04-08-2021, 07:47 PM
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien...27852.html
Exactly 500 years after they were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores, the long-lost intellectual foundations of Aztec civilisation are being rediscovered by a British anthropologist.
In 1521, the Spanish military presided over the destruction of three of the world's greatest libraries – in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and in the Aztec-allied cities of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan.
Of the thousands of books of Aztec poetry, law, rhetoric, medicine, astronomy and history, only one or two works appear to have survived.
But now, new research by a British linguistic anthropologist, Gordon Whittaker, is revealing for the first time that the Aztecs' hieroglyphic writing system was one of the most sophisticated scripts that humanity has ever produced.
After some 20 years of detailed research, Professor Whittaker has discovered that, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Aztec writing system could be used not just to convey a limited number of words and syllables, but to comprehensively communicate the sounds of every syllable in the Aztec language (Nahuatl) – a flexibility which allowed tens of thousands of often multi-syllabic words to be expressed phonetically in written form.
You know, I'm really not surprised that the Aztecs were more intellectually sophisticated than we give them credit for. After all, their capital city of Tenochtitlan had over 200,000 people (making it one of the largest in the world at the time) - and primitive civilisations simply don't have the infrastructure for anything like that.
Still, it's a real shame such little literature by them has survived. One can only imagine what kinds of stories, or perhaps scientific or philosophical treatises, they might have written in that script!
Exactly 500 years after they were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores, the long-lost intellectual foundations of Aztec civilisation are being rediscovered by a British anthropologist.
In 1521, the Spanish military presided over the destruction of three of the world's greatest libraries – in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and in the Aztec-allied cities of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan.
Of the thousands of books of Aztec poetry, law, rhetoric, medicine, astronomy and history, only one or two works appear to have survived.
But now, new research by a British linguistic anthropologist, Gordon Whittaker, is revealing for the first time that the Aztecs' hieroglyphic writing system was one of the most sophisticated scripts that humanity has ever produced.
After some 20 years of detailed research, Professor Whittaker has discovered that, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Aztec writing system could be used not just to convey a limited number of words and syllables, but to comprehensively communicate the sounds of every syllable in the Aztec language (Nahuatl) – a flexibility which allowed tens of thousands of often multi-syllabic words to be expressed phonetically in written form.
You know, I'm really not surprised that the Aztecs were more intellectually sophisticated than we give them credit for. After all, their capital city of Tenochtitlan had over 200,000 people (making it one of the largest in the world at the time) - and primitive civilisations simply don't have the infrastructure for anything like that.
Still, it's a real shame such little literature by them has survived. One can only imagine what kinds of stories, or perhaps scientific or philosophical treatises, they might have written in that script!
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