96 PICTUEE-WEITING AND WOED-WEITINa. 



purely plionetic writing was of native Mexican origin, and after 

 the Spanish Conquest they turned it to account in a new and 

 curious way. The Spanish missionaries, when embarrassed by 

 the diflBculty of getting the converts to remember their Ave 

 Marias and Paternosters, seeing that the words were of course 

 mere nonsense to them, were helped out by the Indians them- 

 selves, who substituted Aztec words as near in sound as might 

 be to the Latin, and wrote down the pictured equivalents for 

 these words, which enabled them to remember the required 

 formulas. Torquemada and Las Casas have recorded two in- 

 stances of this device, that Pater noster was written by a j&ag 

 {pantli) and a prickly pear {nochtlt), while the sign of water, a 

 (tl) combined with that of aloe, me (tl) made a compound word 

 ametl, which would mean " water-aloe," but in sound made 

 a very tolerable substitute for Amen.^ But M. Aubin has ac- 

 tually found the beginning of a Paternoster of this kind in the 



metropolitan library of Mexico 



' ^ (otli), a stone, te (tl), a prickly 



P^' *® noch- te. pear, noch (tli), and again a stone, 



^S" te (tl), and which would read 



Pa-te noch-te, or perhaps Pa-tetl noch-tetl." 



After the conquest, when the Spaniards were hard at work 

 introducing their own religion and civilization among the con- 

 quered Mexicans, they found it convenient to allow the old 

 picture-writing still to be used, even in legal documents. It 

 disappeared in time, of course, being superseded in the long- 

 run by the alphabet ; but it is to this transition-period that we 

 owe many, perhaps most, of the picture-documents still pre- 

 served. Copies of old historical paintings were made and con- 

 tinued to dates after the arrival of Cortes, and the use of re- 

 cords written in pictures, or in a mixture of pictures and Spanish 

 or Aztec words in ordinary writing, relating to lawsuits, the 

 inheritance of property, genealogies, etc., were in constant use 

 for many years later, and special officers were appointed under 

 government to interpret such documents. To this transition- 

 period, the writing whence the name of Teocaltitlan (Fig. 10) 



' Brasseur, vol. i. p. xli. ^ Aubin, Eev. O. and A., vol. iii. p. 255. 



