Writing and Books and Their Uses in Mesoamerica: Overview

Of all Mesoamerican writings, Aztec records are described in the fullest detail in the scholarly literature. They contained “annals of ancient times, contemporary events, year counts, accounts compiled yearly, specific records for each year, books of each day and day-by-day count[s] or diaries.” Some of the records constituted histories of whole peoples, and they incorporated accounts of “victories, defeats, the lives of rulers, memorable ceremonial occasion” and even “the adventures of individual heroes, often in intimate and vivid detail.” Letters were written by and to individual correspondents.

Such records were kept pretty much throughout Mesoamerica. According to Spanish eyewitnesses who talked with native priests about their books, the Maya of Yucatan “used to write their histories and the ceremonies and method of sacrifices to their idols, and their calendar, in books.” Also, they had written records of “important things which had occurred in (the past) . . . (the prognostications) of their prophets and their lives . . . (of) their lords.” Another description mentions “brief chronicles, fragmentary historical narratives, rituals, . . . mythological accounts of the creation of the world, almanacs and medical treatises,” as well as prophecies of future events. Tax and trade records were also kept.

We know a good deal about the Maya writing tradition from the content of the four surviving Maya codices, from 16 lineage histories from Yucatan (the Chilam Balam records), and from inscriptions on stone monuments, many of which are now deciphered. At least during the Post-Classic period (from AD 900), the Maya wrote prophecies forecasting what would take place during each coming calendrical period, and they held public readings of those written prophecies. Predictions were compiled in books, while historical memorials were also engraved on stone. The Maya, too, wrote letters to one another.

Those same types of written products were also kept long before the Spanish arrived. In fact, many of the documents from just after the conquest were “simply transcriptions of the old hieroglyphic manuscripts” put into Spanish characters. The Post-Classic codices certainly suggest that the Classic Maya [AD 300-900] had books of divination and astronomy, and it would be surprising if they [like their Post-Classic descendants] had not had books of historical prophecy.” Brotherson used slightly different categories to classify Maya records: “highly structured ritual and cosmogonical [creation] histories, . . . political and migration histories, genealogies and lives, and year-by-year annals.”

One other interesting type of document may have been used anciently. On the basis of the scenes painted on vases found in Maya tombs, Michael Coe believes that rites for interred dead leaders might well have utilized the text of “a long hymn which could have been sung over the dead or dying person.” Indeed, “it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there was a real Book of the Dead for the Classic Maya, akin [in function] to the Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians.” The scenes and texts reproduced on the hundreds of funerary vases are all that survive of such a document, if it existed. There could also have been parallel funerary texts in other cultures, he maintains, for “there was a single, unified body of thought in Mesoamerica . . . which we would call . . . Mesoamerican religion.” An actual book, or codex, was found in a tomb at the site named Mirador in wester Chiapas that dates to around AD 400-450, and possible fragments of others form tombs are also known.