Video sources and notes for claims made.
Credits for images, fonts, music, sfx.
After years of contrasting definitions of writing vs my own study of Mesoamerican scripts, Alonso Zamora Corona's "Toward a complex theory of writing" really struck a chord. I couldn't get it out of my head; it drove me to read through The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts by Jansen & Pérez Jiménez. From there, I took notes on other works mentioned below and sank time into a video about definitions of writing, mostly to prepare the road to this one. This script has been rewritten and cut so much, consequently some material in the notes below is given much less time (including the Nāhuatl script comparisons) and a few are cut entirely.
While not required viewing, there's some setup work in my buildup animation where I revisit my Writing Bee and reconsider definitions of writing. (There's also a patron followup that provides more details. The sources document for those has more to share about writing and spelling.) My diagram models writing in a way that widens our focus from marks on pages to roles of readers and writers. (This time I alter the model to show cultural differences in roles within a Ñuu dzaui framework.) Ok, onto the specific claims made in this video and sources for them following the timeline.
Opening. I tried out a few concepts for the cold open. Revisit my previous "Aztec or Mayan" quiz game, adding an "Aztec or Mixtec" edition for contrasts and misconceptions? Focus on how the script defies our definition of writing? Eventually, patrons guided me to what's most interesting: how the script actually works.
Unlike other scripts. My previous video shares scripts I've studied and what they've taught me about writing. The book shown is Whittaker's Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, which I went through once for pen-and-pigment practice and again for notetaking. More below about features that set the Mixtec script apart, but here's a taste: pure logography and tonal puns. Tonal puns are "the opposite of what happens in Chinese... a word could be represented by a glyph denoting a word that differed only in tone", while its characterization as logography reflects an exhausted failure to find "any traces of a syllabary in Mixtec writing", versus a claimed Nāhuatl "syllabic grid" (Zamora Corona, "Towards a complex theory of writing", section 7). The Chinese comparison is synchronically neat but diachronically messy – syllables that differ only in tone are indeed often represented by different characters, but 諧聲 puns were applied before tones had even developed, and now traces of what were once morphological reasons let some characters like 量 represent two syllables with different tonemes. I'm getting ahead of myself; I should save this for next year's video on the changing phonology of Hàn-era Chinese.
Strawberry field workers. The insignia and ñuu motif are displayed on the MICOP site, which explains how Mixtec people "face unique challenges including language barriers, as they often only speak their native pre-Hispanic indigenous languages... [and] earn meager seasonal wages with few, if any, employee benefits" (https://mixteco.org/mixtec/). "Over 200 Indigenous migrants, primarily strawberry farmworkers" created a "radio station" to address these needs ("Radio Indígena" page). When I tune into their station, I hear both Mixtec and Spanish. (Compare other articles discussing Mixtec people in strawberry agriculture.) Korunsky's "Milpa and strawberries" similarly connects Indigenous farm labor in Oregon to landscapes (chapter 1) and radio stations ("The place and the past"). The connection between the mixteco.org signs and their glyphic values may be quite ancient, for example: "The step-fret motif (ñuu sign) already occurs in the Classic Period (the so-called Ñuiñe style) and seems to be derived from Teotihuacan" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 1, section "Mexica and Mixtec place signs", below Figure 1.8).
Mixtec diversity in California and Mexico. La Mixteca spans multiple modern states, with three subdivisions of its own: "Baja" lowlands, "Alta" highlands and "de la Costa" along the Pacific (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language", including map in figure 1.2). Bax's "Language ideology, linguistic differentiation, and language maintenance in the California Mixtec Diaspora" documents the California use of Bajo as a "broad umbrella term" vs Alto as "ideologized...distinctly different from their own" even if not from Mixteca Alta. Bax draws particularly bold lines linking between language, migration and labor:
"Many Mixtec people in California perform backbreaking agricultural labor, especially in the strawberry fields. However, despite frequently working 12-hour days, there is a 90% poverty rate for Indigenous Mexican immigrants (Pérez, Vásquez, and Buriel 2016). Mixtecs are poorer than mestizo migrants; they typically hold the worst-paying agricultural jobs (as do other Indigenous Oaxacans, such as Triquis; Holmes 2007, 2013). Because many migrants are monolingual or Mixtec-dominant, especially those from more rural areas, they often face prejudice at work for not speaking Spanish (López and Runsten 2004; Mines, Nichols, and Runsten 2010). They are frequently the targets of exploitation by unscrupulous employers, including wage theft and labor law violations, because they lack the resources to defend themselves in Spanish (Runsten and Kearney 1994)." (Bax, 1.2.4)
Map of Chiyo Cahnu. My two main sources are Caso's 1949 booklet El mapa de Teozacoalco and Whittington & team's "El Mapa de Teozacoalco", a 2003 survey study of sites from the map. Caso "made a first analysis of this crucial document, using it as a Rosetta Stone to decipher the Ñuu Dzaui codices" (Pérez Jiménez & Jansen, chapter 2, page 46). Caso traces the provenance of this "verdadera 'Piedra de Rosetta'" (page 3) to handlers including Joaquín García Icazbalceta in the 1800s and more distantly to a Felipe II (page 8). He starts from a concern that moderns characterize the people as living before history, as if real history starts once people learn Spanish and the alphabet (page 3; note parallels to "evolutionist" divisions between proto-writing vs true writing down below). Caso admires how the map mixes "precioso dibujo indígena" and "técnica europea" (page 9).
Date of the map. Consider at length the reasoning of Jansen & Pérez Jiménez: "In the Map of Chiyo Cahnu the last person in the Ñuu Tnoo column is Don Francisco's daughter: Doña Francisca de Mendoza. As she died without having children, her father’s brother, Don Felipe de Santiago, became her successor as cacique of Ñuu Tnoo in 1576. This, however, had not yet happened at the time the Map was painted – otherwise Don Felipe 'Coyote with Staff' would certainly have been shown as ruler of Ñuu Tnoo, which he was in 1580, when the Relación Geográfica was written. On the other hand, the Map was clearly composed after the boundary-correction with Yucu Ndedzi (Elotepec), which took place in 1574. This narrows down the date for the making of the Chiyo Cahnu Map to between 1574 and 1576" (chapter 2, page 50, section "The Map of Chiyo Cahnu (Teozacualco)").
Two-name names. Jansen & Pérez Jiménez write the terms as "dzevui", still given to a child through "the Patron Saint of its birthday", and "dzeque", recorded in Alvarado's dictionary and shown in pictorials "as a separate sign close to or on top of a person's head" (chapter 1, section "Kings and queens"). Caso reads the names of estancias, followed by place glyphs, then names involved in events (up to page 34). He's confident these are Mixtec not Aztec like Nuttall thought nor Zapotec like Clark thought (page 8). Caso points to colonizer writings about the shared language heard throughout Mixtec places, and that they have a naming convention of a birthdate name plus a seven-year "sobrenombre" (page 15), which he treats as "nombres y sobrenombres" (page 20, footnote). He concludes we can now "interpretar todo este grupo de códices mixtecos que parecían indescifrables" (page 35). These include "los Códices Vindobonensis, (reverso y parte del anverso), Nuttall, Colombino, Bodley, Selden I y Selden II y Becker I y II" as well as post-contact lienzos and manuscripts ("además de numerosos lienzos y manuscritos post-cortesianos"), all telling Mixtec lineage histories ("relatan historias genealógicas de los principados mixtecos") (quotes in this sentence from page 4).
Modern varieties and the Postclassic language. Jansen & Pérez Jiménez write that "several hundreds of thousands of people speak different dialects of the Mixtec language or Dzaha Dzaui... During the 16th century the dialect of Yucu Ndaa (Tepozcolula) in the central area was used as a lingua franca. We still use it in this way in historical studies" (The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts, chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language" again). Caso reads dates from 772 (page 21) to 1519 and beyond, with post-colonial lineages recorded pictorially until 1642 (page 35). Jansen & Pérez Jiménez write that the language of the manuscripts "span[s] the so-called Postclassic Period (±AD 900–1521)" (start of their preface). In their "so-called" I can almost hear Graeber & Wengrow taking issue with prefixes that reduce whole societies and timespans to "impatien[t]" "prefaces" or "waning" "postfaces" (The Dawn of Everything, chapter 10, section "In which we offer a digression on 'the shape of time'...", including the term "Post-Classic" at the bottom of page 379). The two sources I highlighted at this point are that book by Jansen & Pérez Jiménez and Sahìn Sàu by Pérez Jiménez. Sahìn Sàu focuses on her modern dialect, helpfully marking tones or noting when old tones are unknown. For example, the cognate of "dzeque" is "sɨkɨ" with two mid tones (Sahìn Sàu, unit 3). At a few points I checked Alvarado or Reyes for the classic language. While searching for more, I also stumbled on creators who share linguistic and cultural lessons, such as these brief videos, this long one and these channels, as well as creators who sing and rap in the language. (I'm also appreciating what to my ears sound like Mixtec phonological influence on Spanish – carrying over tonal patterns or applying contrastive sets of voiceless stops vs prenasalized/post-oralized voiced stops: [komᵇaj̃ia], [intihena], [kwenᵈa].)
Language skills, language facts. Pérez Jiménez presents the language as tonal, like related Otomanguean languages, with three tones: "alto (á), medio (a), bajo (à)" (introduction to Sahìn Sàu). Nouns are definite by default ("ya están determinados"), unmarked for case or number ("no cambia ni en plural ni cuando el sustantivo es objeto"), so "náà" is the mother(s); indefinite nouns are marked like "ɨn ñáà" for a mother (Sahìn Sàu, unit 2). More on the term Mixtec below.
