Zapotec script

The Zapotec script is the writing system of the Zapotec culture and represents one of the earliest writing systems in Mesoamerica. Rising in the late Pre-Classic era after the decline of the Olmec civilization, the Zapotecs of present-day Oaxaca built an empire around Monte Albán. One characteristic of Monte Albán is the large number of carved stone monuments one encounters throughout the plaza. There and at other sites, archaeologists have found extended text in a glyphic script. Some signs can be recognized as calendar information but the script as such remains undeciphered (if not undecipherable). Read in columns from top to bottom, its execution is somewhat cruder than that of the later Maya script and this has led epigraphers to believe that the script was also less phonetic than the largely syllabic Maya. According to Urcid (2005), the script was originally a logo-syllabic system and was probably developed for an ancient version of contemporary Zapotecan languages, but its application to language varieties other than "Ancient Zapotec" encouraged the development of logophonic traits. For some time, San Jose Mogote monument 3 (see below) has been considered among the earliest evidence for writing in Mesoamerica, roughly contemporary with La Venta Monument 13, and only slightly later than the San Andres glyphs (both representing possible Olmec writing), but well before Epi-Olmec (Isthmian) script. However, [t]he early evidence of writing in Oaxaca does not necessarily imply that the Zapotecs invented the first Mesoamerican system of phonetic writing. The nature of the archaeological record generates differential preservation of the media through which writing was probably conveyed, and since it is plausible that early scribes used as well perishable materials like wood, cloth, bark paper, and deer hides, several aspects of the origin of writing and its early societal uses in Oaxaca and in Mesoamerica in general may lay beyond our reach.