is expensive compared to bulk printing at a shop or online but in my opinion it is worth it and is still better than forgetting about those photos or even not taking them in the first place. I tend to think it is still less money wasted than if I was smoking.

One of the last Polaroid picture I took was of a little girl playing with her mom. Her husband told me several week later that it had become a bookmark that he has pleasure rediscovering everytime he grab his current book. Sometimes the smallest but meaningful gifts are the nicest.

For holidays, special events, whenever I have more than a handful of pictures to print or if I want bigger format I am doing it through the local photo print shop or online.

tetris11
0 replies
8h11m

My ex and I had a wonderful tradition of collating all the photos we'd taken in a single year, and making a printed album of it. It's a fantastic ritual to let you appreciate the good moments.

dzdt
8 replies
18h50m

There are remarkably few surviving Aztec codices. Wikipedia lists 39, of which only 3 are possibly pre-hispanic. The new codices all seem to be in the later group, but this is still a substantial increase of the corpus.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_codex

mistrial9
3 replies
2h18m

the Spanish systematically destroyed them in the early stages of contact, no?

navi0
2 replies
52m

Correct. To the great dismay and anguish of the Mexica at the time.

The hubris and bigotry of the Spaniards (repeated elsewhere by them and other Europeans) was truly a loss for all of humanity.

It’s on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in my book (pun intended).

roughly
1 replies
41m

They did the same to the Incan Quipu, which more recent study and discoveries suggest was an actual full written language, not just a counting system.

The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with sophisticated arts and cultures who’d built cities that dwarfed their European counterparts with building techniques and on terrain that would’ve flummoxed western builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today) and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the plague.

mistrial9
0 replies
12m

dwarfed their European counterparts

I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so different.

alpacca-farm
3 replies
18h27m

That's pretty fascinating, dzdt. The idea of a palimpsest hiding older Aztec text opens up so many possibilities. Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing back then. Has anyone come across any initial findings or interpretations of the erased text?

Tuna-Fish
1 replies
15h12m

Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing back then.

Generally, everything that they didn't know would be useful or important. These are written on parchment, which has great durability over time, but sadly this means that very little of all the material that was written on parchment survives. This is because parchment is both very expensive and easy to recycle, which means that for most of history the second someone no longer values the material written on their parchment, they are going to wash that off and use it for something else.

galaxyLogic
0 replies
12h19m

Etch-a-Sketch

dzdt
0 replies
18h23m

My impression is so far investigations are extremely preliminary, not much more than was necessary to validate the authenticity of the documents. Hopefully we will see a lot more detailed analysis come out in the coming years.

dash2
6 replies
8h0m

Can someone tell me what an Aztec codex is? I assumed Aztec writing was not on paper but on stone... these seem to be from the colonial period, so are they hybrid cultural forms or what?

retrac
2 replies
5h26m

It's a book. Paper bark or parchment. . The Aztecs didn't have full writing in the sense of a system to represent a spoken language. Aztec codices are more to the calendar and graphic end of things. (But I could be wrong, since so few examples, are truly from pre-exchange times.)

The primacy of stone is a misconception. The following applies not just to the Aztecs, but also Sumer and Babylon, Egypt, the Maya, etc: the primary writing material for all of these civilizations was not stone. It was perishable materials, including parchment, wood bark, wax tablets, papyrus in Egypt, or just drawing in a pile of fine sand to do some arithmetic. (Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception, maybe. But they also wrote on wood, bark paper and cloth, among other things.)

That means we only get monumental inscriptions. I'm more familiar with the Maya, who did have a complete writing system for spoken language, and we strongly suspect the Maya had literature in the same way the Egyptians, Chinese or Sumerians did. Poetry anthologies, mythological anthologies, religious texts, and also textbooks on medicine and astronomy, etc. Obviously, they didn't carve those on monuments, they wrote them on the closest analogue to paper they had.

Unfortunately, neither Mexico's meteorological climate nor Spain's religious climate at the time was conducive to preserving such fragile books.

ffgjgf1
0 replies
1h42m

Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception

It wasn’t just Babylon but dozens of other civilizations in the region. IIRC we have a lot more Assyrian tablets because Babylon and their allies sacked and burned the Assyrian capital which preserved their library.

detourdog
0 replies
2h37m

The fired clay tablets I believe were long term record keeping. Things important enough to try to maintain the information.

bawolff
0 replies
6h36m

Codex usually does not mean stone, but more like a book (albeit usually something like vellum instead of paper)

ako
0 replies
7h48m

The link includes some pictures and a video, there it looks like paper, not stone.

