The PARI Journal - A quarterly publication of the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute v8 № 4 Spring 2008 - Special Nahuatl Writing Issue.pdf - Pisma prekolumbijskie - różne - garnett5

The PARI Journal

A quarterly publication of the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute

Volume VIII, No.4, Spring 2008

Special Nahuatl

Writing Issue

containing:

Regional Scribal Traditions:

Methodological Implications for the

Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing 1

Regional Scribal

Traditions:

Methodological

Implications for the

Decipherment of

Nahuatl Writing

Alfonso Lacadena

PAGES 1-22

Alfonso Lacadena

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Abstract

After more than a century of research,

Nahuatl writing is not yet completely de-

ciphered. One reason is that scholars have

imposed an artiicial neglect of certain

hieroglyphic texts. An important group

of documents, including the Codex Santa

María Asunción and the Memorial de los

Indios de Tepetlaoztoc, has traditionally

been taken to be unrepresentative of the

Precolumbian writing system. Since these

documents exhibit a more frequent use

of phonetic compounds than others like

the Codex Mendoza or the Matrícula de

Tributos, they have been considered to be

inluenced by the alphabetic writing sys-

tem brought by the Spanish. In this paper,

I justify the full use of this group of docu-

ments, arguing that the higher frequency

of phoneticism is not a consequence of

Spanish inluence, but rather an idio-

syncratic characteristic of the Tetzcocan

scribal school. The scribes of Tetzcoco in

many cases favored more phonetically

transparent spellings, but they used exact-

ly the same spelling rules and orthograph-

ic conventions as the scribes belonging to

the other contemporary schools.

There is an analogy here with neighbor-

ing Maya writing, where the differences

between regional scribal schools have nev-

er been interpreted as evidence for the ex-

istence of different writing systems. Thus,

for example, during the Terminal Classic

the scribes of Chichen Itza favored a more

frequent use of syllabic signs in glyphic

compounds. This peculiarity, rather than

being looked upon as problematical or as

evidence that the inscriptions of the site

somehow do not relate directly to the rest

of the corpus of Classic inscriptions, has

been exploited in the successful decipher-

ment of several signs.

For a methodologically more correct

approach to Nahuatl writing, it is im-

portant to incorporate the documents of

the Tetzcocan school into the corpus of

Nahuatl hieroglyphic texts, using them in

the process of decipherment. Only when

we consider the script as a whole and the

corpus in its totality will we be able to

complete the decipherment and system-

atization of Nahuatl writing.

A Nahuatl Syllabary

Alfonso Lacadena

PAGE 23

One Hundred and

Fifty Years of Nahuatl

Decipherment

Marc Zender

PAGES 24-37

The wa 1 and wa 2

Phonetic Signs and

the Logogram for WA

in Nahuatl Writing

Alfonso Lacadena

PAGES 38-45

Introduction

In the middle of the nineteenth century,

the French scholar Joseph Marius Alexis

Aubin (1849) published an important

work on the writing system of the Nahuatl

language. Employing examples derived

principally from a mid-sixteenth century

document, the Codex Vergara, Aubin pro-

posed the identiication of more than a

hundred glyphs and their corresponding

readings. Glyphic compounds identiied

by Aubin, such as itz - co - atl for Itzcoatl ,

On the

Complementary

Signs of the Mexican

Graphic System

Zelia Nuttall

PAGES 45-48

Joel Skidmore

Editor

joel@mesoweb.com

The PARI Journal

202 Edgewood Avenue

San Francisco, CA 94117

415-664-8889

Electronic version

available at:

www.mesoweb.com/

pari/journal/0804

1 A version of this work was presented at the

5th World Archaeological Congress, Washington,

D.C., June 22, 2003, in the symposium “Written

History and Geography in Central Mexico: Codices,

Lienzos, and Mapas Linked to the Ground,” orga-

nized by Lloyd Anderson.

ISSN 1531-5398

The PARI Journal 8(4):1-22.