The names Mixtec and Ñuu Dzaui. My previous sources documents noted the trickiness of "Aztec"; now it's time for Mixtec! Whittaker shares stories of how Mexica scribes translated and transliterated names into their own script as the Triple Alliance expanded its empire, even creating glyphs for Spanish after the invasion (chapter 7). The term "mixtēcah" (Gran diccionario Nāhuatl entry) adds a suffix – the same ending on az-tecà – to mixtli (represented by the cloud glyph in the Tlachia results below that entry). In Mixtec, rather than borrow terms from "Nahuatl, mixtecâ, which means 'inhabitants of the land of the clouds'", the people and land are "Ñuu Dzaui or Ñuu Savi, the 'Nation of the Rain God'" and their language is "Dzaha Dzaui" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language"). The words for rain vary across time and space: "Ñuu Dzaui (Ñuu Dzavui, Ñuu Dzahui)" show historical spelling variants, while "Ñuu Saui, Ñuu Savi, Ñuu Davi" and "Ñuu Dau" come from modern Mixtec varieties (all in the introduction to Sahìn Sàu), which show off diverse initial consonant outcomes like dz > d or dz > s and a tendency in some varieties to reduce unemphasized -ui/-vui/-vi (Sahìn Sàu, unit 17). Contrast the historical and dialectal diversity of rain-word shapes with the word for people given in Sahìn Sàu, in The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts, and the SIL-published Gramática mixteca de Atatlahuca and Gramática popular del mixteco: Mixteco de Silacayoapan, which always maintains that same ñuu shape as in the quotes above.
Glyphs alone. The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts puts Ñuu Dzaui words to the glyphs of each "iya, 'Lord', and iyadzehe, 'Lady'" and the towns they rule, including "ita" (Sahìn Sàu mid-low "ità" but mid-mid in another variety) for flower and "ñuu" (Sahìn Sàu "ñuù") for people, town, community (chapter 1, section "Kings and queens"). The glyph "yucu" for mountain (Sahìn Sàu "yuku") is treated earlier and combined with black paint or with the flower glyph (section "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language). Jansen & Pérez Jiménez note that in "the modern dialect of the area of Ñuu Ndeya (Chalcatongo) and Ñuu Kahnu (San Miguel el Grande), with which we are most familiar, yukù (with mid-low tones) means 'herb', but yuku (mid-mid) 'mountain'" (chapter 1, section "Mexica and Mixtec place signs"). Discussed at length by them but cut from my video is an important triangle cloth glyph for "'fame', 'nobility' or 'virtue' (dzico)" (section "Kings and queens").
Welcome back logograms. My previous logographic scenes consider features of Maya, Chinese, Cuneiform and Egyptian writing ("Thoth's Pill" and in specific animated tales). The curious case of Egyptian cryptography stands out for its relevant use of rebus puzzles – the title of that video, "Writing doesn't always end in alphabets", could just as well apply here.
Combining glyphs. Two adjacent name glyphs within Codex Añute are read together as "Lady 10 Flower 'Spiderweb of the Rain' (Dzinduhua Dzavui)" and she is seated on "the Town of Flints (Ñuu Yuchi)" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, Figure 1.15).
Conflating glyphs. Jansen & Pérez Jiménez show how Ñuu Dzaui is depicted as "a frieze (ñuu) with the head or mask of the Rain God (Dzaui, in historical orthography: Dzavui; Nahuatl: Tlaloc)" (Figure 1.9 and text below). The "'A-O sign', as it is often called in the literature... is read cuiya, 'year'", and it gets tied up with one of "the four 'Year-bearers'" and might even "be accompanied by an eye (nuu), suggesting the reading nuu cuiya, 'in the year…'" (Figure 1.11 and nearby text; 13 Reed in 1.16; 6 Flint in Codex Sierra 1564; Sahìn Sàu "kuià…\< kuiyà" in unit 1).
Qualifying glyphs. A change in glyph dimension and pigment can be linguistically meaningful as in Nāhuatl script (chapter 3 of Whittaker, section "Adjectives: size and color matter", along with my brief patron bonus video on this topic), something done in Mixtec pictorials for the town "Ñuu Tnoo" (chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language), today known as "Ñuù túún" (Sahìn Sàu, unit 5).
Tonal puns. Readings "may be based on punning with homonyms or words that only differ in tones", with Jansen & Pérez Jiménez sharing examples of different tone patterns yielding different meanings and how this is punned in names (chapter 1, later in section "Kings and queens", page 38). Specific tones for three examples mentioned there are earth ñuhu, fire ñuhù, deity ñùhù (Sahìn Sàu unit 1, which also gives a fourth ñúhu with the meaning contains/"contiene"). To write the "toponym Chiyo Cahnu, 'Big Altar, Big Pyramid'... the painter used a homonym with another tone: cahnu, 'to bend, to break'. The anonymous small man, painted black, is just an actor who represents the verb." (chapter 2, section "The map of Chiyo Cahnu (Teozacualco)"). Tonally, the two terms are "jahnù quebrar [fut. kahnù]" and "káhnu grande" (Sahìn Sàu, unit 13, "No confundir" wordlist at the end of Part I). Hamann advises against reading chiyo as altars instead of ruins, but Jansen & Pérez Jiménez respond that "this goes somewhat too far… we are under the impression that such ancient ceremonial places, even after being abandoned, were not considered 'ruins' in the modern Western usage of that term, but remained the dwelling place (and altars) of Gods and divine ancestors" (chapter 4, pages 176-177). Pérez Jiménez derives modern "Ndìjinu" from "Ndijìn Nuù", with the same double meaning implied by Good View/Sight ("'Buena vista', en el sentido doble de 'bien visible' y 'con buen ojo'), but the old scribes engaged in wordplay to paint "un ojo (nuù) con unas vigas atravesadas (ndìjin)", an eye with crossed beams (Sahìn Sàu, unit 5, page 49). According to Whittaker's book, this placename resulted in a further Mixtec/Aztec pun: Nahua scribes were given the direct translation Tlachiyaco but, "[r]ealizing that a verb was unacceptable as a place name", they responded with Tlach-quiyauh-co, ballcourt-rain-at, for "At the Entrance to the Ballcourt" (start of chapter 7, an anecdote originally repeated later in my script but decided to cut). Whittaker uses the pun to warn about deriving etymology from glyphs, and Jansen & Pérez Jiménez agree: "Given the large number of homonyms and words distinguished only by tones, in connection with a complex dialectical variability, it is easy to make errors in the etymology of Mixtec terms" (chapter 3, section "Elaboration and new perspectives", page 119).
Proverbs, difrasismos. Jansen & Pérez Jiménez define "the hendiadys or difrasismo" as "two (often concrete) terms in a couplet" that express "one (often abstract) concept" (chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language"). In my previous videos and sources we met examples of Nāhuatl difrasismos. Mixtec pictorials represent rulership with "yuvui tayu, 'mat and throne'", conquest with "nduvua iya, 'arrows of the lords'", children are "ñene ini, 'the blood, the heart'", an inhabited area is "yucu nduta, 'mountain and water'" (chapter 1, sections "Ñuu Dzaui: land and language" and "Ñuu Dzaui historiography", pages 10-14). The parallelism "tnuhu yaa" for "the words and songs" also appears on page 14, and later as "yaa tnuhu" (page 235) and as their title for part 3 of the book. If you are one of said "lover[s] of a good kenning", it's also fun to contrast the differences: "Following Rudolph Meissner's definition, a kenning is generally defined on structural and systemic, rather than on semantic or cognitive grounds, as a two-element substitutive periphrasis, composed by a base-word (B) and a determinant (D) in a genitival syntactic relationship" (Bianca Patria, "Kenning variation and lexical selection in early skaldic verse", 1.1). If we riff on that phrase-structure analysis, the difrasismos I'm familiar with in Nāhuatl, Mayan languages and Mixtec are double-headed (the X and the Y) can expand into two separate phrases – improvising here, compare "sat on the mat, sat on the throne" for "ruled the town" to how kennings' modifier-referent "extensions" fit their "riddle-like" descriptiveness (Patria 3.2). Most importantly, the Mesoamerican difrasismo is "part of a broader pattern of parallelism across all levels of grammar" (Barrett's "Poetics", chapter 7 in The Mayan Languages).
Give-and-take puzzles. What was a sentence here plus a paragraph later in earlier drafts is here cut down to a mere mention. Robertson's "Decolonizing Aztec picture-writing" (chapter 12 in Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas) challenges criticism of "Aztec picture-writing" by Prem and others by attempting to situate signs in an artistic and cultural context. When experts embrace the idea we'll meet below, that writing progresses from pictographs to clumsy phonograms to refined alphabets (section "Defined by a colonial act"), Robertson argues they miss and misinterpret signs because they fail "to take into account all of the pictorial elements, and to think in terms of give-and-take relations" (second section, "The place-name signs for Toyac and Tonalimoqueçan"). Robertson singles out Prem's view of the system as "'limited' in terms of its ability to record language-specific information, 'excessive' in terms of its pictorial detail, and 'defective' due to the ambiguity of the pictures (Prem 1992, 58, 69)"; contrast this with a puzzled-out reading of Tepeyacac, where Robertson reads the inclusion of a nose as signaling a riddle nose:face::spring:mountain (second section again).
Pure logography. In a standard world writing systems typology, Mixtec script stands apart from Aztec, which uses a phonetic formula for Whittaker or a syllabic grid for Lacadena (for the critical difference check Whittaker chapter 4, section "The structure of the Aztec syllabary" and tables on the previous page; also pictorial examples below). Zamora Corona writes that Mixtec script "has to be recognized as being fully logographic and yet, much to the chagrin of Lacadena’s followers, it was as functional and as equally valid as a writing system as Nahuatl, despite having no syllabic grid" ("Towards a complex theory of writing", section 6, also check footnote 4). Jansen & Pérez Jiménez also deemphasize the difference, treating even Mixtec name glyphs as important "phonetic elements in the pictorial record" (chapter 1, start of section "Mexica and Mixtec place signs", followed by a comparative analysis of words and morphemes in both scripts). Indeed, despite differences in languages and in phoneticism, "Ñuu Dzaui pictography operates in the same way as that of the Mexica. In the concrete case of the toponyms the structuring principles are identical, but the character of both languages is quite different. ... Due to the different structure of both languages, the elements in the toponym are in opposite order. For example 'Black Mountain'... Both pictographic systems represent it as a bell-shaped drawing (mountain) painted black" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 1, again from the section "Mexica and Mixtec place signs").
