Aztec Eternals

The warm monsoon carries moist water vapor from the peaceful Caribbean Sea.

It passed through the wild islands, through the wild rainforest, through the plains of the Huastec, and then rose along the Mexican plateau, caressing the lush Mexica valley, and then turned into a soft drizzle.

The drizzle drifted across the sky and the fields, over the mountains and forests, over the fortified mountain cities of the Otomi, and over the camps of the Mexica warriors in the mountains.

Then it fell gently and wet the curtain of a wooden house, and the water droplets traced a soft arc and reflected into the eyes of a young man.

The young man raised his pen to meditate, and then drew a pictogram of water, which was five curved blue lines, and then wrote the word "water" underneath.

The young Xiulot looked at the wooden board in front of him, which was covered with blue graphics and words. The pictures and texts are divided into two lines, the first line is a variety of pictograms similar to oracle bone inscriptions, and the second line is traditional Chinese characters.

Seeing that the board was full, he took the board off the earth platform in front of him and put it in the neatly arranged pile of boards beside him.

Then, he picked up a brush made of hair and dipped it in the Mayan blue ink dipped in indigo. Before he could think hard, he saw that the ink was running out.

He called Bertard and told him to go to the room of the priests and get some more Mayan blue dye. If it is not enough, mix some on-site with the leaves of the wild green tree and the clay of palygorskite.

After Bertard left, Shulot sighed leisurely. He felt that all his wisdom had been exhausted, and he needed to take a break and regain his energy.

It's been two weeks since the siege, and it's hard to find some free time. So Luote started to do a long-premeditated and extremely important event: "creating characters".

In Schlott's eyes, the Aztecs, and even the whole of Central America, are still in the era of drawing and recording, and the germination of hieroglyphics has just emerged, just like the graphic "war" he once learned from his father, a shield and a a stick, and "death," a corpse wrapped in a white cloth.

These graphics are still in the bud of pictographs, much more primitive than the Yin Shang oracle bone inscriptions with complete "Six Books", and are estimated to be at the same level as the Xia Zhuan in the legend of the Xia Dynasty. It can also be inferred from this that when the American ancestors separated from the Eurasian continent, they were still in the prehistoric era without the germination of writing.

According to Schlott's experience, at this time the Aztec graphic "words" were too random, and the writing and interpretation changed according to the user's wishes, and the power of culture was firmly imprisoned in the hands of the priests.

Words are the cornerstone of a country, and culture is the foundation of a country.

For the ambitious Xiulot, he couldn't tolerate the lack of writing in the empire, so he prepared to make up for this defect with his own hands.

At the beginning, Xiulot was ambitious and planned to imitate myths and legends and create a writing system by himself. However, this idea only appeared for ten minutes before it got stuck on the first text.

Later, Xiulot turned to the writing system he is most familiar with and loves: Chinese.

He thought about it for a long time, thinking that a Mexica Empire using Chinese characters would be great, "The Chinese and Aztecs ruled the Americas", and thinking about it, he felt passionate.

Next, he encountered a difficult problem: "The development of writing does not happen overnight."

For the Mexica, who were at the beginning of civilization, it was impossible to use simplified characters as soon as they got started. A Mexica warrior, he can understand "heaven and earth are mysterious and yellow", but he has not yet learned "the universe is prehistoric", can see "the sun and the moon are in full bloom", and he does not understand "the celestial constellations". For him, abstract words such as "science", "economy", and "culture" have no basis for establishing concepts.

Chinese characters themselves represent a kind of understanding of the world and society. It comes from pictograms, from the simplest perception of the world, and then through different eras, under the integration of ideas and the evolution of culture, it turns from image to abstraction. Every interpretation of Shuowen Jiezi is a kind of understanding of the world by the ancestors.

Xiu Luote does not want to simply introduce Chinese characters as a tool, just like the Spanish of Mexico in later generations. What he hopes to integrate is the mature Chinese culture based on writing. In this way, on the one hand, it can accelerate the development of the entire Aztec civilization, and on the other hand, it can also neutralize the too bloody human sacrifice culture.

Of course, this kind of word creation does not mean to completely abandon the original graphic text or the native Nahua language. In practice, this cannot happen. Xiulot's creation of characters is just a way to speed up the formation of characters, and it is impossible to change the habits of an ethnic group. Because, those who use words are the original people after all!

Even New Spain, which was bloodily conquered by the colonists, has forcibly assimilated the Spanish language for hundreds of years, and there are a large number of Nahua spelling words in the Spanish used. Now that pictographic characters are used, the priests of the alliance will also introduce native graphic symbols to carry out customary localization.

