Aztec Eternals

The warm monsoons carry moist water vapor from a tranquil Caribbean Sea.

It passed through the still wild islands, through the fierce rainforest, through the Vastec plains, and then up along the Mexican plateau, stroking the prosperous Mexica Valley, and turned into a gentle drizzle.

The drizzle drifted across the sky and the fields, over the mountains and forests, over the strong mountain towns of the Otomi people, and drifted to the camps of the Mexica warriors in the mountains.

Then it fell gently and wet the curtain of a wooden house. The water droplets crossed a soft arc and caught the eyes of a young man.

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

The young Shilot 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 plank was full, he took the plank off the soil platform in front of him and put it into the neatly arranged pile of planks next to him.

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

He then called Bertard and asked him to go to the priests' room and get some Mayan blue dye. If that's not enough, mix some on-site with the leaves of the wild green tree and the clay of palygorskite.

After Bertard left, Shirot sighed leisurely. He felt that all his wisdom had been used up, and he needed to rest for a while to recover a little bit of energy.

It has been two weeks since the siege of the city, and I finally have time to spare. Shilot began to do a long-planned and extremely important event: "creating characters".

In Shirlot's eyes, the Aztecs, and even the whole of Central America, were still in the era of drawing and memoirs. A stick, and "Death," a corpse wrapped in a white cloth.

These figures are still in the infancy of hieroglyphics, much more primitive than the Yin and Shang oracle bone inscriptions with complete "six books", and they are estimated to be on the same level as the Xia Zhuan in the legend of the Xia Dynasty. From this, it can also be speculated that when the ancestors of the Americas separated from Eurasia, they were still in the prehistoric era without the germination of writing.

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

Writing is the cornerstone of a country, and culture is the foundation of a country.

For the lofty and ambitious Shulot, he could not tolerate the status quo that the empire had no words, so he prepared to make up for this defect by himself.

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

Then, Shilot 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 that uses Chinese characters is also very good, "the Aztec Empire of China unites the Americas", and he feels passionate when he thinks about it.

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

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

The Chinese character itself represents a kind of understanding of the world and society. It comes from pictograms, from the most simple world perception, and then through different eras, under the integration of ideas and the evolution of culture, it moves from image to abstraction. Every interpretation of Shuowen Jiezi is a kind of cognition of the ancestors to the world.

Shilot doesn't want to simply introduce Chinese characters as tools, just like Spanish in Mexico in later generations. What he hopes to integrate is the mature Chinese culture based on the text. In this way, on the one hand, the development of the entire Aztec civilization can be accelerated, and on the other hand, it can also neutralize the **** human sacrifice culture.

"King Wen's education, the wandering girl is like a minister. Don't dare to be slow, and stand with a crown." Xiulote recited a few poems, and then felt that it was a bit shameful to compare himself to King Wen and the warriors to wandering girls. Too high, he smiled and continued to meditate.

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

What he wants to do is to use the semi-figurative traditional Chinese characters as the basis, and reversely deduce the more vivid oracle bone inscriptions, seal inscriptions, or fabricated pictographs, and build a logical process of specific things -> figurative oracle bone inscriptions/seal inscriptions -> semi-figurative traditional Chinese characters . Finally, the abstract concept meaning is derived from the traditional Chinese characters with half images.

After a while, Sherlot heard someone lift the curtain of the house door, and saw Bertard entering the house with the dye in the clay pot, followed by Avit, who had not seen him for a few days.

"Shirot, what are you busy with recently?" Avit said with a smile, "There have been many banquets in the camp these days, and I haven't seen you appear."

"The banquet is just to eat some roasted deer and drink some tequila. The supply has been tight recently, and there is not much delicious food." Sherlot also smiled: "I'm busy with a major event recently, Avette, do you have any? Help me in time."

The two of them sat cross-legged on the edge of the earthen platform, and the floor was covered with a deerskin blanket.

"Look at these planks." Sherlot pointed to the stack at his feet.

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

"This is text. The upper line is a variety of 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 structure of the text. You can guess according to the graphics. Look at the meaning of the words."

Avette became interested and studied it carefully.

"A row of images on this piece of wood is, a person, an eye, a mountain, a river, a tree, two trees, three trees, and a fish?"

Shulot glanced at it, and the following line was "people, eyes, mountains, water, trees, forests, forests, fish."

"Yes, the characters below are a kind of writing standard and condensed meaning of the pictogram above. You see, a wood character is a tree, and two wood characters are a large forest, and three wood characters are behind us. Forest. The superposition of this wood letter 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 of a person holding a round thing, a river with land in the middle, a tree with fruit on it, hair on one eye, and a person looking up at the sky? These images are Derived from the previous plank?"

"That's right, so the text below is also related to the previous one. The order is melon, continent, fruit, eyebrow, and sky. Melon comes from herringbone~www.readwn.com~ Zhou comes from water, and fruit comes from wood. Come, eyebrows come from the eyes, and the sky comes from people."

"Avit, look at this piece again. Those that grow on the ground and bear round fruits are 'beans'; the beans grow lushly, with many shoots and leaves, which means 'abundance', which means a good harvest; this skeleton's The shape is the 'bone' in our body. The word 'feng' derives from the harvest, which means big and full. The combination of 'bone' and 'feng' means expanding the bones into big and full, that is your body ,'body'..."

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

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

"Shirot, these words are very interesting. In the beginning, they were all things that could be seen and touched. Then gradually combined, they became some things that were invisible and intangible. What I know, looking at the words you say, I can have some sense of understanding."

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

"Very good." Avett praised happily.

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

"That's fine. These days are relatively free. I'll play with you for a while."

"If, I mean if. If this is not a game, I want to use these fixed-meaning words to replace the graphics of the priests' notes, what do you think?"

A moment of silence.

Afterwards, Avett smiled and said, "I want to live longer, and I also want you to live longer."