Words carry memories of composition. Dzaha Dzaui helped read logograms, combinations, puns and proverbs, but it also shed light on manuscript composition. The codex is a "tacu, 'painting' and ñee ñuhu, 'sacred skin'", painted on "ñee, 'skin, leather', tutu, 'paper', i.e. the native bark paper or amate, and dzoo, 'cloth' i.e. a lienzo" (chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui historiography"). The writer/chronicler is "tay taa tacu tnuhu yaa, 'the man who writes and paints the words and songs'", though Jansen & Pérez Jiménez wonder about terms for women scribes like "'la pintora' represented in Codex Telleriano-Remensis" (section "Ñuu Dzaui historiography" again). Pages are visibly structured in "the boustrophedon pattern yuq yuq, 'following the furrow'" (Figure 1.4 and text below). Although I fail to spot a similar morpheme in the translation for "surco" and in the multiple entries with "seguir…" in Alvarado, a modern term for "surco, fila" is "yuku" (Sahìn Sàu, unit 13, "No confundir" wordlist). Through the language, manuscripts can bear their own titles instead of the names of their handlers after colonization, like Codex Añute for the place it's about or Codex Tonindeye for the composite lineage history it depicts (see named codex sections throughout Jansen & Pérez Jiménez chapter 2).
Could the entire page be read? This is a setup for us to see the need for Zamora Corona's combined bottom-up and top-down perspectives before we even meet his article (in the next claims section). First, let's review existing definitions of writing.
Writing systems experts defining writing. Writing definers and pictorial decipherers ramped up over roughly the same decades. Compare the trajectory from Caso's decipherments (1949) to Troike's dissertation and symposium (1974) to the book and paper that I focus on today (2011 and 2022) to dates of some well-known definers: Gelb's Study of Writing (1952), Sampson's Writing Systems (1985), Daniels & Bright's The World's Writing Systems (1996), Coulmas' Writing Systems (2002). My Writing Bee sources briefly share aspects of Gelb's and Daniel's definitions, and in a later paragraph questions those definitions. (The particular focus is on what Zamora Corona calls "problematic evolutionist aspects", since among others Daniels & Bright and Coulmas continue Gelb's demarcation of "true writing" vs forerunners.) Their influence is felt everywhere in academic discussions of writing in English – here's one scicomm example from the "World of Antiquity" channel. Following Zamora Corona, in this video we will pay particular attention to Gelb's notion that writing matures over time from pictures to alphabets and Daniels' concept of marks that represent sounds without pictures in the absence of people involved in the writing, since these are relevant to pictography. Zamora Corona lumps Sampson, Unger and Coulmas in with other "grammatologists" because of notions of progressive stages and phonocentric approaches that partially or largely rule out pictography (introduction to "Towards a complex theory of writing").
Theirs are the definitions I met. I first ran into Daniels & Bright in my teens, then the other cast of definers in my university library stacks and undergrad "Writing systems of the world" course. (You may still find me sitting like that between shelves somewhere.) I've since revisited their definitions for animations on Mesoamerican scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, West Africa's scripts, and of course Thoth's Pill. My Tibetan script video teased a gameshow concept we returned to in my recent Writing Bee video, where I did not debunk these definitions but proposed how turning that gameshow into a model of writing allows us to fit other perspectives, including Zamora Corona and Jansen & Pérez Jiménez today.
Mexico's scripts on the other side of the line. Above I listed definers who nuance or repeat what Zamora Corona calls the "evolutionist aspects" of Gelb's definition of writing. Gelb considers pictography to be stuck among the "forerunners of writing", which he labels "semasiography": "the emphasis placed upon the descriptive technique of art at the expense of the identifying device forced all their attempts in the wrong direction with the result that none of the Amerindian systems – and this includes the Maya and the Aztec – developed beyond the stage of forerunners of writing" (Study of Writing, chapter 6, see also figure 95 laying out "Stages of the development of writing", the third of which is "Full Writing", with three substages). Gelb makes more remarks about their "low" level and lack of sound-writing in the same chapter. Gelb's views continue to be echoed but with a lone Maya caveat (see next paragraph for why). For example, here's Hinton 2001: "In the New World, so far as we know, only the Mayan hieroglyphic system is a true writing system" ("New writing systems" within The Green Book of Language Revitalization). People closer to these scripts take issue with this demarcation. For Whittaker, Mexico's scripts constantly display iconic/linguistic "dualism", though he retreats to the perspective that an icon "does not require knowledge of the language" (introduction to Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs). Mark van Stone writes that "writing systems of America have long refused to fit into our long-established Old World categories... As it became obvious that Maya worked very much like Babylonian or Japanese, scholars classed it among 'full' or 'true' writing systems, but continued to argue about the status of Aztec, Mixtec, and other New World scripts. These are unique in their operation and are often described as 'incomplete' or 'not fully developed' writing systems. Since they satisfy the most central functions of a writing system, however, these others ought to be considered on a par with Old World systems, although uniquely different" ("Writing systems of Mesoamerica", pages 383-4 within Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya). The First Writing, edited by Houston, compiles thoughts from those versed in logographic systems generally, including the use of iconography in Mesoamerican scripts. One reviewer is "startled" by the introduction and conclusion: "Houston declares that the invention of scripts has little to do with linguistics or even directly with language", a view nonetheless supported by "Elizabeth Hill Boone's account of non-linguistic graphic communicative representations such as the Aztecs' pictorial codices" (Roger Wright's review of the book). Millard sums up Boone's "examples of 'non-phonetic graphic systems,' such as notations... All of these, in fact, are better described as adjuncts of writing; they would not be intelligible to the uninitiated without texts" (Alan Millard's review). Houston is adamant that the proto/true demarcation is messy even for the non-Mesoamerican scripts it was tailored to fit:
"Peter Damerow labels the earliest, linguistically incomplete notations 'proto-writing' (1999b:2), a species of record that requires heavy doses of oral contextualization and background information. In this volume, John Baines makes the point that early writing systems may not principally have had 'language-notating' in mind, a point underscored by their extreme abbreviation and isolated occurrence, neither of which accords with the linear sequencing of language. At the time of their invention, Egyptian hieroglyphs were not thought teleologically to be 'proto-anything'... however, the lack of explicit phonic clues cannot be taken as evidence that lexemes were exclusively semantic in their referents" ("Overture to The First Writing", I.1 in The First Writing).
Maya as the sole exception. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code dramatizes the bitter disputes that preceded Maya's academic recognition as true writing, and even then its ascension came from finally conceding its "phoneticist" credentials, not revising definitions of writing to account for its inextricable iconography. Whittaker starts his book with a promise to "show that Aztec glyphs do not represent, as has previously been suggested, mere 'writing without words'" (introduction to Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs). Later, Whittaker addresses the failure of current definitions of writing to account for Central Mexico's scripts: "While the Maya script has now begun to find a place in handbooks on writing systems, Aztec writing has to date not fared anywhere near as well. If it is mentioned at all, it is quickly dismissed as a mere forerunner of writing... this is far from an accurate or adequate assessment of this long-overlooked Central Mexican phenomenon" (chapter 4, page 126). Maya is "well-disciplined" (page 126 again) and in that script "a sign is, with remarkably few exceptions, either a logogram or a syllabogram, and not both" (two pages later on 128). Classic and Postclassic scribes hardly ever write sans iconography, "but the distinction was not necessarily important to the author, who thrived on the dualism in Mesoamerican thought and art" (chapter 1, page 28).
Me slowly studying Mesoamerican scripts. My experience with Dzaha Dzaui is confined to the path to this animation, though the brief glimpses I got before 2023 left vivid impressions. I shared resources and thoughts from studying Maya and Nāhuatl scripts in my Writing Bee sources. I'll save my head full of wait-one-things (beyond what I've already shared) and my file full of notes for when we one day get to that video about the script of the Aztec Empire.
Stuck between definitions and pictorials, I encounter this paper and book. Zamora Corona's "Towards a complex theory of writing" synthesizes decades of perspectives on Nahua and Ñuu Dzaui pictorials into an applicable model. More in the next section, but here are the basics: writing uses marks to represent language through a combination of bottom-up segments (phonological/morphological units) and top-down schemata (semantic/pragmatic units). Segmental vs schematic is my own alliterative mnemonic for this, but I cut it from the video because "segmental" has a narrower meaning in writing systems analysis. Zamora Corona's paper cites The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts by Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, which over readthroughs, sketches and drafts became my main source for this video.
Interpretations are top-down. Zamora Corona's "Towards a complex theory of writing" shares how writing definers have long excluded pictography (section 2) by focusing exclusively on the low-level units of writing (section 3), ignoring the high-level elements that must be combined with low-level logograms and phonograms in order for a message to emerge in pictorial writing (section 4). The task facing the pictorial reader then is to integrate top-down interpretations and bottom-up decipherments, as the author does with examples from Aztec writing (sections 5 and 6) and the apparently phonogramless Mixtec writing (section 7). Caso's Mapa de Teozacualco early on acknowledges the schematic nature of this system: "No me parece justo, después de quemarles a los indios sus historias, declarar que no las escribían... en el Estado de Oaxaca, asiento de una de las culturas más altas y exquisitas de México, existió un pueblo que escribía historia, utilizando un sistema jeroglífico que le permitió conservar una relación esquemática de los principales acontecimientos" (page 4, emphasis mine).
