The warm monsoon carries moist water vapor and rises from the tranquil Caribbean Sea.
It passes through the still wild islands, through the ferocious rain forests, through the plains of the Huastecs, and then rises along the Mexican plateau, caressing the prosperous Mexica Valley, and then turns into a gentle drizzle.
The drizzle floated across the sky and fields, across the mountains and forests, past the fortified mountain city of the Otomi people, and to the camp of the Mexica warriors in the mountains.
Then it fell gently and wet the curtains of a wooden house. The water droplets traced soft arcs and reflected in the eyes of a young man.
The young man raised his pen and meditated, then drew a water icon, which was five curved blue lines, and then wrote the word "water" underneath.
The young boy Shulot looked at the wooden board in front of him, which was covered with blue graphics and words. The pictures and text are divided into two lines. The first line is various pictograms similar to oracle bone inscriptions, and the second line is traditional Chinese characters.
Seeing that the wooden board was full of writing, he took the wooden board off the earthen platform in front of him and placed it in the neatly arranged pile of wooden boards next to it.
Then, he picked up the brush made of hair and dipped it in indigo Mayan blue ink. Before he started thinking hard, he saw that there was not much ink left.
He called Bertard and asked him to go to the priests' room and get some more Mayan blue dye. If it's not enough, use wild green tree leaves and palygorskite clay to prepare some on site.
After Bertard left, Shulot sighed leisurely. He felt that all his wisdom had been exhausted and he needed to rest for a while to regain his energy.
It had been two weeks since the siege of the city, and I finally had some free time. Shulot then began to do a long-planned and extremely important event: "creating characters."
In Xiulote's eyes, the Aztecs, and even Mesoamerica as a whole, were still in the age of inheritance of drawings and records, and the germination of hieroglyphs had just emerged, just like the graphic "war" he had learned from his father, a shield and a A stick, and "Death," a body wrapped in a white cloth.
These graphics are still in the infancy of hieroglyphics, and are much more primitive than the oracle bone inscriptions of the Yin and Shang Dynasties that are complete with the "Six Books". They are estimated to be on the same level as the legendary Xia Zhuan of the Xia Dynasty. It can also be inferred from this that when the ancestors of the Americas separated from the Eurasian continent, they were still in the prehistoric era without the beginning of writing.
According to Xiulote's experience, the Aztec graphic "words" were too random at this time, and the writing and interpretation changed according to the user's wishes. The power of culture was firmly locked in the hands of the priests.
Writing is the cornerstone of a country, and culture is the foundation of a country.
As for the ambitious Shulot, he could not tolerate the status quo of the empire without writing, so he was ready to make up for this flaw himself.
At first, Shulot was ambitious and planned to create his own writing system by imitating myths and legends. However, this idea only appeared for ten minutes before it got stuck on the first text.
Later, Shulot turned to the writing system he was most familiar with and loved: Chinese.
He thought about it for a long time, thinking that a Mexica empire using Chinese characters would be very good, "the Chinese Aztec empire unified the Americas", and he felt excited just thinking about it.
Next, he encountered a problem: "The development of writing does not happen overnight."
For the Mexica people who were in the early stages of civilization, it was impossible to use simplified Chinese characters right away. A Mexica warrior can understand "the sky and the earth are dark and yellow", but he has not yet learned the "primordial universe", can see "the sun and the moon are waxing and waning", and cannot understand "the stars and the stars". For him, abstract words such as "science", "economy" and "culture" have no basis for establishing concepts.
The Chinese characters themselves represent an understanding of the world and society. It comes from iconography, from the perception of the simplest world, and then through different eras, with the integration of ideas and the evolution of culture, it moves from image to abstraction. Every interpretation of Shuowen Jiezi is an ancestor's understanding of the world.
Xiulote did not want to simply introduce Chinese characters as a tool, like Spanish in Mexico in later generations. What he hopes to integrate is the mature Chinese culture that relies on writing. In this way, on the one hand, it will accelerate the development of the entire Aztec civilization, and on the other hand, it can neutralize the overly bloody human sacrifice culture. At the same time, the complete structure of Chinese characters is used as the main body, existing graphics are added, and then the pictophonetic characters of Nahuatl are introduced, thus saving thousands of years of evolution time. Then rely on writing to carry out political, religious, and cultural reforms of the alliance as soon as possible.
