# About Mexico - Past and Present/Chapter 9

Table of Contents
CHAPTER IX.
AMONG THE BOOKS.
THE uncivilized man pictures the event he wishes to record. If he is describing a battle, he draws something which suggests war—his arrows, his tomahawk or the scalp of his foe. Water is often expressed by a waved line; a month, by the figure of the moon; a day, by that of the sun. In such rude pictures originated the old Hebrew alphabet in which Moses wrote, as is shown by the names of the letters. Thus, aleph means "an ox;" beth, "a house;" gimel, "a camel;" and daleth, "a door." Through ages of use the lines of these pictures were changed and simplified, until they became merely letters in which the original design could scarcely be traced.
An advance in civilization is shown by an effort to express abstract ideas by signs. Among the ancient Egyptians an ostrich-feather was chosen to represent the idea of truth. They went still farther, and used signs to represent sounds as our letters do. Thus the figure of a hawk meant the sound a, etc. In the next step in written language both pictures and symbols are dropped, and signs are used only to represent the sounds of spoken language—characters which can be combined to make syllables and words. This is phonetic writing. If a man can write one word in this way, he can go on and write a hundred words, or five hundred if he has learned to use ​five hundred words in conversation. Such a person is no longer a savage: he has become a partially-civilized man.
Every letter used in the composition of this book has such a history of civilization as this. Tracing it to its fountain-head, we find ourselves on the banks of the Nile, among the pyramids of old Egypt, where men made their first rude attempts to write language. "In every letter we trace," says Max Müller "lies embedded the mummy of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph," or symbol. The Phœnicians, who were the travelers and the wide-awake people of their day, visited Egypt and there learned the use of letters. What the Phœnicians knew, they taught to the Greeks, who in their turn became the teachers of all Europe. They began to write language about b. c. 600. It was from these people that the Romans—whose alphabet we use—got their first idea of a written language. The very name they gave their letters tells the story. It is alpha beta, the first two letters of the series used by the Greeks. The written languages of the New World have no part in this history of our alphabet, as the characters used by the American tribes are of their own invention. It is very doubtful whether until this century any of them ever got much beyond picture-writing.
About the year 1821, Se-quoy-ah, a Cherokee Indian, heard a white man who was visiting his tribe read a letter. Those who have all their lives been accustomed to seeing people read have no idea of the effect produced on this untutored child of the forest when he discovered that the curious little black marks on paper had conveyed ideas to the mind of his visitor, and that there were other white men who would find the same meaning in them. ​He began to think and to ask questions about this strange fact, and slowly he grasped the idea of making characters which would represent the different sounds of the human voice. After months of study he found that eighty-five distinct sounds, or syllables, were used in Cherokee conversation, and that all the words with which he was familiar were combinations of these. He contrived eighty-five signs, or characters, which represented these sounds. This done, it was easy to put them together to make words; and the Cherokees had a written language so simple that under the guidance of Se-quoy-ah these Indians have gone beyond their white brethren, and in their system of phonetics have got rid of a world of rubbish, in the shape of useless or silent letters, with which our written words are encumbered.
Some have claimed that the Mayas of Yucatan—a people supposed to have descended from the builders of the magnificent cities now in ruins there—once had such a phonetic alphabet, but this cannot be proved until a key has been found to the records carved on their monuments. So far, these are still an enigma to the curious student. The Toltecs, Tezcucans, Aztecs, and other Nahua tribes, had a few symbols representing ideas, but most of the numberless manuscripts found at the time of the conquest were in picture-writing. It is not proved that they had the art of writing sounds, although they seemed to be rapidly working toward it.
The Aztecs were very skillful in representing the forms of birds, animals and fishes in gold and silver; but the same objects, when used in picture-writing, were strangely distorted. They made no difference in size between men, women and children, but indicated difference of age by dots near the head of the figure ​represented Their human beings were always big-headed, long-footed, with faces in profile, immense noses and a front view of one staring eye. The work was otherwise well done, with clear strokes and fadeless coloring. The priests were the great picture-writers and historians of the tribe. Their law-records were said to have been so accurate that the Spanish government always took them in evidence when Indian testimony was required. There were several different styles of penmanship, no one of which is now understood by any living person. In less than one hundred years after the conquest there were but two persons who could read the manuscripts which escaped the general wreck. Both of these men were very old, and neither was a skilled interpreter.
The Romish priests became very much interested in Mexican picture-writing. When it was decided that the Indians could be trusted with their old art, the monks began to encourage them in it, and even to study it themselves in order to communicate the truths of the gospel to these poor people in the way most familiar to them. In some cases they were successful. Many a native who had gone faithfully through his prayers in an unknown tongue now began for the first time to understand them. The Aztecs were a deeply religious people—as, indeed, were all the Mexican tribes—and when they came to unburden their hearts to the priests in the confessional, they could in no way express themselves so well as by their old pictures. Many learned the art in order to relate their religious experience, and thousands of new manuscripts were written, some of which remain to perplex the antiquarian. A monk who understood picture-writing says he was literally overwhelmed by these Indian confessions on long strips of muslin. ​Even those natives who had been taught the use of the Roman alphabet would return to their old art whenever they could.