Interpreting a marriage schema. Jansen & Pérez Jiménez show and translate this marriage scene, including the wedding date and the names of two rulers of the Town of Flints; the scene continues with the names of their first and second sons (Figure 1.16). This kind of interpretation applies across a host of images that present what Zamora Corona calls schemata, blueprints or containers: "A seated couple on a mat represents a marriage, a man with black ointment with an incense burner in his hand is a priest, a man armed with shield and club or dart-thrower is a warrior, while a place sign perforated by a dart or a toppled temple in flames indicates a conquest" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 1, page 31). Unlike continuous narrative art (a term that brings up its own Western debates), pictography is explicitly linguistic on both levels and to both scribe and interpreter: "it was the intervention and criteria of the producer, the tlacuilo, which determined which images had 'embedded texts' and hence could be considered pictography, and which didn't... one of the most important cues towards the presence of 'embedded texts' or pictography is precisely the presence of dates and names written in a logosyllabic manner, working in tandem with pictography, in contexts in which we have clear verbal parallels in written alphabetic sources" (Zamora Corona's conclusion, responding to objections from "cross-cultural" comparisons).
Interpretation is hardly anything goes. Previous attempts to interpret Mexican pictography "were criticized as being fanciful in some aspects" (Zamora Corona, end of section 6). An old controversy between Dark and Caso anticipates ongoing posturing in writing systems debates that pit scientific decipherment of true writing against nebulous interpretation invited by pictography. Dark charged that Caso's "[i]nterpretations of the meaning of these pictographs will, however, be largely based on what the observer can read into them... This knowledge has very little empirical basis"; however, time has proved Caso the "clear winner", alongside Nowotny's insights that the texts are legible historical accounts (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 3, section "The Map of Teozacualco as a Rosetta Stone"; the same authors summarize Nowotny's insights around page 110). Zamora Corona's paper goes on to share a method for proving exact readings, summarized below.
Readings require parallel pictorial-alphabetic proof. After briefly contrasting the Mixtec and Aztec scripts, Zamora Corona uses parallel proof to read two examples. The first is an alphabetic text side-by-side with a pictorial scene from Codex Muro, where the gloss "Ñuñumahu Dzavi Jicaji niduvi sihi Ñucavaco Yusi Tedzadodzo niday Chiyo Yuhu" so neatly parallels the pictorial sentence "6-MAHU DZAVI-JICAJI MARRIAGE 2-HUACO YUSI-TEDZADODZO PROVENANCE CHIYO-YUHU" that the author can offer a word-for-word translation: "The late 6 Death, Rain-Sun, married the late 2 Flower, Jewel-Quetzal, which came from the altar of the white flower" (section 7, including Figure 7). The same marriage appears in Codex Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu as "Lady 2 Flower married Lord 6 Death from Ñuu Naha"; between the two there is but a "slight discrepancy in the given name of Lady 2 Flower" and whose provenance is listed (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, Figure 9.22 on page 443). Despite that the script's pure logography and reliance on tones should make it seem typologically far from Nāhuatl writing, at least to the definers, alphabetics and parallel proof from the language prove that "Mixtec writing as a whole worked in a rather similar way to Nahuatl writing" ("Towards a complex theory of writing", start of section 7). Whittaker displays this same parallel proof method for Nāhuatl in his use of Chimalpahin's history to back up the reading of "[a] hieroglyphic sentence" in Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and at length in his interpretation of whole pages from the Codex Xolotl (Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, chapter 3, final section "Sentences"). Admittedly, my quick remark in the video abbreviates the academic story. Pictorial-alphabetic parallel proofs neither settle all interpretive questions nor qualify as a silver bullet to interpretation. Instead, in a way that brought back faint memories of the "combinatorial method" from my Etruscan video sources, they yield evidence that feeds into a wider "eclectic" approach to produce better readings. Still, I wonder if there remains some tension when we set Zamora Corona's call for readings never to be "'improvised' by filling the gaps in a fanciful way" beside how Jansen & Pérez Jiménez avoid narrow approaches:
"Interpreting the pictorial manuscripts from Mexico, as a culture-historical specialization, is a particularistic endeavor, which does not primarily aim at creating grand theories. On the contrary, those involved in such work generally use theoretical reflections in an eclectic way to elucidate or explain certain phenomena they observe in the record and to support their specific hypotheses. Therefore, most authors, we too, are looking for the practical hands-on guidance of general methodological works, trying to find simple or simplified procedures. There is no easy recipe, however. Interpretation is a personal quest and a dynamic process, evolving and changing over time as more and more implications are considered and new data and new theoretical perspectives come forward." (The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts, start of chapter 5)
Reading is interpretation plus decipherment. Schemas must be interpreted and logographic pieces deciphered for a text to be properly read: Mexican pictography "can be deciphered at the low level and from a bottom-up perspective, but it needed to be properly interpreted (in the sense of actual language production within rhetorical conventions) at a high level" ("Towards a complex theory of writing", section 8). When modern decipherers focus solely on logophonetic pieces and fail to read from both perspectives at once, Zamora Corona speculates that educated Aztec readers would've felt we were like "a child" learning the alphabet who "still does not know how to combine the letters" (end of section 5). Zamora Corona's second Mixtec example relies on proof of language use to read a pictorial difrasismo, showing how the method of parallel proofs and top-down plus bottom-up perspectives "privilege[s] the perspective and usages of the native user" (section 7). Likewise, Jansen & Pérez Jiménez regularly cite Indigenous language use and practices, including difrasismos and naming traditions, to provide evidence for or against pictorial readings. Decades earlier, Jansen summed up "[t]he challenge of interpreting the Mixtec codices" as one of "relating the pictographic images to the spoken language and its concepts and by relating the contents of the scenes to Mixtec culture. Historical and archaeological studies have to be combined with an understanding of the language and the heritage that is still alive today" (start of "Mixtec pictography: contents and conventions"). Taking all of this into account, Zamora Corona urges us to truncate Daniels' definition and to "divest the original definition of writing by Ignace Gelb... of its problematic evolutionist aspects" to redefine writing as "a set of conventional markings which represent language both through 'low-level' or bottom-up depictions (phonological and morphological) and through high-level or top-down (semantic) depictions" ("Towards a complex theory of writing", section 8).
Some detractors claim scripts fit old definitions (remark cut). Lacadena pursues the strategy of rescuing Nahuatl writing from semasiographic charges by finding phonetic signs and fitting them, Maya-style, into a syllabic table ("The Nahuatl syllabary", The PARI Journal, spring 2008). Whittaker disputes this analysis in a paper on "The principles of Nahuatl writing" and at length in his book – briefly, "Aztec" phoneticism is better explained by a formula than a grid, and the outputs of that formula resemble Cuneiform syllable shapes or earlier Japanese readings more than the strict Maya CV syllables that Lacadena compresses glyphs into (chapter 4, section "The structure of the Aztec syllabary", and tables before that section).
Other detractors don't call pictorials writing to say they matter. Houston argues that Mexican embrace of pictography was a step forward: "Especially intriguing is Houston's notion that the Mexican pictographic systems do not represent a regression from the full phonetic writing of the Maya, but rather a more effective integration of art and writing, resolving a 'tension persisting since late Olmec times' (Houston 2001)" (Cooper's "Babylonian beginnings" in The First Writing, quote on page 94). Some see early sparks of Mixtec writing in the earlier Zapotec or Teotihuacan scripts; some spot a decrease in phoneticism over time – check Urcid's "Paisajes sagrados y memoria social" for Ñuiñe writing, Guzmán's "Los inicios de la escritura en la Mixteca" for the development from "Ñuu Yata" to Classic "Ñuiñe" to a shared Postclassic Mixteca-Puebla style, and "Writing and ritual" by Martínez Gracida & Hernández Sánchez for more on Mixteca-Puebla codex ceramics. Severi finds in these systems a rich use of images for memory, and sums up how the "distinction between picture writing and 'true writing'" undergirds "a categorical distinction between 'written' and 'oral' traditions" while in actuality "[s]ocieties might be, for long periods in history, not entirely 'oral,' nor entirely 'written'" (Severi "Their way of memorizing", section "Writings, nonwritings, and the 'origins of monsters'"). Pair this with the fact that Mesoamerica went through periods of dephoneticizing/pictorializing (considered an advancement in the above quote by Houston), and the results stand in counterintuitive contrast to Gelb-like perspectives on the development of writing. Instead of casting them as developmental failures (why did Postclassic scripts fail to become alphabets?), imagine asking: in what ways did pictography represent a breakthrough?
Errors and roles. In this section I stitch together examples and quotes from The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts to support their insight that "anomalies" provide evidence of copying and of public performances (start of chapter 6).
Some mistakes are typos. The mistake in a calendar name involves the wrong number of disks: "...marries Lady 13 Serpent [here erroneously written as 12 Serpent]" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, Figure 1.16 again). In another manuscript, it's not the number but the day glyph that's wrong: "Lady 6 Reed [here erroneously called: 6 Flower] 'Plumed Serpent'" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, Figure 9.14). An interesting aside here might be Codex Añute, where the combined evidence of careful training and an "unsteady hand" suggest the painter "was already somewhat advanced in age" (chapter 2, section "Codex Añute", page 80).
Sometimes alphabetic texts are wrong (remarks cut). A quick example is Alvarado's "typographical error" iyo "there is" for iya "Lord" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 6, page 219, note 2). One that has more weight potentially confuses the words chile vs maguey: "Observing that yaha can (with other tones) also mean 'chile' and yahui (as orthographic error for yavui without glottal stop) also 'maguey', Pohl suggests that the term yaha yahui also refers to 'elite food commodities'" (chapter 4, section "Philological-iconographical analysis and archeological field-research", page 171). For this reason we should revisit the proof model in the previous section and stress the parallel in parallel pictorial-alphabetic proofs, not treating alphabetics as a single source of truth.
