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Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas. The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging. The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems. Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown. Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers. |
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39020.1491
- 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9862761-1493