This block with its 62 symbols may change how you talk about the history of writing.
Does this serpentine stone from Veracruz bear Mesoamerica's oldest glyphs?
It's part of an unfolding epic quest you might not be aware of – a quest for the earliest
writing in the Americas.
Las Lomas de Tacamichapán, México.
Workers are busting into a local gravel quarry.
They're looking to gather up good road fill because, well, "we need to do our jobs".
The quarry, though, doubles as an archaeological site called Cascajal.
The roadworkers aren't insensitive to that.
In fact, they have been separating out artifacts and getting them into the hands of a local
cultural caretaker, who stores them at home.
Curious what all of this even is, he places a call: "Hello, archaeology!?"
Two archaeologists roll into town, take photos and begin identification.
The initial results are stunning.
A few of the finds date from the same time as the height of Olmec La Venta some 2500
years ago.
Most though are older still, from the Early Preclassic era, including the star of our
story – this block, 36 by 21 by 13 centimeters, full of what look like glyphs written roughly
in rows.
Experts in Mesoamerican epigraphy take note and wonder if this might be the oldest writing
in the whole hemisphere.
Why is this important?
And wait, is that a pineapple?
Well, just decades ago scholars were asking if the Americas even had "real" writing
at all.
Not always as a criticism.
Maybe these are rich works of meaningful iconography.
Maybe "high culture" doesn't require writing at all.
We've since learned otherwise.
(Not about culture.
You can absolutely go cultural without going scriptural!)
No, the world has conclusively learned that Mesoamerica birthed writing.
Ancient writing, and lots of it.
Libraries across Europe, from Oxford to Bologna, keep among their holdings one-of-a-kind
Aztec books.
Let's clear up some terms here.
First, "Aztec" is really "Mēxihcah", one of the Nāhua people associated with
the Triple Alliance.
That's a story for another animation... this one, in fact!
Second, books.
Academics prefer the term "codex", but,
either way, there's a special meaning here: āmoxtli aren't bound books, they're one long
folded and painted hide or bark āmatl paper, which is easy to see in this codex, which is
actually a Mixtec book we'll come back to.
Some āmoxtli date to just after the Spanish conquest, and a precious few survive from
before the siege of Tenochtitlán.
These get labelled picture books, at best a kind of pre-writing.
Problem: it's not so simple.
These glyphs may not be pictographic half measures.
We absolutely should get into decipherment here, the arguments and uncertainties, but how we're
now learning to read Nāhua glyphs is also for another time.
All told, it implies this civilization started writing more than 500 years ago.
Some of the oldest painted books held in European stashes aren't Aztec, Mexica, but from peoples
of Oaxaca that the Mexica called Mixtec, people of the cloud, adapted from their names:
Rain People.
Rain glyph painters are known for their sophisticated books full of ancestral history, and these
may push our date back to 700 years into the past.
One epic city in the Valley of Mexico was already using glyphs much earlier.
Teotihuacán, long celebrated for its huge monuments, turned up unexpected finds.
Not on its giant pyramids but down in the homes within what's come to be called "la
plaza de los glifos".
Now the language of the Teotihuacanos is notoriously up for debate, but at over 1500 years old,
their glyphs more than double our time horizon.
(I know, I know, you're older.
We'll get back to you, promise!)
Out east, a famously literate civilization uses writing seemingly everywhere: folded
books, outdoor monuments, indoor monuments, even on drinking cups.
These are in Maya.
Four legible Maya books survived massive colonial destruction, including what's likely to be
the oldest book from the Americas.
Other book remnants unearthed at Maya sites hold their breath for scientific breakthroughs
before they can even be opened without disintegrating.
(And if it looks like art not writing, yes and... you can be both!
And when the time comes to animate what Classic Maya sounded like, know that I'm
preparing for it.)
But older Maya glyphs show up in stucco or stone, originally painted, since about 1800
years ago.
Meanwhile, closer to the Pacific lie Kaminaljuyu and Tak'alik Abaj.
These cities were not Maya... not exclusively.
At a crossroads of Mesoamerica's many languages from many families, these sites may get overlooked
now, but millennia ago they predated and surpassed their neighbors in structure building... and
glyph writing.
The language could be Mixe-Zoque?
Maya?
Both?
But it's no stretch to say they were writing 2000 years ago.
But that's still late.
Update!
A brief report on finds from Guatemala swoops in and suddenly pushes back the date for the
earliest Maya writing to at least 2200 or 2300 years ago.
Amidst the frenzy of interest around Maya, inscriptions come to light from what's long
suspected of being Mesoamerica's "mother", but is honestly more like your
precocious cousin.
Olmec sites turn up amazing structures... and early dates.
Standouts include representations of great figures and the famously massive heads.
But writing here looks somewhat younger, in a script called "Isthmian".
Examples are few but exciting.
A stela pulled from a river near La Mojarra is the longest.
Despite claims that this is definitely Zoque and definitely decipherable, the jury's out.
The oldest though come from Chiapas: the earliest long count date yet found
anywhere, and a piece of pottery with signs 2400 years old.
The sun rises ever earlier on Mesoamerican writing.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, there's a place of clouds we need to visit before our story circles
right back to its start.
An unexpectedly fertile land for scribes lies west.
It seems an unlikely contender from where we've spent time, but seeing the impressive
sites rise above the Valleys of Oaxaca, you might be amazed but not surprised to learn
that Oto-Manguean peoples here have native writing, too, including the Ñuiñe and earlier
the Zapotec.
18 kilometers away from famous Monte Albán, a modest site yields a stone with a human
image, and below the image, the earliest Zapotec writing yet identified –
over 2500 years old.
And now we're prepared to see, to feel why unearthing this Cascajal block was so significant.
It hails from Olmec territory.
Even on closer inspection, it really does look like its symbols represent writing and
come from an early period.
Yet again, it's from centuries before the last accepted date for oldest script in Mesoamerica.
There are hunches about the language.
(It's Olmec, so Mixe-Zoque comes up.)
But careful minds continue to warn: we don't know what this says.
As always with undeciphered scripts, more evidence is required.
And with how this tale has gone, who knows if the next river or mound will uncover
yet older glyphs.
In the meantime,
stick around and subscribe for language.