94 PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 



few of the Mexican pictures now in existence may perliaps be 

 original documents made before tbe arrival of tbe Spaniards, 

 and great part of tbose drawn since are certainly copied, wboUy 

 or in part, from sucb original pictures. 



It is to M. Aubin, of Paris, a most zealous student of Mexi- 

 can antiquities, tbat we owe our first clear knowledge of a pbe- 

 nomenon of great scientific interest in the history of writing. 

 This is a well-defined system of phonetic characters, which 

 Clavigero and Humboldt do not seem to have been aware of, 

 as it does not appear in their descriptions of the art.^ Hum- 

 boldt indeed speaks of vestiges of phonetic hiei'oglyphics among 

 the Aztecs, but the examples he gives are only names in which 

 meaning, rather than mere sound, is represented, as in the 

 pictures of a face and water for Axayacatl, or " Water-Face," 

 five dots and a flower for Macuilxochitl, or " Five-Flowers." So 

 Clavigero gives in his list the name of King Itzcoatl, or " Knife- 

 Snake," as represented by a picture of a snake with stone 

 knives upon its back, a more genuine drawing of which is 

 given here (Fig. 8), from the Le Tellier Codex. This is mere 



Fig. 8. Fig. 9. 



picture-writing, but the way in which the same king's name is 

 written in the Vergara Codex, as shown in Fig. 9, is something 

 very different. Here the first syllable, itz, is indeed repre- 

 sented by a weapon armed with blades of obsidian, itz (tli) ; 

 but the rest of the word, coatl, though it means snake, is 

 written, not by a picture of a snake, but by an earthen pot, co 

 (mitl), and above it the sign of water, a (tl). Here we have 

 real phonetic writing, for the name is not to be read, according 

 to sense, " knife-kettle- water," but only according to the sound 



1 Clavigero, ' Storia Antica del Messico ;' Cesena, 1780-1, Tol. ii. pp. 191, etc., 

 248, etc. Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pi. xiii. 