"In King Wen's education office, the wandering maiden is like a minister. Don't dare to be too slow, and stand still with your crown tasseled." Shulot recited a few lines of poetry, and then he felt that it was a bit shameful to compare himself to King Wen and the warriors to wandering maidens. Too high, so he smiled and continued to meditate.
Now, Shulot already has a specific text template in his hands: traditional Chinese characters.
What he wants to do is to use the semi-image traditional Chinese characters as a basis, and then infer the more vivid oracle bone inscriptions, seal scripts, or made-up pictographs, and build a logical process of specific things -> vivid oracle bone inscriptions/seal script -> semi-image traditional Chinese characters. . Finally, abstract conceptual meanings are derived from the semi-image traditional Chinese characters.
After a while, Hulot heard someone opening the curtain of the door, and saw Bertard entering the house with dye in a clay pot, followed by Avitt, whom he hadn't seen for a few days.
"Xulot, what have you been busy with recently?" Avitt said with a smile, "There have been many banquets in the camp these days, but I haven't seen you show up."
"The banquet is just to eat some roasted deer and drink some tequila. The supplies are tight recently, and there is not much delicious food." Xuellot also smiled and said: "I am busy with a big thing recently, Avitt, you have Please help me when you have time.”
The two of them sat cross-legged on the edge of the earth platform, with a deerskin blanket spread on the ground.
"Look at these wooden boards." Shulot pointed to the pile at his feet.
"What is this?" Avitt looked at the two lines of pictures and text on the wooden board.
"This is text. The top line is a variety of graphics, many of which we have learned on the sacrificial plate. The bottom line of text is a summary of the meaning of the graphics, with a fixed writing form and a structure for constructing the text. You can guess based on the graphics. Let’s talk about the meaning of the words.”
Avitt became interested and began to study it carefully.
"This piece of wood has a row of images on it: a person, an eye, a mountain, a river, a tree, two trees, three trees, and a fish?"
Shulot took a look, and the words below were "people, eyes, mountains, water, trees, forests, forests, fish."
"Yes, the characters below are a writing standard and condensation of the meaning of the pictogram above. You see, one character for "木" means a tree, two characters for "木" means a large forest, and three characters for "木" means the one behind us. Forest. The superposition of this wooden character is not a number of two or three, but an expansion of meaning in a large space."
"Then on this piece of wood, the image is of a person holding a round object, a river with land in the middle, a tree with fruits, an eye with hair, and a person looking up at the sky? What are these images? From the previous plank?"
"That's right, so the following text is also related to the previous one. They are melon, continent, fruit, eyebrow, and sky in that order. Melon comes from the character for human, continent comes from the character for water, fruit comes from the character for wood, and eyebrow comes from the character for eye. Come, even heaven comes from man.”
"Avit, look at this piece again. The ones that grow on the ground and bear round fruits are 'beans'; the beans that grow lushly and have many seedlings and leaves are 'feng', which means a good harvest; the skull's The shape is the 'bone' in our body. The word 'feng' derives from harvest, which means big and full. 'bone' and 'feng' combined mean to expand the bones into big and full, which is your body. ,'body'..."
"And this one, you see one line is 'one', two lines is 'two', three lines is 'three', a short line plus a long line is 'up', and a long line plus a short line is 'down'. ..”
The two of them chatted more and more passionately, until nightfall was approaching and the room became dim.
"Xulot, these words are very interesting. At the beginning, they were all visible and tangible things. Then gradually they were combined and turned into something invisible and intangible. However, there is no need for these words. I know something, and looking at the words you said, I can feel some understanding."
"That's because you are 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 shapes, okay?" Shulott followed the instructions.
"Okay. I'm quite free these days. I just want to play with you for a while."
"If, I mean if. If this is not a joke, I want to use these words with fixed meanings to replace the priests' note graphics. What do you think?"
There was a moment of silence.
Afterwards, Avitt smiled and said: "I still want to live longer, and I also want you to live longer."
