Ink, Stone and String: Records of the Maya, Aztec and Inca

Gallery 3: Ink, Stone and String

1Welcome. Long before Europeans arrived, three great civilizations in the Americas kept records in very different ways. The Maya carved and painted glyphs, a writing system that could record any word of their language. The Mexica, often called the Aztecs, painted pictures and symbols in folding books. The Inca kept records on knotted cords.

2Object 1: Cast of a stone stela from Copán, in present-day Honduras, carved in the 700s CE. The tall stone shows a king of Copán in rich clothing. Glyphs on its sides give dates in the Maya calendar, name the king and list the ceremonies he led. Copán was one of many Maya city-states, each ruled by its own king.

3Object 2: Copy of pages from the Dresden Codex, a Maya book painted on bark paper and folded like a screen, made several centuries before the Spanish arrived. Its tables track the planet Venus and predict eclipses, using dots for ones, bars for fives and a shell sign for zero. Bark paper also rots easily in hot, wet forests. In 1562 the Spanish priest Diego de Landa burned Maya books at the town of Maní, saying they went against the Christian faith. Only four Maya books are known to survive.

4Object 3: Copy of a page from the Codex Mendoza, painted about 1541 by Mexica artists for the Spanish viceroy, or governor, of New Spain, with notes in Spanish. One page shows the founding of Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in about 1325. Other pages list the tribute each conquered province sent to the emperor in Tenochtitlan: cotton cloaks, warriors' costumes, cacao beans and feathers. Local rulers usually kept their power as long as the tribute arrived.

5Object 4: An Inca khipu, made in the 1400s or 1500s. Dyed cotton cords hang from one main cord. Knots tied at different heights stand for ones, tens and hundreds. Trained record keepers used khipus to count the people in each province and the goods in storehouses along the roads leading from Cusco, the capital. Inca subjects paid taxes mainly in labor, called mit'a: for a set time they farmed state fields, built roads or served as soldiers. Scholars can read the numbers on many khipus, but no one today can fully read any words they may hold.

6Object 5: Copy of pages from the Florentine Codex, completed about 1577. The Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún worked for decades with Nahua scholars and elders, some of whom had lived through the conquest. Its twelve books are written in Nahuatl, the Mexica language, with a Spanish version beside it. Book 12 tells of Hernán Cortés's arrival in 1519, a smallpox epidemic in 1520 and the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

7Closing panel: In 1532 Francisco Pizarro's forces captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa, and Spanish officials later governed both Mexico and Peru. Today millions of people still speak Maya languages, Nahuatl and Quechua, the Inca language.