Lacadena

te - o - cal - tlan for Teocaltitlan , and mo - cuauh - zo - ma for the

personal name Mocuauhzoma , led him to suggest that

the Nahuatl writing system was basically “ une écriture

syllabique ”—that is, a syllabic writing system.

Aubin’s contributions, however, met with ierce

opposition in the scientiic community. Despite the

clear signiicance of his examples, critics of his method

questioned the extent to which they could be said to

be representative. As irst noted by Seler (in Nicholson

1973:29), Aubin had for the most part used examples

proceeding from a very limited region, the zone of

Tepetlaoztoc, a dependency of Tetzcoco. Other docu-

ments containing highly phonetic compositions, such

as the Codex Santa María Asunción or the Memorial de

los Indios de Tepetlaoztoc, derived from the same lo-

cale. The clearly marked phoneticism associated with

documents from the area of Tepetlaoztoc contrasted

notably with examples of Nahuatl writing from other

areas, such as Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. Mexica doc-

uments, such as the Matrícula de Tributos, the Codex

Mendoza, or the Codex Boturini—considered to be the

only faithful representations of the traditional writing

system, with little or no Spanish inluence—differed

from the examples of the Tepetlaoztoc group in vari-

ous respects. In point of fact, there are no examples of

completely syllabic compounds in these manuscripts,

as distinct from those presented by Aubin. On the con-

trary, what one inds is an overwhelming use of logo-

grams. Apart from a few examples of phonetic comple-

ments, phoneticism is found most frequently in the use

of rebus in logograms (where the sound value of the

logogram is used to evoke the same sound with a dif-

ferent meaning): - tlan(tli) “teeth,” for – tlān “place of,

beside,” nāhua “speak” for – nāhuac “beside, together

with,” or pān(tli) “lag” for – pan “on, upon.”

An analysis of the few Prehispanic monuments that

survive, principally the cuauhxicalli of Tizoc (carved,

presumably, between 1481 and 1486), conirms what

can be observed in the Matrícula de Tributos, the Codex

Mendoza, and the Codex Boturini: the scant utilization

of phonetic signs in the Prehispanic era. Later codices

from the same region of Mexico, more acculturated

to Spanish inluence in their pictorial representation,

such as the Codex Azcatitlan, the Codex Osuna, the

Codex Telleriano-Remensis, or the Codex Cozcatzin,

present a similar scarcity of phonetic examples, seem-

ingly reinforcing the thesis that phoneticism was little

developed in the original writing system. When a giv-

en text, such as the Codex of Tlatelolco or the Codex

Mexicanus, shows an increase in phonetic signs, this

is usually associated with the transliteration of Span-

ish names, which cannot, as such, relect the traditional

writing system. Thus the development of phoneticism

might have been due to the initiative of indigenous

scribes, who modiied their original system in order to

adapt it to these new cases, making it more phonetic.

Alternatively (or in addition), the indigenous scribes

may have been inluenced by the completely phonetic

writing system of the Spanish and tried to bring their

traditional system closer to it. The greater phoneticism

present in the documents of the Tepetlaoztoc group uti-

lized by Aubin would undoubtedly have resulted from

the idiosyncracies of the region’s scribes, especially as

inluenced by the phonetic writing of the Spanish.

In an important article on the extent of phoneticism

in Nahuatl writing, Nicholson (1973) considered these

questions. Although Nicholson himself accepted the

prevailing thesis that Prehispanic writing was basical-

ly logographic with a barely developed phoneticism—

even employing the term “semasiographic” coined by

Gelb (1963) in a very inluential book of that time—he

insisted on three crucial points: irst, that phoneticism

was not, perhaps, so limited in Prehispanic times as

had come to be considered; second, that one needed to

explore the possibility that Tetzcocan documents might

also relect traditional Nahuatl writing; and third, that

it was necessary to rise above the circular reasoning

that attributed the apparent increase in phoneticism to

the direct or indirect inluence of the Spanish:

