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Updated: June 25, 2025
Museums of Mexican antiquities are so much alike, that, in general, one description will do for all of them. Mr. Uhde's Museum at Heidelberg is a far finer one than that at Mexico, except as regards the picture-writings.
Going back to the early time when the deeds of the god-king, chanted and mimetically represented in dances round his altar, were further narrated in picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so constituted a rude literature, we might trace the development of Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, it presents in one work theology, cosmogony, history, biography, civil law, ethics, poetry; through other phases in which, as in the Iliad, the religious, martial, historical, the epic, dramatic, and lyric elements are similarly commingled; down to its present heterogeneous development, in which its divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to defy complete classification.
Going back to the early time when the deeds of the god-king were recorded in picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so constituted a rude literature, we might trace the development of Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, it presents in one work theology, cosmogony, history, biography, law, ethics, poetry; down to its present heterogeneous development, in which its separated divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to defy complete classification.
Though the Mexicans carried the arts of knife and arrow-making and sculpturing hard stone to such perfection, I do not think they ever discovered the art of making a hole in a stone hammer. The handles of the axes shown in the picture-writings are clumsy sticks swelling into a large knob at one end, and the axe-blade is fixed into a hole in this knob.
The real home of the people in their waking hours was on their housetops. The rocks of the mountain are etched with many picture-writings attesting the artistic skill of this people. The predominant form is the rattlesnake, which is found in the crevices of the rocks on every hand.
The Spaniards burnt in Mexico vast piles of American picture-writings, an irretrievable loss; and Cardinal Ximenes delivered to the flames, in the squares of Granada, eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical authors.
The great work of Lord Kingsborough, which contains a fac-simile of this curious document, reproduces also an ancient interpretation of the matters contained in it, evidently the work of a person who not only understood the interpretation of the Aztec picture-writings, but had access to some independent source of information, probably the more ample oral traditions, for the recalling of which the picture-writing appears only to have served as a sort of artificial memory.
When, therefore, the picture-writings showing the Spanish invaders reached Montezuma, they caused him great apprehension, and he summoned the kings of Tezcuco and Tlacopan to consult with them as to how the strangers should be received.
A curious ornament is met with in the Central American sculptures, representing a serpent with a man's face looking out from between its distended jaws; and we find a similar design in the Aztec picture-writings, sculptures, and pottery.
Art should certainly be at home in Mexico, where it has found expression in various forms for hundreds of years. What were the picture-writings of the aborigines but early examples of art? There are numerous specimens of Aztec paintings illustrative of the early history of Mexico, which were produced long before the arrival of the conquering Spaniards.
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