Some mistakes reveal copyists unfamiliar with histories. Codex Yuta Tnoho (Vindobonensis Mexicanus I) is painted on two sides: "the Reverse is imperfect and sloppy, the Obverse is thoroughly composed" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 2, section "Codex Yuta Tnoho", page 55). The Reverse contains "an abundance of errors, indicative of a copy" (previous page). Among other conclusions, the authors infer that the "painter was not a well-trained professional", "did not know the history" and had no reference to copy, and, through a reconstructed scenario, the painter "was in a great hurry" for Cortés (across that entire section cited above, from pages 54-59). I've also searched for errors from scribal misinterpretation because they weren't even a speaker of language (presumably a Nahua scribe copying a Ñuu Dzaui manuscript); nothing so far, but consider for fun the glyphic translation scenario behind Ndìjinu (also Ndisin Nuu and other spellings) retold in Whittaker's book, cited way up above.
Singing, orchestras and a performance model. Way above (and, sorry for repeating, in my Writing Bee sources document) I talk about my own model of writers writing marks read by readers. The Ñuu Dzaui model greatly alters the roles in my diagram: wordsmiths craft messages that get painted in a pictorial source, scribes copy that source as is, interpreters perform as bards that communicate that source to/with a local audience. Jansen & Pérez Jiménez tell us that errors support this chain of roles: "Several anomalies that occur in the sequences of images can be explained as errors in a complex process of copying. We deduce from them that the painters primarily looked at the pictographic source and did not always have the story itself in mind. Then, on public occasions, specially trained performing artists, storytellers or bards would present or 'read' the codex or lienzo aloud" (start of chapter 6, page 217). Words for Spanish "comedia" give us "a glimpse of the terms used for the oral performance of the painted story", since they all include "yaa, 'song'" (chapter 6, section "Literary style", page 219). Following Troike's analysis of Codex Iya Nacuaa, we can appreciate how the pictorial's "'special effects' such as an orchestra" connect the manuscript to "a dramatic performance of great impact" (chapter 2, section "Codex Iya Nacuaa (Codices Colombino & Becker I)", page 74). That codex recounts the "tragedy of Lord 8 Deer and Lady 6 Monkey" in a tragic way, while Codex Añute "selected only the triumphant moments of this story and simply left the rest untold, thereby creating an exclusively self-glorifying text" (same section, page 82). Later in chapter 5, the authors call out elements that lend themselves well to performance – in the story of "Lord 8 Deer 'Jaguar Claw' and Lady 6 Monkey 'Power of the Plumed Serpent', for example, compositional techniques such as 'turning points' and 'tragic irony' are evident" and continue to have an impact "both on a modern Mixtec audience and on a general public" (section "A practical method: three steps", page 193; there's a cave, a pact and ultimate betrayal back in chapter 2, on page 74).
Why does it matter that people wrote and performed histories this way? The fact that these texts are ancestral histories and that colonization resulted in a "partial overwriting of the indigenous identity and memory... lends dramatic social relevance to what otherwise might seem a simple iconographical and philological exercise" (preface to The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts). We'll build up to that weighty significance by considering one key advantage of the Mixtec script.
Pictography's disadvantages vs advantages. Previous sections share the definer's claimed disadvantages of pictography for representing language, while advantages are alluded to in Houston's perspective. For my part, I don't deny that, to borrow Alonso Zamora Corona's term, a "bottom-up" alphabet with letters and diacritics is advantageous for accurate representation of Dzaha Dzaui's phonemes and tonemes. That said, here's a bonus exercise that takes very rough inspiration from Middle Chinese 反切: come up with a pictorial system that represents Dzaha Dzaui words with two glyphs, one to represent the tonal pattern, the other the syllables.
Hunch that pictography doesn't look like writing. My cold open relies on this shared premise. Here, the two walls of text are written in two non-pictographic scripts, and so I expect them to be a much closer match to our shared incoming assumptions of what writing looks like.
Multilingualism. Scribes even found a way to write multiple languages at once, a decisive and obvious advantage even after colonization. Zamora Corona says logographic pieces complement interpreted schemata in this way: "They can function, for example, along with iconography, explaining precisely those parts of the message that the iconographic system is not able to convey, in particular, personal names and exact dates" (section 2, paragraph 7). Though high-level schemas lend themselves to multilingual interpretations, while Mixtec logograms often rely on language-specific puns, proverbs or puzzles, even many low-level elements are flexible enough to be recognized and read by those accustomed to local styles and icons: the Ñuu Dzaui glyph clearly combines "the Rain God" and "a frieze (ñuu)", reinforced by what look to my eyes like stony elements of a mountain (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, Figure 1.9 and text below). Setting them beside the many phonetic spellings for Rain and People across Mixtec varieties made these pictographic markings feel simple. To me there's no better contrast between pictographic and alphabetic perspectives than this one unifying Dzaui\~Savi glyph versus Reyes declaring in his old grammar that local ha/sa and sa/dza differences reflect "mala pronunciación" (Sahìn Sàu, unit 17). Let's appreciate that simplicity and take a breath, because the following multilingual cases get more complicated.
Multilingual region, multilingual text. The center and south of Mexico, from the Pacific to the Gulf, is an incredibly mountainous and multilingual environment. After understanding the internal diversity of la Mixteca, the clearest outside contacts are with their "Beni Zaa (Zapotec)" neighbors as well as with Nāhuatl, though the field has both had to step away from and turn back to compare "Central Mexican sources" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 4, section "Interregional contacts"). More evidence of pictorial contact comes from but is hardly limited to Mixteca-Puebla codex style vessels and multilingual use in Cholula (Martínez Gracida & Hernández Sánchez), as well as the Totonac example below.
Simple bilingual Totonac-Nahuatl example (remark cut). Zamora Corona shares a particularly neat and intentional multilingual glyph read in Nāhuatl and Totonac at the same time: Xico-tepe(c) and Ka-kolun, where the old man represents the second Totonac morpheme, the bee the first Nahuatl morpheme, and the mountain crosses languages to represent both other morphemes (Figure 9 and text below). The mountain even works differently in each, as a Nahuatl logogram for the word mountain but as a Totonac place determiner, which motivates the prefix. Zamora Corona and Stresser-Péan call the insect a wasp (Quiñones Keber's review of Stresser-Péan's Códice de Xicotepec study), while the Gran diccionario Náhuatl gives "aveja/abeja grande de miel", a honeybee, with which the Mexican Spanish reflex jicote agrees. Aschmann's vocabulary lists the term for old male as "kolú (si es hombre o animal macho)", with o underlined for a long vowel, and has "c'a" (with long a) as a prefix under the entry for the Spanish preposition "en" (Diccionario de Totonaco de Papantla). I spotted two strategies here, which I will apply to the next example: readings diverge on language-specific glyphs (head vs bumblebee) and converge on shared glyphs (mountain). Please be warned that this convergence vs divergence analysis is my own, unpublished and unvetted. Anyhow, multilingualism grates against claims that true writing necessarily reflects a single language: "instead of saying that these signs are not writing because they could be read in other languages, we should embrace their multivocal communication capacity and attempt to explain its richness" (section 8).
A-O example from Codex Sierra. We met the "A-O sign" in the decipherment section earlier in the video. The already-conflated date becomes bilingual in multiple manuscripts, including the Codex Borgia (Zamora Corona's "Mixtec glyphs in Codex Borgia?"; for my part I flipped through the pages and found "Aztec" plants + "Mixtec" AO in the date "the year 4 Reed" on page 51). My animation will focus on and return to a particularly special document: "In the Codex of Tejupan (Sierra) it is combined with a leaf, producing a bilingual reading of year in Dzaha Dzaui and Nahuatl: cuiya and xihuitl ('year', 'leaf') respectively" (chapter 1, section "Days and years", page 27, footnote 16). Adjacent parallel alphabetic text writes the words for year in both languages, paleographically "xiuitl" and "cuiya"/"cuyya" (for examples, check the tops of its dated pages). I joke that the colonial context of this manuscript could've lent itself to trilingualism if only they added Spanish eñe to form LEAF-A-ñ-O: xihuitl+cuiya+año. Whittaker's book taught me about colonial multilingual punning in the Nāhuatl script for Spanish, like "ten small circles" for Spanish "diez, 'ten,' equivalent to Nahuatl màtlactli" to pictorialize the name Díaz (chapter 7, Figure 7.9 and text beneath). The footnote mentioned above led me to a book by and interview with Terraciano, whose work drove me to rewrite my final sections. The Gran diccionario Náhuatl gives "izhuatl" for leaf; the expected "xihuitl" grass form and pigment are painted in Codex Borgia but not in Codex Sierra-Texupan. However, both Lopez and Terraciano read the leaf aloud as "xihuitl" (interview, Lopez around 20:30 and Terraciano around 29:15). Below Terraciano illuminates how that choice of leaf reflects one ñuu's post-conquest experience.
Codex Sierra as a unique record of accounts. The footnote mentioned in the paragraph above led me to Terraciano's Codex Sierra and a conversation between Lopez & Terraciano – in both the codex is praised as "unique" for its multilingual and parallel elements and styles. An account book or "libro de cuentas based on a Spanish model", it stands out for integrating Arabic numerals, Nāhuatl and some Ñuu Dzaui in the alphabet, and both Indigenous and European figures painted in pictography (early in the interview, around 15 minutes). The manuscript stands out as "one of the earliest and lengthiest Nahuatl alphabetic texts from Mexico, despite the fact that it was written outside of central Mexico, in a community where Nahuatl was a second or even third language after Mixtec (Ñudzahui) and Chocho (Ngiwa)" (introduction to the book). The mulberry leaf improvises the traditional grass pictogram for "xihuitl" to represents how the ñuu was pressed into silkworm cultivation and silk production, and the manuscript is the account of this economy over the first decades after invasion and colonization (Terraciano's interview from around the 27 to 40 minute marks, and at length including chapters 6 through 8 in the book). More about that story after broader cultural and pictorial changes.