And what he did was to introduce Chinese characters with a complete structure as the bones, add simplified pseudonyms of local graphic texts, and then introduce pictophonetic characters of Nahuatl, thus saving thousands of years of evolution time. This kind of move is the same as Korean Hangeul, Fusang’s pseudonyms, Vietnamese’s Nom, and Xixia’s Tibetan script. It is a blend of Sinicization and localization. After the mature text is established, it can rely on it to carry out the alliance's political, religious, and cultural reforms as soon as possible.

"Wen Wang's Enlightenment Department, You Maid is like a public servant. Don't dare to be slow, and stand in full crown." Xiu Luote chanted a few lines of poems, and then felt that it was a bit shameful to compare himself to Wen Wang and the warriors to You Nu If it was too high, he smiled and continued to meditate.

Now, Xiu Luote already has a specific text template in his hands: traditional Chinese characters.

What he has to do is to use semi-image traditional Chinese characters as the basis, reverse the more vivid oracle bone inscriptions, seal script, or fabricated pictographs, and build a logical process of concrete things -\u003e image oracle bone inscriptions/seal script -\u003e semi-image traditional Chinese characters . Finally, the abstract conceptual meaning is derived from the half-image traditional Chinese characters.

After a while, Shulot heard someone lift the curtain of the door, and saw Berthard enter the room with dyes in clay pots, followed by Avit, whom he hadn't seen for a few days.

"Sholot, what are you up to lately?" Avit said with a smile, "There have been many banquets in the camp these days, but I haven't seen you appear."

"The banquet is just to eat some roasted deer and drink some tequila. The supply is tight recently, and there is not much delicious food." Xiulot also laughed: "I am busy with a big event recently, Avette, what do you have? Time to help me."

The two sat cross-legged on the edge of the earthen platform, with a deerskin blanket on the ground.

"Look at these boards." Shulot pointed to a stack at his feet.

"What is this?" Avit looked at the two lines of pictures on the board.

"This is text. The upper line contains various graphics, many of which we have learned on the sacrificial plate. The lower line of text is a summary of the meaning of the graphics, with a fixed writing form and a structure for constructing text. You can guess based on the graphics. Find out what the text means."

When Avet became interested, he began to study it carefully.

"On this piece of wood, there is a line of images on it, a person, an eye, a mountain, a river, a tree, two trees, three trees, and a fish?"

Xiulot glanced at it, and the following line reads "person, eye, mountain, water, wood, forest, forest, fish."

"Yes, the following characters are a kind of writing standard and meaning condensed from the above pictograms. You see, one wooden character is a tree, and two wooden characters are a large forest, and three wooden characters are behind us. Forest. The superposition of the wooden characters is not a quantity of two or three, but an expansion of the meaning of a large space.”

"Then this piece of wood, the image is a person holding a round thing, a river with land in the middle, a tree bearing fruit, one eye with hair, and a person looking up at the sky? These images are From the previous plank?"

"That's right, so the words below are also related to the previous one. They are melon, continent, fruit, eyebrow, and sky in sequence. Melon comes from the word 人, continent comes from the word water, fruit comes from the word wood, and eyebrow comes from the word mu Come, the sky also comes from people."

"Avit, look at this piece again. The one that grows on the ground and bears round fruits is 'bean'; the bean grows lushly, with many seedlings and leaves, which means 'feng', which means a good harvest; the skeleton's The shape is the "bone" in our body. The word "feng" means big and full from the harvest, and the combination of "bone" and "feng" means to expand the bones into big and full, that is your body ,'body'."

"And this one, you see, one line is 'one', two lines are 'two', three lines are 'three', one short line plus one long line is 'up', one long line plus one short line is 'down'. "

The two chatted more and more speculatively until night fell and the room became dark.

"Sholot, these words are very interesting. At the beginning, they were all things that could be seen and touched. Then gradually combined, they became something invisible and intangible. However, for these Knowing things, looking at the words you said, I can have a feeling of understanding."

"That's because you're too smart." Shulot laughed. "What do you think of these words?"

"Very good." Avitt praised happily.

"Then I'll tell you the meaning of the words, and then you can draw the corresponding graphics, okay?" Xiuluote persuaded.

"It's okay. These days I'm still free. I'll play with you for a while."

"If, I mean if. If this is not a game, I want to use these words with fixed meanings to replace the priests' memo graphics. What do you think?"

There was a moment of silence, the wooden house was silent, and a needle could be heard.

Afterwards, Avet said with a smile: "I still want to live longer, and I also want you to live longer."