Pre-Columbian Literature: The 8 Most Important Features

The Characteristics of pre-Columbian literature Are all those elements that have personified the art of letters in America prior to the arrival of the Spanish.

Pre-Columbian or Mesoamerican literature goes back to the earliest forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, dating from the middle of the first millennium BC.

Pre-Columbian Literature: The 8 Most Important Features

Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, which produced various writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and integrity. Mesoamerican writing systems emerged independently of other writing systems in the world.

Literature and texts created by indigenous Mesoamericans are the first known in the Americas for two reasons.

First, the fact that the native populations of Mesoamerica were the first to enter into intense contact with Europeans, ensuring that many samples of Mesoamerican literature have been documented.

Secondly, the long tradition of pre-Columbian writing that undoubtedly contributed to the native Mesoamerica easily accepted the Latin alphabet of the Spaniards and created many literary works written during the first centuries after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Three main themes of pre-Columbian literature can be identified:

  • Religion, Time and Astronomy: Mesoamerican civilizations shared interest in tracking time by observing celestial bodies and celebrating religious rituals. In particular, true pre-Columbian literature, like the Mayan and Aztec codices, deals with calendrical and astronomical information, as well as rituals related to the passage of time.
  • History, power and legacy: Another great part of the pre-Columbian literature is carved in monumental structures like stelas, altars and temples. This type of literature usually documents power and heritage, remembering victories, ascending to the government, dedications of monuments or marriages between royal lineages.
  • Mythical and fictitious genres: Mainly present in the post-Conquest versions, but often based on oral or pictorial traditions, mythical and narrative literature of Mesoamerica is very rich.

Although the concept of literature came from the colonizing powers of the American continent, there are now works that can be understood as part of a set that would be pre-Columbian literature.

Many consider the classification of Precolumbian literature As a generalist, since many of the indigenous cultures were stapled, while others maintained a writing system by means of logograms.

More generally, indigenous cultures are very different from each other and although they have common characteristics, divergences can separate them and cause them to face each other irreconcilably.

Others, however, understand as a historical necessity to group pre-Columbian cultures and their artistic creations into a definition, within which is literature.

9 characteristics to understand pre-Columbian literature

1- Conception of writing

At present, most languages ​​(including indigenous languages) are written by means of an alphabet, assigning sounds to each letter.

The allocation of an alphabet to indigenous languages ​​is recent. However, in pre-Columbian times civilizations such as Maya They had a wide writing system, made up of logograms through a syllabary that they plastered on walls.

The Incas , For their part, did not have a similar system. Although there is no consensus, the researchers consider that the way in which they left register was through quipu, which were a series of small strings with which could be obtained more than eight million combinations.

2- Further Registration

The records that we know today and that are studied as works of pre-Columbian literature were obtained thanks to subsequent registrations carried out mainly by priests and members of the Catholic Church.

Most of these clergymen worked with native natives who functioned as translators. For example, in the case of Popol Vuh , Was transcribed by Friar Francisco Jiménez in the seventeenth century.

However, the Maya codices are originally written by them, because they had already discovered the paper.

The work of researchers in this case has been to determine the meaning of the content of the same.

3- Influence of religion

Most of the transcribed texts that today stand as the most famous of pre-Columbian literature tell religious stories, emphasizing indigenous deities and legends of creation of the world and of men.

The magical and spiritual has great influence in this literature.

4- Role of war

Physical strength was another characteristic of the life of pre-Columbian cultures.

Men in these civilizations tended to engage in war, which was frequent because of the problems that arose among various groups or even of an internal character.

Some of the pre-Columbian literary works show stories of warriors, conquests and military victories, to exalt the work done by the troops.

5- Record of astronomical and astrological results

Pre-Columbian civilizations had vast knowledge of the stars and their influence on Earth, especially in relation to agriculture and the sea.

In this way, they developed lunar and solar calendars and created clocks and different mechanisms of time measurement.

This type of conclusions were also recorded in works that were later written by the natives or later transcribed by the colonizers.

6- Shortage of well-known works

In the first instance, several indigenous groups decided to hide their works before the Spanish colonizers, thus losing much of the cultural heritage recorded at the time.

However, the clerics set themselves the task of investigating the Indians to the full, so that the beliefs and experiences of the natives quickly began to settle, without this implying precisely the creation of a literary work.

The problem arose when the evangelization and catechization of the Indians were imposed. The imposition of Christianity on the Aborigines made it impossible to maintain beliefs.

Consequently, as the generations died, all the potential literary content was reduced to a few copies that usually identify the cultures to which they belong and which today are preserved with suspicion.

7- Presence of poetry

Within pre-Columbian literature, poetry broke out with great force. The records are very scarce because they were information transmitted by oral tradition, but over time could be collected.

One of the civilizations with more poetic tradition was the Inca. Pre-Columbian poetry exalted the different pillars that supported the different indigenous civilizations.

Many poems were dedicated to warriors, gods, seasons of the year, among many other reasons. They could be grouped in the form of songs to be intoned to the deities.

To a lesser extent, there were personal reflections and analysis of the inner being. The poetry was manifested in public, either in the form of singing or declamation in different acts in which the indigenous society came alive.

8- Use of mnemonics

When there are human social groups that have not developed the ability to translate their ideas into something imperishable that does not need to be constantly remembered, mnemotechnology is often used as a way to endure in time.

Mnemonics are techniques of memorization based on the association of different mental ideas.

In the case of the Indians, especially those belonging to the people of the archipelago, the use of these techniques was institutionalized, so they used to make structures that rhymed or were easy to remember. It had great influence in the perduring of the poetry.

References

  1. [Links] Precolumbian poetry . Caracas: Editorial Foundation The Dog and the Frog.
  2. DonQuijote (s.f.). The Pre-Columbian Literature: the Popol Vuh. Don Quixote . Retrieved from donquijote.org.
  3. Editorial Santillana. (2008). Language and Communication 1 . Caracas: Editorial Santillana.
  4. Editorial Santillana. (2008). Language and Communication 2 . Caracas: Editorial Santillana.
  5. Net (s.f.). Pre-Columbian literature and its historical context. Home . Recovered from escolar.net.
  6. Peña, R. and Yépez, L. (2006). Language and literature . Caracas: Distribuidora Escolar.
  7. Yépez, A. (2011). Universal history . Cambridge: Oxford University Press.


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