Ñuu from Classic to Postclassic to Colonial (remarks greatly condensed). Quickly, [sources for ñuu meaning over time]. In Alvarado's 1593 dictionary "ñuu" appears in entries for "gente" and "pueblo", while in Sahìn Sàu it may be translated as "ciudad", "pueblo", "lugar" or "nación" depending on context (unit 16 for various examples). "Land and people are one (ñuu)", as Jansen & Pérez Jiménez tell us, and the historical situation is usually translated as "'city-state', although 'village-state' or 'sovereign community' would probably be a closer fit for Postclassic Ñuu Dzaui reality just as for the early Greek polis" (chapter 1, section "Ñuu Dzaui historiography). Nowotny "demonstrated in his groundbreaking works (1948, 1961a)" that pictorials were lineage histories and not "astralistic" texts; after his work the manuscripts became appreciated as "much more informative than even sensational excavations, but at the same time they are very complex in their contents" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 3, section "The religious dimension", also compare the section just before that called "Astronomy or history?"). While lineage histories indulge in rhetoric and performative theatrics, they do not fit definitions of "[p]ropaganda" (chapter 11, section "Regional developments, page 505). The lineage history begins in a "crisis" at the start of the Postclassic, centered on the figures of Lord 4 Serpent and Lord 8 Serpent. The "knots (of paper) in their mouth" suggest they were "'guardians of secrets'", leading the authors to "interpret" the foundation event "as a crisis cult community that brought about the social order of the Postclassic Era" (chapter 6, two paragraphs below Figure 6.12). The "cult of the Plumed Serpent, personalized as Lord 9 Wind, the Culture Hero, and venerated as a Sacred Bundle, was a driving force" in reconnecting to this "creation story, shrouded in sacred mystery and metaphors", a story from a time when "the earliest historical data suggest that at the end of the Classic Era, around 900 AD, the region was a periphery or margin of the Monte Albán influence"; and so town leaders reached back to that past: "Ñuu Dzaui still looked to that ancient capital or regional center as a source of legitimation for their rule, marrying princesses who traced or linked their lineage to this iconic place of cultural memory" (chapter 11, section "Regional developments"). The result over time was a Postclassic network of ñuu, where rulers held power "based on the way in which they succeeded in investing in their relationships with others, both inside their realm and abroad, through family ties, gifts, ritual kinship and dzaha" (chapter 11, section "Power and interaction", page 514). This meant not controlling land and resources, or accruing money or commodities (more about that colonial economic shift when we return to Terraciano below), but instead cultivating "exchange networks", "alliances" over "war", and "redistribution" as "investment in social relationships" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 11, also in the section "Power and interaction"). On the same page as that last quote, the authors repeat Drennan's catchy metaphor for this: "Trade or exchange at long distance, then, provided the plumes of the chiefly peacock, not its basic diet" (same section "Power and interaction"). The difrasismo we learned earlier in the video for rulership conveniently anticipates this whole discussion, tying together both "the importance of the network, symbolized by the mat (yuvui), and the inheritance of central authority, symbolized by the throne (tayu)" (end of section "Power and interaction"). From here, lineage and ñuu connect directly to what pictorials did: "Pictorial writing – and its public performance – probably played a major role in the process of local and interregional communication and network forming. The recitation of such texts was an essential part of community rituals and therefore of the construction of corporate identity" (for one last time quoting "Power and interaction", in chapter 11 of Jansen & Pérez Jiménez). The idea that rulership often meant something else in Mesoamerica comes up throughout Graeber & Wengrow, who tell for example of the bottom-up ways that Tlaxcala and Teotihuacan planned and organized, and who use their model of three freedoms and three forms of domination to theorize how power "crystallized" very differently among the Maya than it did in Western Europe, Mesopotamia, Egypt or China. After digesting quotes about Postclassic Mixtec ties and comparing these authors' notion of "play kings", I wonder how far we are from their conclusions on rulership in earlier Mesoamerican \~ahem\~ "states": "they are probably best defined as seasonal versions of what Clifford Geertz once called 'theatre states', where organized power was realized only periodically, in grand but fleeting spectacles. Anything we might consider 'statecraft', from diplomacy to the stockpiling of resources, existed in order to facilitate the rituals, rather than the other way around" (The Dawn of Everything, chapter 10, very end of section "On politics as sport: the Olmec case"). Below we head towards our own conclusion by considering the results of changes as colonizers use pictorials to redefine Mixtec rulership.
Multilingual and multistyle colonial manuscripts. Boone & Smith in "Postclassic international styles and symbol sets" distinguish style from iconography, first sharing characteristics of Postclassic styles then Postclassic symbol sets. Their last section justifies identifying "a Mexican painting style and a Mexican symbol set, which became international once they diffused more widely" beyond its origins in Central Mexico and Oaxaca. After showcasing common symbols, they contrast three Nahuatl vs Mixtec symbols for "rulership", "warfare" and "year date" (Boone & Smith, Figure 24.10). On-the-ground realities of how scribes paint manuscripts may explain some multilingual and stylistic overlaps – Olivier's "Controversy on the Borgia Group codices from ancient Mexico" argues that the "difficulties found in identifying a precise origin" of a shared Mixteca-Puebla style stem from the "mobility" of scribes between workshops, scribal familiarity with ranges of conventions, and collaborative scribal work on the same manuscripts. Applying the idea that style and iconography often but not always go together, consider a pictorial example of how not only can multilingual glyphs can converge and diverge, so can European and Indigenous elements: the Codex Yodzo Cahi (chapter 10, section "Caciques, monks and encomenderos", including figures 10.1-10.17). For more about how Codex Yodzo Cahi directly depicts a fundamental change in the role of the rulers into colonial "caciques", read the section "Sword and rosary" in chapter 10 of The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts. For more about how the ñuu navigated mass conversion using colonial religious pictography, in chapter 10 Jansen & Pérez Jiménez recommend Resines Llorente's Diccionario de los catecismos pictográficos.
Codex Sierra, silkworms, money and collapse. Terraciano highlights the major colonial developments depicted in this "unique" pictorial-alphabetic book of accounts during the interview with Lopez, and discusses them more fully in his book (including chapters 6 through 8). During that interview, he shares that "Spaniards introduced silkworms" early in the conquest and "failed just about everywhere except the Mixteca" (minute 33). The ñuu engaged in sericulture to pay off Spanish tribute demands, managed their own affairs, even producing maize, cheese and wool, as "leaders embraced" new technology alongside the survival of their own practices (46 minutes). Expenses show payment for writing materials like books, paper and ink (seen for example on Codex Sierra-Texupan page 35, where parallel alphabetic text has amatl, tlilli, libros for paper, ink and books). However, "a conspicuous annual expense" stands out: "the annual cost of feeding the vicar always exceeded the yearly cost of food for Texupan's entire nobility, which numbered dozens of people... twice as much", and the church was generally owed 60% (Terraciano & Lopez, 49:50). Petitions and complaints show locals clearly didn't like and complained about the officials (51:30). They resisted and argued about outsiders growing silk, pasturing sheep and damaging crops (after 52 minutes). In 1564 "one major change" explains why this book of accounts ends so abruptly (53:30): colonial rulers "extract the labor" and make the community dependent on money (55:00), "introducing poverty" (after 54 minutes). On the death of the viceroy in 1564, Texupan's tribute increased from 180 pesos/year to 1567 pesos/year over 15 years (56:30-57:15). They were pressed alongside "every other town in the Mixteca" (58 minutes), and no more records follow this pressure "to maximize" (58:50). A letter from the Cabildo de Huexotzinco expresses the nobility's great "frustration" over being taxed into poverty: "we resemble the commoners" (1:00:00-1:01:10). Indigenous people owed 4/5, unlike 1/5 for Spaniards, "to generate money" where no silver was mined (1:02:00-1:03:10). Outbreaks of smallpox and "something else" each claimed half the population, which dropped from 54k in 1520 to 3k to 1k 1590 (around 1:05:00). When the 1579 Relación geográfica (historically connected to the map that so fascinated Caso at the very beginning) asks in question #15 if the people are living better now or in ancient times, the ñuu picks the past (1:06:45). Terraciano calls attention to the leaf growing and growing until, atop the final entries for 1564, it is ornate and twisted in three dimensions, the artist showing off a "Renaissance style", and the artist attached a "cocoon" and "drew the year sign as a silk worm" (38:15-40:20). A belated epilogue to this story – today, there is "still some independent" silk production in Oaxaca (1:21:30). Chapter 7 of Terraciano's Codex Sierra has a section on "Sericulture", and chapter 8 recounts the history surrounding the changes in "tribute assessment" (section "New Spain, 1550-1564").
Maps, uneven pacts, colonial court lawsuits. "Individual village-states were highly stratified", with the lowlands "probably even more hierarchical than the Mixteca Alta", yet "the system itself was highly flexible and decentralized" (Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico, chapter 1). Towns that "survived" the colonial pressure did not do so as "closed, corporate communities" as historians previously thought but by integrating old hierarchies with religious institutions that "served not to redistribute wealth but instead described the uneven pact between indigenous lords, indigenous commoners, and the colonial regime" (Smith again, chapter 1). Pictorials played a fundamental role in enforcing this "pact" – it "was a common custom" to bring colonial manuscripts to court "as evidence" (chapter 2, section "Codex Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu", page 68). For example, after "Don Felipe de Austria/Santiago" became colonial cacique of Chiyo Cahnu, he was frustrated by failed attempts to expand his rule in a 1566 "lawsuit" and made "similar claims" from 1572-74, until finally "he did succeed" in 1576 (chapter 2, section "The Map of Chiyo Cahnu (Teozacualco)", page 52). Other lawsuits in 1582 (chapter 2, page 68), 1653 (chapter 10, section "Diverse fragments"), 1717 (chapter 2, below figure 2.6), 1852 (chapter 2, page 77) make reference "to such historical 'pinturas'" being used as evidence. The manuscripts involved are Codex Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu (late 1500s) Codex Iya Nacuaa I (1717) and Codex Iya Nacuaa II (1852); the latter two from "portions I and II" of a single document that "ended up in the hands of lawyers in Puebla – Manuel Cardoso and Pascual Almazán respectively – around the middle of the 19th century" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 2, section "Codex Iya Nacuaa", page 76). Zamora Corona explicitly attributes their use in court to the multilingual advantage of pictography, which demonstrates that in that context the writing system was "not a hindrance, but an advantage, since the top-down elements of them were clearly understood by people who didn't speak the original language of such documents nor were even particularly familiarized with how the system worked, as numerous Mixtec and Aztec colonial pictorials glossed in Spanish, used as legal documents before colonial authorities, show" ("Towards a complex theory of writing", section 8).
