{"id":96,"date":"2011-01-14T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T08:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=96"},"modified":"2011-04-03T21:59:23","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T04:59:23","slug":"mixtec-1200-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/14\/mixtec-1200-ad\/","title":{"rendered":"Mixtec — 1200 AD, Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mixtec writing<\/p><\/div>\n

The Mixtec writing system is from Southern Mexico, very close to the Mayan civilization in distance and contemporaneous.\u00a0 The Spaniards only did half as good a job destroying the Mixtecs books — there are a whopping eight pre-Columbian Mixtec books still in existence instead of just four like the Mayan books.<\/p>\n

Mixtec doesn’t really look like writing in the way that Westerners think of writing.\u00a0 It’s not that the shapes of the glyphs is odd — you should be used to that by now if you’ve been following this blog.\u00a0 Rather, the text seems to be in service of enhancing pictures (mostly with dates and names), while we are used to our writing being mostly text, occasionally with pictures in the service of enhancing the text.<\/p>\n

Text serving pictures is not unknown in the Western world.\u00a0 Go into practically any old church in Europe and look at the stained glass.\u00a0 You will see pictures that tell stories, with a little bit of text on them to enhance or clarify the pictures (mostly with names).<\/p>\n

Now, it might be that the Mixtecs had lots of books where text dominated, but that those were preferentially destroyed, and the only ones the Spaniards left were ones that they felt were just innocuous picture books.<\/p>\n

I think that is unlikely.<\/p>\n