The explanation of the special case of the Tepetlaoztoc

group is admittedly particularly difficult, but I do

not think that the frequency of the “écriture syl-

labique” in the formation of the name and place

signs of these documents is necessarily merely the

result of post-Conquest developments, although it

may well be. ... While it is clear that many students,

such as Aubin, Pipart, Brinton, and Whorf, undoubt-

edly exaggerated the extent of pre-Hispanic phonet-

icism, some modern students may have gone too far

in the other direction, almost mechanically invok-

ing “Spanish influence” to account for any marked

phonetic usage in post-Conquest pictorials. Some of

this may have represented a continuation of genuine

pre-Hispanic practice. In any case, I suggest we keep

our minds open concerning this possibility, pending

further studies and, hopefully, the discovery of fresh

data. (Nicholson 1973:35-36)

Unfortunately, Nicholson’s suggestions were not prop-

erly taken up in the following years, and to this day

assumptions about the nature of Nahuatl writing are

not very different from those of the Seventies: (1) The

written testimonies of the Mexica are the most repre-

sentative of the Prehispanic writing system; (2) docu-

ments that show a greater frequency of phoneticism

do not represent the traditional indigenous system but

rather a modiied one, having been inluenced as much

by the alphabetic writing of the Spanish as by the novel

necessities of transliterating foreign names; (3) Nahuatl

Regional Scribal Traditions

writing is basically logographic, with an incipient or

undeveloped phoneticism, restricted to the utiliza-

tion of rebus for logograms and a limited repertory of

signs used in phonetic mode, without integration into

a true conventional syllabary (see Prem 1992; Lockhart

1992:327-330; Boone 2000:31-38; León-Portilla 2003:41).

Only Lockhart took up the doubts of Nicholson, and

thus, although he deemed it impossible to resolve at

present “whether the widespread phoneticity of post-

conquest pictorial script is primarily a continuation of

the preconquest tradition or is primarily an adaptation

caused directly or indirectly by the Spaniards and their

phonetic alphabet” (1992:333), he added:

My own provisional, speculative conclusion is that

pictorial phoneticism expanded in the postconquest

period, but that the method already existed for use

when needed; we have too little preconquest materi-

al to be able to tell much from the apparent absence

of some trait. In preconquest times, however, since

nearly all proper names consisted of readily intel-

ligible roots, there must have been little occasion for

a pure phoneticism that would use the sound value

of a depicted root regardless of its meaning; even

non-Nahuatl Mesoamerican names were translat-

able into familiar concepts and roots. Not so Span-

ish names, which seemed to consist of a series of

nonsense syllables crying out for purely phonetic

transcription. Thus it would have been primarily the

opaqueness of the new subject material that caused

one aspect of the indigenous system to be more

practiced, not Spanish encouragement or conscious

imitation bringing on an entirely new writing prin-

ciple. (ibid:333)

In the present work—as a complement to another on

the Nahuatl writing system (Lacadena n.d.)—I am

going to renew the discussion of the Tetzcocan docu-

ments and propose that they are perfectly representa-

tive examples of a traditional, indigenous writing sys-

tem. I am going to argue that the difference observable

between, for example, the Matrícula de Tributos and

the Codex Mendoza on the one hand, and the Codex

Santa María Asunción and the Memorial de los Indios

de Tepetlaoztoc on the other, is not a contrast between

Prehispanic and postconquest writing systems, nor

between traditional and acculturated documents in-

luenced by the Spanish alphabet. Rather, the system

of writing is the same in all the documents, with the

differences between them always falling within the

bounds of Nahuatl writing. I am going to argue that

there existed distinctive regional manifestations of the

same system of Nahuatl writing, and that it is to these

distinct traditions that the differences must be attrib-

uted. I am going to suggest that, indeed, the writing

of the Nahuatl tradition was strongly conservative and

that it was not inluenced in its functioning by the Latin

writing used by the Spanish. And, inally, I am going to

highlight the negative consequences to the decipher-

ment of Nahuatl writing by the artiicial limitation of

the hieroglyphic corpus.