Weight of these linguistic tales, eerily familiar wrapup. The Map of Chiyo Cahnu returns – it captures this "liminal period in memory" by mixing "the genealogical structure of precolonial historiography with a geographical representation of the community and its lands" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 11, section "Noble houses and communities in colonial time", page 522). Immediately after that characterization, the authors connect it and other historical documents to whole societies of "native peoples" becoming "marginalized" and colonizers forcing them through a "traumatic transformation" until "exploitation and fragmentation introduced a deep crisis in the community" (next paragraphs on that same page). From there, the sections "Roots of contemporary conflicts" and "Closure" share a perspective I attempt to harness in my own conclusion. They note the shift from land as sacred "(Ñuhu)" and precious items as "seals of alliances" to all of these as mere "commodities"; leaders becoming colonial caciques becoming "totally usurped"; "big landowners" that "turned their back on the grassroots people and identified with the dominant class and the ruling party on the national level"; connected families that can "trick people into debts"; the constants of "physical and cultural erosion, poverty and discrimination, coupled with the pressures of corrupt administrators, aggressive religious sects and violent narcotraficantes"; oppressed Indigenous people opting for migration to "the United States (particularly the West Coast)" (all quotes from sections "Roots of contemporary conflicts" and "Closure" in chapter 11 of The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts). (Their chosen term alludes equally to "physical" erosion of the land.) For years my videos have acknowledged impacts of colonization and modern discrimination on Indigenous languages and communities, an awareness that earned judgy comments for example on my Zeros video (addressed in a followup), Papuan Langriculture and others. Yes, it is the internet, but for those honest about trying to sort through the evidence that supports making these connections, the close of The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts gives me a clear chance to point at my main source and show how this same kind of acknowledgement of a people's plight and resilience is so bound up with linguistics and history, and is in this case inextricable from the pictographic story.
Path from colonization to modern erosion and endurance. After key quotes from Jansen & Pérez Jiménez in the previous paragraph, let me turn their remarks into a broad-strokes periodization of the ñuu's last 1200+ years of history:
| 1 | Terminal Classic earliest Mixtec dates | | "crisis" #1, "Sacred Bundle", "brought about the social order of the Postclassic" | | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---- | | 2 | Postclassic | Ñuu lineage pictorials | "network" mat and "centralized" throne build ties through "marriage", "trade", "conflict"; pictorials integral to "interregional communication and network forming" | | 3 | | Triple Alliance multilinguals, shared style | "ancient Mexica or Aztecs" demanded "tribute" and "dominated large parts of the area" about a century before colonization | | 4 | Colonization colonial pictorials, parallel pictorial-alphabetics | | "crisis" #2, "colonial invasion" 1521, "Sword and Rosary" lead to century of "double life" called by Nahuas "'in-between', nepantla" | | 5 | Colonialism pictorials in courts, new religious pictography | | "colonial caciques", "lawsuits" into the 18th century, eventually ruling families "totally usurped in the colonial administration" | | 6 | Modernity legacy cultural and symbolic use, efforts to reconnect to pictorial perspective | | "Janus face of nationalism", "exploitation, discrimination and the internalization of a colonial ideology", "migration", while the "powerful" now "identify fully with Western Europe and the U.S.A." |
The expanded remark by Jansen & Pérez Jiménez on the "Janus face of nationalism" takes issue with nation states' use of "impartial and universalistic ideology, considering ethnic particularism either as irrelevant or as a possible threat" (chapter 3, section "First historical research in the region"). The authors quote Kardulias 1999 to lament that turning nobles into caciques into business and political leaders served primarily to "incorporat[e]" them into the nation and into "the capitalist world-system" (chapter 11, section "Noble houses and communities in colonial time", quote from the top of page 520). The usurpation of noble lineages physically impacted the books themselves, resulting in the loss of their original homes: "When the cacique became totally usurped in the colonial administration, and divorced and alienated from his people, a significant portion of historical-geographical manuscripts passed from the cacique families to the municipal archive" (Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, chapter 11, section "Roots of contemporary conflicts"). It's no wonder the Indigenous contribution to a pictorial exhibition in the "Museo Nórdico de Linz, Austria (1986)" was the declaration "Mani ɨnga kakahan ja kuuri jinahari", "Only others speak for us" (Sahìn Sàu, unit 15).
Modern pictography in Mexico, la Mixteca and California. I shared short examples of glyph use in Mexico, Guatemala and Central America in my video and sources document on modern use of Mesoamerican glyphs. City and town emblems often use placename glyphs directly from Aztec and Mixtec scripts, or at least incorporate elements from them into a hybrid or European heraldic/canting style (using Boone & Smith again to separate icons and styles). Comments and messages over the years regularly remind me to mention the unique pictographs tied to each stop along Mexico City's metro system, many of which are even clever innovations rather than faithful retentions. A patron also tells me that "some street signs in Mexico [C]ity include the glyphs corresponding to the name if they're in Nahuatl", though this is by no means ubiquitous. In the case of the Mixtec script specifically, I am not familiar with attempts to create new works in the script today, but I'd guess it would take a different shape from modern Maya works given the unique history of its use and, as we've learned here, the special ways it works. In fact, that last remark wonders if I could be missing the growing forest for its oldest trees. So, as sourced near the start, the Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project uses historical glyphs both in their insignia and in motifs on their site. (I called out, for example, their use of the step-fret read as "ñuu".) However, on that same site we see large examples of other icons in circles, familiar contemporary icons readable to a modern audience – raised hands holding hearts, a network of dots swirling around people, a heart with plus sign between hands coming from two directions, and so on. Bonus question, one that will put you back in the definer's hotseat: what are the differences between those icons and multilingual uses of pictography?
Outro and call for support. Thanks as ever for joining me as I sort through my sources and back up my claims. Actually, extra thanks, because this one ended up longer than most of my sources documents. The group I asked you to join me in supporting is MICOP, whose glyph work got mentioned both at the beginning and end. If you're motivated to aid vulnerable but resilient communities whose stories and communities span both sides of the US-Mexico border, please read the community post I was moved to write during the process of working on this video. If you have spare support or attention – again, MICOP's work really does come first – on my patron page I share posts, offer reward tiers, and you can join for free if you just want more from me. Take care of yourself and your loved ones.
Alvarado, Vocabulario en lengua mixteca
Bax, "Language ideology, linguistic differentiation, and language maintenance in the California Mixtec Diaspora"
Boone & Smith, "Postclassic international styles and symbol sets"
Caso, El Mapa de Teozacoalco
Coulmas, Writing Systems
Daniels, The World's Writing Systems
Gelb, Study of Writing
Graeber & Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
Houston (editor), The First Writing
Innuendo Studios, "Story beats: Ben there, Dan that" (video)
Jansen & Pérez Jiménez, The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts
Korunsky, "Milpa and strawberries"
Martínez Gracida & Hernández Sánchez, "Writing and ritual: the transformation to Mixteca-Puebla ceramics of Cholula"
Olivier, "Controversy on the Borgia Group codices from ancient Mexico"
Pérez Jiménez, Sahìn Sàu: Curso de lengua mixteca (variante de Ñuu Ndéyà)
Pohl, "Ancient books: Mixtec group codices" (famsi.org)
Pohl, The Politics of Symbolism in the Mixtec Codices
Reyes, Arte de lengua mixteca
Robertson, "Decolonizing Aztec picture-writing" (chapter 12 in Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas)
Sampson, Writing Systems
Severi, "Their way of memorizing: Mesoamerican writings and Native-American picture writings"
Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico
Terraciano, Codex Sierra: A Nahuatl-Mixtec Book of Accounts from Colonial Mexico
Terraciano & Lopez, "A rare Indigenous manuscript from Early Colonial Mexico, 1550-1564" (video interview)
Tokovinine, "An overview of the Classic Maya script" (video lecture)
UNAM, Gran Diccionario Náhuatl (online)
Van Stone, "Writing systems of Mesoamerica" in Encyclopedia of the Ancient Maya
Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs
Whittington & team, "El Mapa de Teozacoalco"
World of Antiquity (video), "Who invented writing?"
Zamora Corona, "Mixtec glyphs in Codex Borgia?"
