Mysterious Advanced Astronomy in Mesoamerica

By NORAH ROMNEY

The Olmec language and Teotihuacan language are still outside this preliminary classification: the ones represented by the Olmec area and those of Teotihuacan, which are currently being studied and discovered. Though it is still difficult to prove, there is some probability that the Olmec language preceded Totonac. In contrast, it is more specific than the writings and speech of Teotihuacan, which led to Nahua's development. The Mexican population that migrated to Nicaragua later spread this language in its various variants throughout the central Valley of Mexico, even reaching the south of Mesoamerica, to Nicaragua. During the destruction and abandonment of Teotihuacan around 600, the written system of their successors, the Toltecs, was lost but may have been revived later in Aztec ideographic writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DTTV PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Aug 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201022129

NORAH ROMNEY

Norah Romney is a Maori- Inuit ambassador with lineage to both cultures, she was orphaned early in her life losing both parents in a plane crash in the Pacific, she was adopted in the UK to  a family of archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and folklorists. She is the first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in ethno-archaeology, and cultural folklorist as ambassador to to the Inuit's, she has spoken vastly on Maori traditions in 74 nations. Adopted into a wealthy middle-class English family in the United Kingdom, she sees herself as a global citizen with diverse roots, Having achieved Egyptology and Mesoamerican Qualifications her focus is now on Global Mythologies and their insight into ancient civilizations.

Book preview

NORAH ROMNEY

When Paul Kirchhoff defined the region that he called Mesoamerica, one of the characteristics that served as the basis for the precision of the concept was the "hieroglyphic writing: signs for numbers and the relative value of these according to position, folding screen-style books, historical records, and maps.

Among the indigenous cultures of North America that inhabited the continent, only Mesoamerica used letters to transmit messages from early on in its history. It is known that the Inca cultures and perhaps some of those that preceded them used a system to memorize stories, but such systems never used signs with values, either logographical or phonetic. Due to this uniqueness, Mesoamerican cultures share the same historical memory with those of the old continent and Asia.

Throughout history, people have used writing as an information storage system. In fact, human memory existed long before writing was invented, and specific groups of people were often trained to safeguard the community's history. However, there is a significant difference between the transmission of information in written form, that is, utilizing sculpted or painted drawings or signs, and that is, therefore, more efficient and easier to save than that which depends solely on memory or oral transmission.

Sound or phonetic writing and thought or ideographic writing are two writing categories. In ideographic writing, a picture of a tree means the idea of tree or green. Phonetic or sound writing, however, is much more complex because the idea, for example, of tree, must first be translated into sounds of that word, which can be made visible using signs on a surface. Likewise, most phonetic signs do not show any similarity or relationship with the original idea, so they must be translated back to the specific word and from there to the original idea, which must be understood in the reader's mind. This complicated process has, however, gained the edge over purely ideographic systems like Chinese and its derivatives. Civilizations maintain certain symbols, such as numbers (2, 3, and others), cash denominations ($,£), or mathematical signs (+, -, ÷, among others).

The fundamental advantage of the phonetic system over the ideographic system is the small number of signs that must be memorized and used. The Chinese writing system, for example, has nearly 50,000 signs that can be expressed in literary form (or 2,000 to 4,000 for elementary use), but the alphabetic or syllabic system typically has between twenty and sixty signs. The first stamps with personal or personalized marks were used as signature marks in urbanized Middle Eastern cultures around the fourth millennium BC.

In China, writing was known by the second millennium BC, and in Mesoamerica, there is evidence that a rudimentary system of signs was used shortly after 1000 BC.

Guatemala's Pacific coast. According to current evidence, the writing originated in Mesoamerica in the region that extends from Oaxaca and the central part of Veracruz in Mexico to the southern region of the Mayan area, excluding Yucatan. 252 This must have occurred in the Middle Preclassic period (c 600 BC). The following cultures participated in this process:

Olmecs.

The Monte Albán phase may have preceded the Rosario phase in the Oaxaca Valley. Several cultures are present in the highlands of Veracruz and Tabasco. Cerro de las Mesas, Tres Zapotes, Chiapa de Corzo, and La Venta are the most significant sites with early written monuments in the Olmec region; Monte Alban, in Oaxaca; Izapa, Takalik Abaj, El Baúl and El Trapiche on the Pacific coast of Guatemala; and Kaminaljuyú and El Portón, in the Guatemalan highlands.

In these cultures, certain elements or characteristics are common, but that does not necessarily indicate a historical relationship. Standard features include:

A double-column format is preferred over a linear format.

Right-to-left reading order.

There are points and bars in the number system.

The Chinese, Egyptian, and Sumerian civilizations also share some characteristics. It has been explained that, among other reasons, the order of reading from left to right could have been because, when painting on canvas or paper, most people write with their right hand, so they did not want to dirty the surface with their arms. As for the use, spread in many parts, the double columns would follow the human visual, which response more to the vertical format than to a linear perspective, as a result. A common feature of Mesoamerican cultures is the numbering of bars and points, though there are some local differences (for example, the Mixtec codices contain a lot of points, whereas the Mayans have points and bars). It would respond to arbitrary counting on the fingers.

As a result of these characteristics, the debate on the origins of writing in Mesoamerica tends to assign the Olmec Culture some precedence over the Oaxaca Culture based on the iconographic convention pars pro toto, in which the presence of an element indicates the presence of the entire set. Signs appeared to have served as indicative elements of messages in San Lorenzo's monuments 41 and 42, Tlatilco's seal, and the Humboldt Plate (all belonging to the Olmec region). In addition, Monument 13 at La Venta, sculpted in phase IV ending in 600 BC and contemporaneous with Monument 1 at San José de Mogote in the Valley of Oaxaca, contains a short column of signs interpreted