The case against the documents of the Tepetlaoztoc

group and the school of Tetzcoco

One of the reasons put forward to explain the great-

er presence of phonetic signs in documents like the

Codex Vergara, the Codex Santa María Asunción, and

the Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaoztoc has to do

with the circumstances of their creation, in the context

of censuses and land registries ordered by the Spanish

colonial authorities, or documents presented as proofs

in judicial proceedings. Following this reasoning, the

indigenous scribes would have favored more phoneti-

cally transparent compositions and even invented new

forms of written expression in order to facilitate their

reading by the Spanish functionaries; or else the lat-

ter would have compelled the scribes to make a more

transparent system. As the indigenous writing system

would have been forcefully interfered with by this ex-

ceptional context, it should not be taken as a represen-

tative example of that writing system.

However, in spite of the repetition of this argument,

it is necessary to offer a serious criticism: in the irst

place, the Spanish were never, in fact, the addressees of

the indigenous glyphs. In general, the Spanish were not

aware of the autochthonous writing system, which they

did not understand. 2 The procedure followed was that

a native versed in the traditional writing—sometimes

the scribe himself—read the glyphs and explained the

content of the document, with the object of translat-

ing it into the Latin alphabet, thereby giving rise to

the mode of glosses. The Spanish functionaries did not

read the indigenous glyphs, but rather the associated

glosses. There was no motive, therefore, to favor more

phonetically transparent compositions or subtantially

modify the indigenous writing system, since both the

2 The marked iconicity of the Nahuatl signs always discon-

certed the Spanish; the logosyllabic character of the script, with

logograms and phonetic syllabic signs, and procedures like rebus

and phonetic complementation, were radically different from any

other writing system known to the Spanish of the sixteenth cen-

tury. These more familiar systems were scripts with apparently

arbitrary signs—it had been over two and a half millenia since

the loss of the initial iconic character of the Proto-Sinaitic signs

still preserved to a large extent in the Phoenician alphabet—and

of alphabetic type (e.g., Latin, Greek, Arab, Hebrew). The functio-

ning of other non-alphabetic writing like Chinese or Japanese was

not well known until much later, and other writing systems, like

Egyptian and Iberian—the latter a mixed syllabic-alphabetic sys-

tem—while known in the sixteenth century, were not deciphered

until the beginnings of the nineteenth and twentieth.

Lacadena

scribe and the lector were versed in the same system. In

the second place, one would have expected an increase

in phoneticism in other indigenous documents gener-

ated in similar circumstances. Yet the Codex Osuna, of

Tenochtitlan, and the Codex Cozcatzin, of Tlatelolco—

two documents created in order to be presented as

proofs in judicial proceedings—are not especially pho-

netic, nor do they exhibit a writing practice that dif-

fers from other documents of historical or economic

character originating in these same cities (such as the

two known Prehispanic cuauhxicalli , the Matrícula de

Tributos, or the Codices Mendoza, Boturini, Telleriano-

Remensis, or Azcatitlan). And on the contrary, census

documents and land registries like the Codex Vergara

and the Codex Santa María Asunción, or judicial proofs

like the Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaoztoc, are not

especially distinctive in their written expression from

other documents of historial content from their region,

like the Codex Xolotl, of Tetzcoco, or the Codex en Cruz,

possibly of Chiautla-Tepetlaoztoc (Dibble 1981:59), an

altepetl dependent on Tetzcoco—all of which exhibit a

greater utilization of phonetic signs.

As the surviving written testimonies of the area

of Tetzcoco are somewhat later than those of the

Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco group, the greater or lesser

presence of phoneticism has been associated with the

difference in time. The lesser phoneticism was held

to represent the older, Prehispanic system, while the

greater represents a later, Colonial stage. The reasons

for the evolution toward a more phonetic system were

to be sought in the writing brought by the Spanish con-

quistadors, the character of which was clearly phonetic

and would have stimulated the indigenous scribes, ei-

ther directly or indirectly, to make a more phonetic use

of their own. Once again we must raise serious objec-

tions to this argument.

