Communicating to an Empire in the Postclassic Americas:
Pictorials and Quipus in Mexica and Incan Societies
Lecture Description:
This lecture focuses on the means by which the Mexica and Incan Societies communicated to their constituents in the respective Empires. We will explain various preconquest ways of writing in Mexica society as well as the quipu threads as a form of record keeping in writing in Incan society.
Lecture Outline
Key points
- Simplification of writing systems in Mesoamerica with the Mexica
- The quipu in Incan society as a means to communicate and write to other ethnic groups within their vast territories.
- Observations of Mexica society in the Florentine Codex (T & E, 553).
Terms
- pictorial writing
- pictographs
- ideographs or logographs
- phonetic glyphs
- codex
- quipu
- preclassic period: 1000 C.E-1492
- preconquest period: before 1492
- postconquest period: sixteenth through eighteenth centuries
- Inca Empire: 1438-1533
- Mexica (Aztec) Empire: 1345-1521 C.E.
- Tenochtitlan
- Texcoco
- Tlacopan
- Toltec Empire: 950-1175 C.E
- Tula
- Bernal Díaz
- Hernando Cortés
- Triple Alliance
- Toltec Empire
- Mexica
- Triple Alliance
- Huitzilopochtli
- Motecuzoma I (reined from 1440-1469), Motecuzoma II (reined 1502-1520)
- Chinampas
- Altepetl (native city state)
- Ayllu (Ruling Elite, Subunit of Native City State)
- Cuzco
- Viracocha
- Nahuatl
- Quechua
Return to Hist. 151 Syllabus
11/25/03