History of Books - Pre-columbian Codices of The Americas

Pre-columbian Codices of The Americas

The only currently deciphered complete writing system in the Americas is the Maya scroll. The Maya, along with several other cultures in Mesoamerica, constructed concertina-style books written on Amatl paper. Nearly all Mayan texts were destroyed by the Spanish during colonization on cultural and religious grounds. One of the few surviving examples is the Dresden Codex.

Although only the Maya have been shown to have a writing system capable of conveying any concept that can be conveyed via speech (at about the same level as the modern Japanese writing system), other Mesoamerican cultures had more rudimentary ideographical writing systems which were contained in similar concertina-style books, one such example being the Aztec codices.

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