The proposition that greater antiquity equals lesser

phoneticism (while lesser antiquity equates to greater

phoneticism), does not function in the absolute. Two

written testimonies separated by more than a hundred

years, the stone cuauhxicalli of Tizoc, carved between

1481-1486, and Mexican Manuscript No. 40 of the

French National Library (Medina 1998), from around

1597, share the same style of writing, with the same

scant use of phoneticism. Thus in both the cuauhxicalli of

Tizoc and Mexican Manuscript No. 40 we ind glyphic

compounds basically composed of logograms, normal-

ly one or two— KOA , 3 Kōā[titlān] <gloss: cohuatitlan>

(6r), AKAL , Ākal[wa’kān] <gloss: acalhuacan> (6r),

WIXACH , Wixach[titlān] 4 <gloss: huixachtitlan> (7v),

KAL , Kal[imayān] 5 <gloss: calimayan tlaca> (13r),

MATLA , Mātla[tzinco] <gloss: matlazinca> (13r),

TZON - PAN , Tzompān[ko] <gloss: tzonpanco> (6r),

WITZ - KOL , Witzkōl[tepētl] <gloss: huizcoltepetl> (6r),

TOL - PETLA , Tōlpetla[k] <gloss: tolpetlac> (6r), E’EKA -

TEPE , E’ēkatepē[k] <gloss: yecatepec> (6r), XAL - TOKA ,

Xāltokā[n] <gloss: xaltoca> (6r), IKPA - TEPE , Īkpatepē[k]

<gloss: icpatepeca> (13r); combinations of logogram

plus phonetic sign— TOL - a , Tōl[l]ā[n] <gloss: tolan> 6

(5v), a - XAYAKA , Āxāyaka[tl] <gloss: axayacatzin>

(13r), XOCHI - tla , Xōchitlā[n] <gloss: xochitlan> (13r);

instances of rebus— XIW , 7 Xiw[itl] “year” <gloss:

xihuitl molpia> (7v); and infrequent use of phonetic

complementation— a - ASKAPOTZAL , Āskapōtzal[ko]

<gloss: azcapotzalco>, TLEMA 8 - ma , Tlemā[ko] <gloss:

tlemaco> (5v) (Figure 1). Despite the crudeness of the

drawing and the evident disintegration of the ancient

tradition, in scribal terms Mexican Manuscript No. 40,

composed around 1597, is closer to the cuauhxicalli of

Tizoc of 1481-1486 than all of the Tetzcocan documents,

however much nearer in time. In the same way, what is

possibly the oldest surviving Tetzcocan document, the

Codex Xolotl, is closer to any of the documents of the

Tepetlaoztoc group than to any other Prehispanic writ-

ten testimony of the Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco school, to

which it should in principle be most closely related.

In fact, what these distinctive tendencies have in

common is provenance. The greater or lesser pho-

neticism of the documents is not distributed by theme

(historical versus cadastral or judicial, for example),

the more ancient versus the more modern, or as the

assumption would have it, the pure Prehispanic ver-

sus the corrupt Colonial; but rather they are distrib-

3 I have adopted the following conventions: in transcription,

the reading value of logograms will be written in capital letters,

with phonetic signs in lowercase, following a standardized alpha-

bet (a, e, i, o, ā, ē, ī, ō, ch, k, k w , l, m, n, p, s, t, tl, tz, w, x, y, ’);

the transcribed signs of a glyphic compound will be separated by

hyphens; the transliterations will be written in italics; square brac-

kets will indicate reconstructed phonemes; the glosses, if any, as-

sociated with glyphic compounds will be indicated between bent

brackets following the original orthography (see Lacadena n.d.);

the sources will be indicated between parentheses, noting the do-

cument and the page or position. The following abbreviations will

be employed: CCRZ= Codex en Cruz; CMDZ= Codex Mendoza;

CMEX= Codex Mexicanus; CSMA= Codex Santa María Asunción;

CTIZ= Cuauhxicalli of Tizoc; CTLA= Codex Tlatelolco; CVRG=

Codex Vergara; CXOL= Codex Xolotl; MITE= Memorial de los

Indios de Tepetlaoztoc; MM40= Mexican Manuscript No. 40 of the

French National Library.