Zamora Corona, "Towards a complex theory of writing"
Map of "propos[als] to rename" each document from its historically applied outsider name, following The Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts (preface and relevant sections).
| Ñuu Dzaui proposal | Former name | | :---: | :---: | | Añute | Selden | | Chiyo Cahnu | Teozacualco | | Iya Cochi | Becker II | | Iya Nacuaa I | Colombino | | Iya Nacuaa II | Becker I | | Ñuu Naha | Muro | | Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu | Bodley | | Tonindeye | Zouche-Nuttall | | Yodzo Cahi | Yanhuitlan | | Yuta Tnoho | Vindobonensis |
Primary sources for each pictographic example and secondary references that reproduce the figures. I abbreviate sources in the "Secondary" column like this:
JPJ Jansen & Pérez Jiménez' Mixtec Pictorial Manuscripts
ZC Zamora Corona's "Towards a complex theory of writing"
Whittaker Whittaker's Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs
Terraciano Terraciano's Codex Sierra
| Example | Primary source | Secondary figure/description |
| :---- | :---- | :---- |
| map and lineages | Chiyo Cahnu | JPJ 2.1a-b; Mapas Project |
| flower, spiderweb, flint | Añute 8–VI | JPJ 1.15 |
| flower ita glyph | Tonindeye 33 | JPJ 2.4 |
| mountain yucu glyph | Tonindeye 3 | JPJ 7.41 |
| mountain yucu glyph | Yuta Tnoho 44 | JPJ 7.42 |
| town ñuu motif | Yuta Tnoho 11–12 | JPJ 1.8 |
| cloth dzico glyph | Yuta Tnoho (pages unsourced) | JPJ 1.17
Lady 6 Monkey beside dzico
Lady 6 Monkey wears dzico |
| Town of Flints | Yuta Tnoho Obverse 42 | JPJ 4.4 (vs 1.15 from Añute) |
| Ñuu Dzaui glyph | Yuta Tnoho 45-IV | JPJ 1.9 |
| Yucuñud(z)ahui | Tonindeye 2 | JPJ 7.4 |
| A-O cuiya examples | (unsourced) | JPJ 1.11 |
| A-O cuiya in context | Tonindeye 16-I | JPJ 6.5; right side, left side |
| A-O in colonial text | Codex Sierra (throughout) | Terraciano Wikimedia Codex Sierra |
| Nāhuatl color terms | Codex Mendoza f. 39r, 51r | Whittaker 3.12-14 |
| Ñuù Túún color term | Chiyo Cahnu left half | JPJ 2.1a; also in Tonindeye |
| Mixtec scribe | Yuta Tnoho 48-II, 18 | JPJ 8.2; Mexicolore; FAMSI |
| ñuhu earth alligator | Yuta Tnoho 12 Añute 19-III
(compare Tezcatlipoca / Fejérváry-Mayer f. 29v from the Borgia Group) | JPJ 7.33; chapter 2 page 83 Lady 10 Grass given name JPJ chapter 8 page 395 Lady 1 Rabbit given name JPJ chapter 9 page 435 Lord 2 Jaguar given name Breath of earth in yuq yuq Harvest from Borgia Group |
| ñuhu fire | Tonindeye 24 Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu 9-I, 19-III | JPJ chapter 1 page 36-38 JPJ chapter 6 page 247 JPJ 7.20 |
| ñuhu deity | Añute 6 Lienzo de Yucu Satuta (Zapatepec) Tonindeye 25–III | JPJ 8.14 Sacred Bundle offering JPJ chapter 4 page 163 (citing Smith 1973) deity rising from jade JPJ 6.7 (eyes and teeth) |
| Chiyo Cahnu glyph | Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu 15-III Chiyo Cahnu left column Añute 4-V | JPJ 7.8 JPJ 2.1a Añute page with place glyph |
| Ndisì Nuù glyph | Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu 15-V Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu 31-IV | JPJ 7.23a, 9.15 Whittaker 7.1b Lord 4 Wind at Tlaxiaco |
| yuvui tayu, the mat the throne, rulership | Añute 5–IV Añute 8-VI Tonindeye 26-III Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu 14–II | JPJ chapter 6 page 228 JPJ 1.15 Añute marriage and rule JPJ 1.16 Añute marriage and sons
JPJ 9.1 |
| nduvua iya, arrows of the lords, conquest | Tonindeye 75 Ñuu Tnoho–Ndisi Nuu 43 Tonindeye 32–II | JPJ 6.4b and 8.22 Lords conquer an island ZC 8
Lord 8 Deer conquers town JPJ 1.20 (foot pun) Burning foot in given name |
| tnuhu yaa, the word the song, history | Yuta Tnoho 23, 13 | JPJ 8.7 (Altar of Songs) JPJ 8.8 (ashes yaa pun) |
| Nāhua te-pal-e-co-oc, tla-coTLACOCHINcochin | Codex Vergara f. 48r
Codex Tepetlaoztoc f. 4v | Whittaker chapter 4 page 131; 4.2, 4.6; LOC scan |
| reading full schema | Añute 8-VI (again) | JPJ 1.15 (again) |
| various gestures | (unsourced) | JPJ 6.4a |
| more complex schema | Yuta Tnoho 24 | JPJ 4.11 |
| Chiyo Yuhu marriage | Ñuu Naha Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu 17-II | JPJ 9.28, ZC 7, JPJ 9.22 iyadzehe from Chiyo Yuhu iya from Ñuu Naha |
| 12 Serpent mistake | Tonindeye 26-III | JPJ 1.16; archive scan |
| 6 Flower mistake | Yuta Tnoho Reverse XII vs Ñuu Tnoo & Yuta Tnoho | JPJ 9.14; Lady 6 Reed glyphs without the error |
| one side "polished", one side "sloppy" | Yuta Tnoho (Obverse 52 pages, Reverse 13 pages) | JPJ chapter 2 pages 54-55 JPJ 8.24 codex in archive |
| orchestra playing | Iya Nacuaa II 8-I
Yuta Tnoho 24 | JPJ 2.6; codex from FAMSI JPJ 4.11 |
| Xico-tēpec+C'a-kolun | Codex Xicotepec 9 | ZC 9 |
| AO leaf bilingual, and "xiuitl" "cu[i\~y]ya" alphabetic | Codex Sierra 2, 15, 29, 35, 47, 53, 55, 61 Codex Borgia 51 | Terraciano Wikimedia; Laufraga Library Codex Borgia A-O and grass |
| ritual founders, crisis and reunion | Yuta Tnoho 5 Yuta Tnoho 33 | JPJ 6.13 JPJ chapter 6 page 260 Lord 7 Serpent Lord 4 Serpent |
| Lord 9 Wind honored via Sacred Bundle | Yuta Tnoho 35 Yuta Tnoho 24 | JPJ 4.2; Lord 9 Wind JPJ 4.11 |
| multistyle colonial text | Yozdo Cahi 4r, 4v, 9v | JPJ 10.1-10.17; one page; full manuscript |
| book, paper, pigment | Codex Sierra date 1561 | Codex Sierra 1561 entries |
| leaf grows over time | Codex Sierra 1551, 1555, 1560, 1561, 1563, 1564 | Terraciano Wikimedia Codex Sierra |
| vicar food cost | Codex Sierra date 1562 | Codex Sierra vicar entry |
| final accounts date | Codex Sierra date 1564 | Codex Sierra large leaf curl |
| 1500s lawsuit codex | Ñuu Tnoo–Ndisi Nuu | JPJ chapter 2 page 68; (Wikimedia links above) |
| 1717 lawsuit codex | Iya Nacuaa I | JPJ chapter 2 page 75; few Wikimedia photos |
| 1852 lawsuit codex | Iya Nacuaa II | JPJ chapter 2 page 76; few Wikimedia photos |
(Pictorial pages and examples linked in the table above.)
Modern glyphic insignia and motifs based on this page (accessed November 2024):
https://mixteco.org/mixtec/
Thread bobbin partly inspired by photo below:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_thread_(yarn).jpg
Strawberry shape partly inspired by openclipart svg:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Strawberry.svg
Ñee paper background modified from:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Bodley_(4).jpg
Precontact Otomanguean map (drawing on data from Asher & Mosley 2007):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Precontact_Otomanguean.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mesoamerica_topographic_map-blank.svg
Island conquest scene from Codex Tonindeye drawn by Lacambalam:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lámina_del_Códice_Nuttall.jpg
Nahua Codex Xolotl page (unused in final renders):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hijas_de_Achitometl_L3.png
Nahua tlacuilo based on this page from Codex Mendoza:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Mendoza_folio_70r_portion.jpg
Marriage text in Cuneiform – Amarna letter:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AmarnaLetterOfMarriageNegotiation-BritishMuseum-August19-08.jpg
Marriage text modified from 汉高祖劉邦 wiki article (accessed 9 December 2024):
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/刘邦
Marriage text from Vivah sukta hymn:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1500-1200_BCE,_Vivaha_sukta,_Rigveda_10.85.16-27,_Sanskrit,_Devanagari,_manuscript_page.jpg
Codex Yuta Tnoho (Vindobonensis Mexicanus) Obverse photo and Reverse drawing:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quetzalcóatl_descendiendo_de_los_cielos_para_su_misión_en_la_Tierra,_en_la_página_48.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Vindobonensis_Mexicanus_-_Lord_5_Serpent_and_Lady_8_Flower,_rulers_of_Place_of_the_Ceremonies.png
Bluewing butterfly (Myscelia ethusa) rigged from this image:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Myscelia_ethusa.jpg
Modern pictography in station-specific pictographs from Metro CDMX (STC):
(Wikimedia category for metro signage)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Metro_Juanacatlán_2018.jpg
Modern pictography in background along building wall in the Mixteca:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tejedora_de_historias.jpg
Modern nahual piece from Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art project:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tortoise_nahual_by_Jacobo_Ángeles_Ojeda.jpg
Modern pictography in seals for places of Oaxaca:
(Wikimedia category for Oaxacan municipality symbols)
(Wikimedia category for Oaxaca symbols)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escudo_de_Santiago_Juxtlahuaca.png
Most compositions in this video are my own homemade music.
Unofficial instrumental anthem of Oaxaca by Macedonio Alcalá (public domain):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dios_Nunca_Muere_(Himno_de_Oaxaca).ogg
(Most text is handwritten by me.)
Chinese text: cwTeX Q Kai, GNU GPL 2.0
Outro patron names: Alegreya by Juan Pablo del Peral, SIL Open Font License 1.1
My woosh/shush/hushes and chalk writing sounds are homemade. The rest of the sounds are credited to SoundBible.com (licensed under CC BY 3.0 unless specified below), pdsounds.org (Public Domain, currently through Tuxfamily backup or Wikimedia Commons), Freesound.org (CC BY licenses) and Soundeffect-lab.info. The sounds from soundeffect-lab.info use a custom license (their own 効果音ラボ license), and their original Japanese names are listed below so that they can more easily be found on the site.
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_-_Oaxaca_-_National_Museum_of_Antropology_-_Mexico_2024.jpg){kind=link}
_conquers_his_first_town.png){kind=link}
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