Mesoamerican Manuscripts

Princeton's holds an open collection of pre-Columbian and Colonial manuscripts, documents, and artifacts, dating from the 7th to the 19th century. Contents include land documents, a manuscript copy of Nahuatl play concerning the Wednesday of Holy Week, incised bone with Maya glyphs, leather maps with glyphs, Zapotec text on bone, Maya funerary vessels, and an Inca quipu. Texts are written in Latin script or Maya hieroglyphics. Languages represented include Zapotec, Yucatec, Nahuatl, and Chinanteco. Several of the manuscripts also include Spanish and/or Latin text.

2. Quipu, [before 1600].

Abstract:
The only known form of pre-Columbian "writing" in South America is the Incan quipu. Incan clerks, known as quipucamayo, were trained to record and translate these quipus as "memoranda or registers made from strands of cord, in which different knots and colors signify different things. It is incredible what they have comprehended in this way, for what books can say of histories, laws, ceremonies, and business accounts... is provided very precisely by the quipu," wrote a Spanish colonial observer. This 51-strand quipu is typical of surviving examples, which date from the 13th and 16th centuries.
View in catalog:
https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/9939284593506421