AlecSchueler
0 replies
6h49m

They had a pre-colombian pictographic writing system with some phonetic elements that they wrote on animal hides. Priests did most of the writing and there was quite a lot recorded by them before it was mostly destroyed after contact with Europe.

wolverine876
5 replies
13h2m

How many of these are by Aztecs about Aztecs?

* "The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco ...": San Andrés Tetepilco must have been Spanish, of course.

* "The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco ...": Churches would be Spanish.

* "Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history ... comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603.": At least it seems to be about Aztecs.

Why were the first two books about Spanish topics but written in the local language? If Spanish people writing, wouldn't they write in Spanish? If Aztecs were writing, why would they care to record these things? I suppose the latter is plausible if they were absorbed into Spanish society.

linehedonist
1 replies
3h36m

Yeah Spanish colonialism was very different from English colonialism. The Spanish attempted to coopt and convert the local population, not displace and kill them. That’s not to say it wasn’t a nasty process but to this day there are millions of people in Mexico who speak Nahuatl (the Aztec language) as their first and primary language.

ffgjgf1
0 replies
1h52m

The Spanish attempted to coopt and convert the local population,

Population densities in Mexico and throughout much of what is Latin America were considerably higher than in the North.

Also IIRC the number of Spanish colonists who came to the Americas during the 17th century is about the same as the number of immigrants to the English colonies on the East Coast. Considering how massive the Spanish empire was there just weren’t that many Europeans there. Trying to subjugate and assimilate the natives was really the only option they had.

yorwba
0 replies
12h19m

The Aztec Empire fell in 1521, but of course its people didn't disappear. If the codices date after 1603, that's plenty of time for the Spanish to influence their lives, even without full absorption.

That San Andrés Tetepilco has a partly-Spanish name now doesn't necessarily imply that Spaniards had a role in its founding or lived there in significant numbers at the time the codices were written. The church might have been founded by a Spanish missionary, but it might also have been an Aztec convert instead. The history apparently also covers events that happened under Spanish rule, so it's not entirely about a non-Spanish topic either.

dragonwriter
0 replies
9h36m

San Andrés Tetepilco must have been Spanish, of course.

It is not. I mean, yes, the “San Andrés” part of the modern name of the settlement (from a church there built not long after the conquest) is, but its one of Itzapalapan settlements that was later conquered by the Aztecs, so an Aztec codex about its founding is Aztecs writing about pre-Aztec history.

“The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco …”: Churches would be Spanish.

Yeah, unlike the colonization of the United States, the native peoples were still present in and often the bulk of communities after the conquest of Mexico, they weren’t simply displaced for the Europeans (not to say the Spanish were better, but the pattern of colonization was very different.) So, while the Church was built under the direction of the Spanish, it would have been built and attended largely by locals, who would record things for the same people anyone would record things about the community they live in.

zer00eyz
1 replies
18h18m

Before someone asks: No you're not gonna see this in an LLM/ML/AGI anytime soon. The corpus of text is far too small to make the statistical simulation viable.

keithalewis
0 replies
9h28m

Making true statements on HN seems to be a great way to get shadow banned. Dang it.

canjobear
1 replies
14h16m

Fascinating. I didn’t know Aztec writing used glyphs for their phonetic value.

nathancahill
0 replies
1h49m

It's heavily debated.

dzdt
0 replies
18h38m

According to the article in La Jornada one of the codices is a palimpsest! Under multispectral imaging older erased Aztec text is visible. If anything substantial can be recovered there it may be this should be counted as four new codices.

[1] https://www.jornada.com.mx/2024/03/21/cultura/a03n1cul

acheron
0 replies
16h10m

Very nice. Will be interesting to see what comes out of studying these.

Semi-related, I still hold out hope for more discoveries of the Isthmian/Epi-Olmec script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmian_script

NelsonMinar
0 replies
3h39m

I'm sharing my admiration for the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, one of the best museums in the world. An absolutely astounding collection of history, archaeology, and art. Well presented. Worth a visit to CDMX just for itself. If you ever are in the area plan at least a half day at the MNA; you could spend two full days and not see everything. (Take another day to visit Teotihuacán!)