4 Vowel length uncertain in the segment /wixach/.

5 Vowel length uncertain in the segment /kal/.

6 Associated with the same glyphic compound are two other

glosses: <Tolla>—crossed out—and <tulla>.

7 The text refers to xihuitl “year”—the context is the celebration

of xihuitl molpia —but the tlacuilo (scribe) has used the logogram

XIW “grass.”

8 The logogram TLEMA represents a handheld brazier or cen-

ser, tlemaitl in Nahuatl (Siméon 1992:703), possibly tlemā·itl . An ol-

der version of the same appears in the Codex Osuna, without pho-

netic complements.

Regional Scribal Traditions

Figure 1 . Glyphic compounds in Mexican Manuscript No. 40 of the French National Library. Examples of writing with logograms: (a) KOA ,

Kōā[titlān] <gloss: cohuatitlan> (6r); (b) AKAL , Ākal[wa’kān] <gloss: acalhuacan> (6r); (c) WIXACH , Wixach[titlān] <gloss: huixachtitlan>

(7v); (d) KAL , Kal[imayān] <gloss: calimayan> (13r); (e) MATLA , Mātla[tzinco] <gloss: matlazinca> (13r); (f) TZON - PAN , Tzompān[ko]

<gloss: tzonpanco> (6r); (g) WITZ - KOL , Witzkōl[tepētl] <gloss: huizcoltepetl> (6r); (h) TOL - PETLA , Tōlpetla[k] <gloss: tolpetlac> (6r);

(i) E’EKA - TEPE , E’ēkatepē[k] <gloss: yecatepec> (6r); (j) XAL - TOKA , Xāltokā[n] <gloss: xaltoca> (6r); (k) IKPA - TEPE , Īkpatepē[k] <gloss:

icpatepeca> (13r). Examples of combination of logograms and phonetic signs: (l) TOL - a , Tōl[l]ā[n] <gloss: tolan> (5v); (m) a - XAYAKA ,

Āxāyaka[tl] <gloss: axayacatzin> (13r); (n) XOCHI - tla , Xōchitlā[n] <gloss: xochitlan> (13r). Example of rebus: (o) XIW , Xiw[itl] “year”

<gloss: xihuitl molpia> (7v). Examples of phonetic complementation: (p) a - ASKAPOTZAL , Āskapōtzal[ko] <gloss: azcapotzalco> (7v); (q)

TLEMA - ma , Tlemā[ko] <gloss: tlemaco> (5v) (all after Medina 1998).

uted by geopolitical regions. Comparatively speaking,

the written documents that exhibit lesser phoneti-

cism—the cuauhxicalli of Tizoc and Motecuzoma I, the

Matrícula de Tributos, the Codex Mendoza, the Codex

Boturini, the Codex Azcatitlan, the Codex Osuna, the

Codex Cozcatzin, Mexican Manuscript No. 40, the

Codex García Granados (this last dating to the second

half of the seventeenth century)—pertain to the an-

cient altepetl of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, while those

that exhibit greater phoneticism—such as the Codex

Xolotl, the Codex de Xicotepec, the Codex en Cruz,

the Codex Vergara, the Codex Santa María Asunción,

and the Memorial de los Indios de Tepetlaoztoc—have

in common their relationship to the ancient altepetl of

Tetzcoco. The documents of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco

on the one hand, and of Tetzcoco on the other, repre-

sent two distinct written traditions of Nahuatl writing,

two scribal schools of markedly different personality.

Nahuatl writing in the school of Tetzcoco

Accepting that the greater phoneticism present in the

documents of the Tetzcocan group is due neither to

the peculiarity of their theme nor to their temporal-

ity, but rather to their belonging to a particular school

of scribes, we must now ask ourselves if the type of

The PARI Journal - A quarterly publication of the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute v8 № 4 Spring 2008 - Special Nahuatl Writing Issue.pdf

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