THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE ART OF WRITING.

PLATE I.

H. N. Humphreys. In.

Day & Son, Ltd., to The Queen.

PICTORIAL WRITING OF MEXICO.

## CHAPTER III.

### PICTURE-WRITING OF THE MEXICANS.

THE art of writing, as practised by the Mexicans at the time of the Spanish invasion of Cortez and his followers, had not developed itself much beyond the first, or purely pictorial stage: for the empire of the Aztecs had not existed above two centuries; and there are no monuments tending to prove that their more polished predecessors, the Toltecs, had advanced further in the art. Nevertheless, the first elements of a progress in the art beyond mere pictography had begun to shew themselves in the occasional use of characters in a *phonetic* capacity, to express *foreign names*, in a manner analogous to that of the Egyptians. For instance, the pictures of such natural objects as might begin with sounds like qui, tsi, acs, &c., were combined to express a name composed of such sounds. These characters, with those of a symbolic kind, such as that of a tongue, when used to express the act of speaking, and the simple pictographs, or positive pictures of the objects signified, form the whole *matériel* of Mexican writing, which thus serves admirably to illustrate the first stages of the art; especially as no kind of abbreviation or simplification in the pictorial forms had taken place, which is the first step towards reducing a series of depicted objects to a system of *writing*, as we now understand the term. Such was the state of the Mexican system of writing at the time of the Spanish invasion, the further progress of which was permanently checked by the introduction of the European alphabet.

A system of writing similar to that of the Mexicans was practised, at the same time or previously, by the North American Indians; which has been described by Charlerooix, and of which recently-discovered remains have afforded interesting evidence. A similar kind of characters was found also, by Strahlenberg, on the rocks of Siberia.*

D'Acosta relates, that on the first arrival of the Spanish squadron on the shores of Mexico, expresses were sent to Montezuma bearing scrolls of cloth, on which were painted accurate representations of the Spanish ships, &c. &c. "In this manner," he continues, "they kept their histories, representing things

* Botturini says the Peruvians were acquainted with a mode of recording events by means of knotted strings of different colours, of which Sylvestre has engraved a specimen in his *Paleographie*; but it is possible they had also a mode of recording events similar to the system of the Mexicans.

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