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Writing was a fundamental part of multiple societies in Mesoamerica when Europeans first saw them. The use of writing had a long history, extending back at least to the end of the Middle Formative period. Specialized writing systems created and used by multiple Mesoamerican societies shared a number of fundamental features. Foremost was the strong relationship between writing and other forms of representing information graphically. Mathematical records, among the earliest examples of written texts known, used a uniform set of numeral signs. The dot is the numeral 1, everywhere; it does not change its value, and no Mesoamerican writing system requires use of a different symbol for the numeral 1. Numbers are expressed in base 20 in all the known scripts of the region.

This uniform graphical numeral system is combined with other systems of signs that stood for whole concepts, words, and sounds. The signs used vary from one language and writing tradition to another, which makes sense given the vastly different languages being recorded, each with different sounds and grammatical structures. All Mesoamerican systems of signs for text are to some degree pictographic: the signs are derived from drawings of things. Some writing systems, such as those employed at Teotihuacan in the Postclassic Mixtec codices of Oaxaca and by the Mexica, use pictographic signs that are consistently clear images of objects (see Chapters 9, 10, and 13). Over the long history of other writing systems, like that of the Maya (extending from before 200 BCE to the mid-sixteenth century CE), graphic images that formed the basis for text signs might be highly conventionalized, making it difficult for a modern viewer not steeped in the original visual environment to initially see the representational relationship between a sign and the sound, word, or concept for which it stood. Yet it is possible in many cases to demonstrate how an image was transformed into a textual sign.

Defining a sharp boundary between writing and other forms of graphic visual representation in Mesoamerica is sometimes very arbitrary. In practice, there was a complex relationship between the graphic signs for numbers, words, and sounds, and other graphics that formed images juxtaposed to texts. Texts were placed beside, above, or below images, on monuments, portable objects like pottery vessels, and bark paper or deerskin books (Chapters 10 and 13). Texts formed part of the overall design of pictures. Individual text signs could be placed within drawings, forming elements of a picture, for example, embedded in the drawing of a headdress or other part of costume. Texts could be laid out so that in order to read them, a viewer’s gaze passed through an image. Parts of the picture could be drawn intruding into the text. The drawing of an object, such as buildings sketched in Postclassic Maya codices, might have the same form as the sign representing the word for the object.

The abstraction of some designs carved on Early Formative pottery (Chapter 3) can be seen either as extreme conventionalization of a common image or as the kind of abstraction that was the basis for converting some images to service as text signs. Researchers identify groups of abstract, conventionalized, pictographic images as texts in later Mesoamerican societies specifically because they follow rules for arrangement of signs in a linear reading order. Scholars see the linear order of signs in texts as intended to represent a sequence of words whose grammatical order helps to convey meaning. To ensure that a sequence of signs would be reproduced, graphic devices that coached viewers to review text signs in a particular order were necessary so that actors, actions, and the objects of actions could be made clear without the visual context that makes these relationships clear in a drawing showing an event (Chapter 10).

In the Maya writing system, for example, texts were arranged in columns, double columns, or rows, within a regular grid structure joining signs in reading order. Once a reader learned the rules of order, they could follow the signs in any Maya text. On carved monuments, texts might be further set off by being raised in higher relief or incised in lower relief. In drawings, including those in the Postclassic Maya codices, texts might be separated from each other by lines outlining a text and related image. In Postclassic Mixtec codices columns of images and texts are separated by lines that lead readers down, across, and up the pages that fold out, one after another, into a single continuous sheet. Formative Period images have no conventional linear reading order and thus are not interpreted as texts. But they, and later nontext images, can still be read as conveying messages, as iconography, literally, “writing with images” (Chapter 3).

The earliest unequivocal texts known, such as the 260-day cycle position recorded next to a human figure on San Jose Mogote Monument 3, have the effect of recording information about the context of an event that would not be obvious from the picture. They insert a linear reading order that would not otherwise be part of the image: the day number–day sign sequence of the 260-day cycle position. It is in the recording of dates that early Mesoamerican people first impose linear reading order in visual representation, a requirement for the successful understanding of place notation numbers. The incorporation of text signs in linear order recording information beyond calendrical position is seen in inscriptions on monuments from sites such as Tres Zapotes and La Mojarra in the Gulf Coast of Mexico that carry Cycle 7 Long Count dates (corresponding to the Late Formative period). Some noncalendrical abstract signs are arranged in lines on monuments from the same region made around the same time or slightly earlier.