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ANCIENT CENTRAL AMERICA AND MEXICO 127 The greater part of the codices is devoted to divinations, rituals and astrology; a few are concerned primarily with genealogies and sequences of political events, being in fact a kind of history.
The pre-Columbian codices have been mainly written by the native priests, amongst whose duties was that of keeping written records of the ceremonies appropriate for the various religious festivals, of tributes due to the king and the temples, of legal trials, of historical events, and so forth. The post-Conquest manuscripts deal with historical and religious matters, for instance, with Catholic catechism (Fig. 64, 2 and 65, 1).
The manuscripts have been partly deciphered; many of the deities have been identified, the personal and place names can be read, some of
Fig 64 1. The migrations of the Aztecs, as represented in native manuscripts. 2, The Ten Commandments in Aztec
post-Conquest manuscripts
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the ceremonies are understood, but we are still far from complete victory: in many cases, the decipherment is a more or less acceptable guess which cannot be either proved or disproved.
Astec Script
The "Aztee" writing is highly pictographie; indeed, it is the most highly pictographic of all the transitional scripts. Practically, all the symbols are crude pictures. There are numerous instances of pure ideographic writing (Fig. 65, 4); the effort of the scribes is directed rather to the idea than to the sound. In this regard, the script is more in the nature of mnemonic aids to be supplemented by oral description than of a true writing,
