Scripture and Sacred Texts
Aztec Scripts
The language that the Aztec spoke was called Nahuatl. It was also the language of the majority of the people in Central Mexico and a lingua franca in large parts of Mesoamerica. The origin of Nahuatl writing is poorly understood. It most resembles Mixtec writing in that both use dots for numbers less than twenty (in contrast to the bar-and-dot notation used in Maya and Zapotec), share similar construction style of compound signs, and place emphasis on short texts that rely on painted scenes for narratives instead of longer texts. It is thought that Mixtec writing influenced Nahuatl writing, but both are possibly influenced by earlier writing systems of cities such as Xochicalco, Cacaxtla, and the even more ancient Teotihuacan.
Nahuatl writing was primary written on perishable media such as deer-skin and paper codices. Due to ravages of time and purposeful destruction of books by both the Aztecs and the Spanish conquistadores, no pre-Columbian book has survived to the modern age. All surviving documents containing Nahuatl writing were composed after the Conquest and contained a mixture of Aztec glyphs and Spanish notes. There are a few codices made before the Conquest from the Puebla region in a somewhat different style known as the "international" Mixteca-Puebla, style, but their exact relationship to either Aztec or Mixtec writing is still somewhat obscure. http://www.ancientscripts.com/aztec.html |