CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA 223sounds of the native languages, though features such as tone and vowel length were
often omitted. Native people used the same words for books, documents, scribes,
paint or ink, paper, and the act of writing whether pictorial or alphabetic conventions,
native or European paper, were employed. As they did with other aspects of European
culture introduced by the colonizers, Mesoamericans took alphabetic writing and
made it their own, adapting it to their own needs and employing it as a tool for their
own survival.
Before looking at colonial texts, we will look briefly at surviving pre-Columbian
literature.PRE-COLUMBIAN LITERATURE
In Mesoamerica’s tropical environment, paper decays quickly if discarded or buried.
A handful of texts painted on paper survives from the Postclassic period. The only
texts that survive from more ancient times are those inscribed on more durable
media: stone; ceramics; bones; shells; and the walls of caves, tombs, and buildings.
The largest corpus of such inscriptions is that of the Classic Mayas. Classic Mayan
texts deal primarily with historical information, particularly the genealogies and ex-
ploits of rulers. This concern with elite personages extended to the inscribing of
their personal effects with messages like “this is Ruler So-and-so’s chocolate cup.”
Such a text hardly constitutes a work of literature, but some Mayan inscriptions in-
clude hundreds of glyphs. The Hieroglyphic Stairway at the ancient city of Copán,
Honduras, the longest stone inscription in the Americas, has approximately 1,300
glyphs.
Mayan scribes set their human protagonists into grand cosmological schemes
that span millions of years. The texts tie the actions of actual Mayan leaders to those
of primordial deities and to the movements of the moon, stars, and planets. The
rulers claim to be descended from deities and to share their birthdays. They assert
that their deceased parents and other ancestors have themselves been deified. At
the same time, actual historical events such as accession to the throne or the desig-
nation of an heir are recorded with precise historical dates. Such glorification of
human rulers obviously functioned as political propaganda. But the texts also reveal
ancient Mayan views of the cosmos and the nature of their historical consciousness,
which cast human history in mythological terms. One such text is shown in Fig-
ure 6.1.
Only fifteen books, or fragments of books, are known to survive from preconquest
Mesoamerica. Most of these were taken to Europe soon after the Spanish invasion of
Mesoamerica and preserved as curiosities. Eventually they found their way from pri-
vate hands into libraries in England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
These manuscripts are usually called codices (singular, codex). The term “codex”
originally meant a manuscript with its pages sewn together on one side. But since the
late nineteenth century, scholars of Mesoamerica have used this term to designate any
pictorial (or combination written and pictorial) manuscript executed in an indigenous
artistic style. Early colonial pictorial manuscripts are included in this designation.