Visible Language

No abstract.

Iconographic investigations of works of art executed in the Olmec style have produced convincing evidence that rulership during the Early and Middle Formative Period of Mesoamerican prehistory was publicly legitimized by a visual charter. This charter consisted of symbols derived from the natural environment. These naturally derived symbols functioned within a symbol system which stressed the human ruler’s access to supernatural power. The same symbol system also described the cosmic stage on which the rituals of rulership were enacted.

A general overview of the form and substance of Late Formative writing in Mesoamerica is undertaken here. Recent significant additions to the corpus of Mesoamerican Late Formative script have contributed new information warranting a review of our knowledge of this pivotal time period. Focusing on two of these additions for more detailed observations, analysis of the iconographic context of the script reveals considerable interdependence between text and context and provides a glimpse of the importance of cosmological considerations in the display of power. Maize and stages of maize growth are shown to be of crucial importance to power display as well as to the system of divinatory day names integral to the 260-day ritual cycle. Isthmian script is seen as likely to represent a Mixe-Zoquean language, and a maize-bearing shark is identified on a recently discovered Late Formative stela from Veracruz.

A brief description of the historical approaches to the decipherment of ancient Maya writing is presented in order to provide the background for a description of our current knowledge of the nature and structure of their system. Maya hieroglyphic writing is recognized as a true writing system in that it represents the sounds and structure of spoken language. The writing system is defined as a mixed logographic system containing both pictographic and phonetic elements.

Maya hieroglyphic writing appears in the latter part of the Late Preclassic Period (ca. 150 B.c.-A.D. 100) and is primarily associated with documenting political history and legitimacy. Writing was used to record the events of a ruler’s life, validating his right to the throne by documenting his parentage, his accession to power, his conquests, and his performance of important ritual and ceremonial acts. Calendrical information also comprises a major component of Classic Maya inscriptions. Historic events are documented by means of a complex system that both fixes events in time and ties them cyclically to the mythological past.

This paper summarizes the nature of the pre-Hispanic pictoral communication system used by the Mixtec people of Mexico, who were creating manuscripts in which they recorded their histories, genealogies and religious beliefs long before the Spanish reached the New World. The principal pictoral conventions are explained, and each is illustrated with an example from one of the surviving manuscripts.

This paper surveys the origin and development of the representational conventions of Mesoamerica writing systems. Writing probably grew out of the iconography of ceremonial cults, with which it shares many representational conventions; this iconography was used throughout Mesoamerica. Writing per se seems to have taken shape during or just before the period in which state-level political organization was emerging, in at least two separate regional traditions. Many of the representational features of these scripts are understandable in terms of the structures of the languages they represented and the patterns of development often resemble those of Old World systems. Other features are understandable in terms of the close relations that Mesoamerican writing maintained with iconography.