Back of these monkish documents are writings which no one can understand. Not long after the conquest one of these was sent to Charles V. by Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain. It is called the Mendoza Codex, and is a copy of some old manuscript, since it is done on European paper. The Spanish vessel by which this book was sent was captured in mid-ocean by the French and taken to Paris with other booty. There the chaplain of the English ambassador saw it, and bought it. It was taken by him to England and engraved as one of the illustrations of Purchases Pilgrimage. The original picture-book was lost for a hundred years, but finally was found and put in the Bodleian Library, where it now is. Spanish and English interpretations of the Mendoza Codex have been published, but are not to be relied on.
An entirely different style of picture-writing is seen in what is called the Dresden Codex. This manuscript was first heard of in 1739; it is an original, painted in fine, delicate characters on agave-paper. There is no clue to the origin or the interpretation of this beautiful manuscript, though some of the figures and the characters are like those carved on the stones of Palenque, and may possibly illustrate manners and customs of Southern Mexico in vogue several hundred years ago.
About the time it was deemed necessary to invent an Indian Virgin Mary for these poor people, Boturini, one of their warmest friends, devoted himself to a long and patient search among them for relics and manuscripts, hoping to find something which would help the ​monks in this pious effort. He lived in their cabins, became familiar with the various dialects and gained the confidence of the people, and thus obtained a knowledge of their history and traditions better than that of any other European. After making a great collection of maps and manuscripts, he started with his treasure for Spain. But the authorities took alarm at these signs of sympathy with the Indians. Boturini was arrested before he could get out of Mexico; all his papers were taken from him and stored in a damp room in the viceroy's palace. Some of them were stolen, some became so mouldy that they fell to pieces; and in time the collection which had cost so much time and labor was entirely lost. Sahagan, a Franciscan monk, wrote a long history of the people among whom he labored, but it was deemed a dangerous enterprise tending to perpetuate the heathenism which was still wrought into the warp and woof of Mexican Christianity. Sahagan dared not publish his book, and for nearly three hundred years it was as much lost to the public as was one of the picture-writings of which he spoke.
The world lost the best history of Mexico ever written when the bigot Zurramaga emptied the great library of Tezcuco into the town market-place and burned it there; the smoke he raised seemed ever after to linger cloudlike over the vanquished race. What remained of their early records was hidden away, like their lost cities, until their very memory perished, and none were left to read the mouldy fragments which here and there have come to light.
The Aztec manuscripts were folded in a curious zigzag manner, something like a fan, and stiffened at each end ​by two pieces of light wood. For paper, agave-leaves were used, and sometimes a piece of white cotton cloth or a neatly-dressed deerskin. Strips of these, one or two feet broad and from twenty to thirty feet long, were neatly joined together. The folds in these were the pages, and the boards at each end were the cover, of the book.
The Aztec language was copious and polished, and the orators of the tribe were very eloquent in the use of it. The words were often long, some of them having fifteen syllables. Besides this language, there were many others spoken; some have counted thirty-five dialects at the time of the conquest. Tradition says that the poet-chieftain Hungry Fox was the author of sixty hymns to the true God, only a very few of which, however, have come down to our time. Be this as it may, it is not likely that any of these compositions were written until the Roman alphabet came into use among his people, but were preserved in the memories of his followers. In writing figures the Aztecs expressed a small number by circles or by units. A tiny flag represented the number 20; a feather was 400; a sack, 8000; a flag with two cross-lines was 10, and the same picture with three dots beside it stood for 24. Records of the grain and other products which were furnished for the use of large Aztec communities are still preserved.
Nothing so well shows the high grade of civilization to which these Indians attained as their system for the measurement of time; this, it is supposed, they inherited from the Toltecs. They had discovered the exact length of the solar or tropical year, and the necessity of leap-years in order to bring their time up to the seasons. They divided this year of three hundred and sixty-five ​days and six hours into eighteen months of twenty days each, and these months again into four weeks of five days. This left an excess of five days which did not belong to any month. During this time it was considered to be worse than useless to do any work, since the powers of evil would thwart their best endeavors unhindered by the gods, who were all off duty. No prayers were offered to them, therefore, and those who had a heart to laugh when everything was in such dire confusion gave themselves up to amusement. The fact that
"Satan finds some mischief still. For idle hands to do"
must often have been emphasized in these times of general license, and probably furnished the reason why these days came to be considered particularly unlucky days. The leap-year of the Aztecs came at the close of their period of fifty-two years, or four cycles of thirteen years each, when thirteen days were added to make the time right with the seasons. These thirteen days were the solemn season of year-binding, described in a previous chapter.