Narrative, Writing, and the Teotihuacan Language: Exploring Language History Through Phylogenetics, Epigraphy and Iconography

Project Information

NaWaTL

Grant agreement ID: 840033

DOI

10.3030/840033

Project closed

EC signature date 11 April 2019

Start date 1 June 2020

End date 31 January 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 219 312,00

EU contribution

€ 219 312,00

Coordinated by

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NaWaTL (Narrative, Writing, and the Teotihuacan Language: Exploring Language History Through Phylogenetics, Epigraphy and Iconography)

Reporting period: 2020-06-01 to 2022-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ancient city of Teotihuacan remains one of the major mysteries in the study of the Mesoamerican classic period, and as the country’s most visited tourist destination it looms large as an emblem of Mexican history.

We know little of the people who inhabited this ancient metropolis which flourished from approximately 150-500 CE. They had a writing system, but scholars have been unable to begin deciphering it, because we have not identified the likely language spoken by the Teotihuacano people. Many have suggested that an early form of the Nahuatl language, the language spoken by the Aztecs 1000 years after the fall of Teotihuacan as a potential candidate. But because we have not had enough knowledge of the early history of Nahuatl to be able to say whether they were present in the Valley of Mexico during the heyday of Teotihuacan. This was the question which the NaWaTL project, sought to answer: When and from where did the linguistic forebears of the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs arrive in Central Mexico, and might they have had a role in the development of the metropolis of Teotihuacan?

The study combines linguistic dialectology (the study of the geographical distribution of variant linguistic forms) with epigraphy (the study of ancient writing systems), to come closer to knowledge about the language spoken by the ancient people of Teotihuacan.

The objectives of the project were:
1. To create a digital database of Nahuan languages (all the languages that are closely related to Nahuatl), which can be used for studying the historical relations between the different Nahuan varieites and how they dispersed throughout Mexico and Mesoamerica. By analyzing the patterns of the distributions of the different varieties, we could find clues about when Nahuas arrived in Central Mexico, and whether they could have been present at Teotihuacan.
2. To study the writing system of Teotihuacan to look for clues that might point at a possible candidate language, and which might support or contradict the possibility of the Teotihuacan language being related to Nahuatl or not.
3. To combine the results from the linguistic analysis of Nahuan dialect distribution with the results from the epigraphic analysis of Teotihuacan writing, to give an overall evaluation of the likelihood that Teotihuacan writing represents an early or ancestral form of Nahuatl.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

• Pharao Hansen built a database of Nahuan dialectological data, combining data from the survey by Lastra (1986) which was extended with additional data from communities outside Lastra’s sample. This database will be presented in a public talk at the UNAM in April 2024, will be published online later I the spring.
• Pharao Hansen reconstructed Nahuan phonological history revising the previous model by Dakin, this demonstrated that the historical center of gravity of the Nahuan language family is in the basin of Mexico, close to Teotihuacan – it is probable that this is where Nahuatl originates. The resulting paper “What Happened When? Relative Chronology and the state of pre-Nahuan in the Classic Period” was presented at the symposium on »Relative chronology in historical linguistics« in Copenhagen june 29.–30. 2023. It has been submitted for publication in an edited volume edited by Thomas Olander and Florian Wandl, which is under review by Lang Sci Press.
• Pharao Hansen reconstructed phonology and vocabulary shared between Nahuan and Coracholan languages to understand what Nahuan must have been like before the proto-Nahuatl stage. This work resulted in the article “Sapir's Law and the Role Of Accent in the Reconstruction of Proto-Corachol-Nahuan” which has been accepted for publication in International Journal of American Linguistics, scheduled to appear in April 2024.
• Pharao Hansen reconstructed words for star and other words related to the word xolotl in proto- and Pre-Nahua. This work was written into the chapter “Xolotl and Uto-Aztecan Stellar Twins: A Comparative Analysis of the history of the word(s) Xolotl” submitted for an edited volume on the Codex Xolotl, scheduled for publication in 2025.
• Pharao Hansen and Helmke worked on a catalog of Teotihuacan glyphs, which came to be the foundation for a breakthrough, that resulted in the article “The Language of Teotihuacan Writing”, which was accepted for publication in Current Anthropology in January 2024 (scheduled publication 2025). The catalog is included as a supplementary material to the article.
• Pharao Hansen published two blog posts for the general publics about the work on deciphering Teotihuacan writing: 1. “Warlord/Owl - a Uto-Aztecan pun?” https://nahuatlstudies.blogspot.com/2022/03/warlordowl-uto-aztecan-pun.html; 2.“Ears of Nopal: Reading the name of a Teotihuacán Fertility Goddess”, https://nahuatlstudies.blogspot.com/2021/02/
• November 2021 Pharao Hansen completed a two-day course on the use of R for statistical analysis in the humanities.
• December 2022, Pharao Hansen gave an invited talk at the Seminario de Lenguas de Veracruz at the Universidad Veracruzana on the topic of “El desarrollo del Sistema de casos yuto-nahuas en corachol y nahua”.
• In October 2023, Pharao Hansen visited Dr. Johann-Mattis List at the University of Passau to learn how to use the language annotation and analysis software EDICTOR and the CLDF data format for historical linguistics and language phylogenetics.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The main result of the project has been a decipherment proposal of Teotihuacan writing, which 1. proposes a candidate language, 2. proposes phonetic readings of 17 different signs in the Teotihuacan script in the language, 3. describes the way Teotihuacan writing works, and 4. lays out a path for advancing the decipherment towards an eventual full decipherment of the writing system. Each of these four points constitute a major advance from the state of the art, and while not final or a definitive decipherment, it constitutes a highly significant advance in the decipherment of Mesoamerican writing systems. This result is well beyond what we planned, expected or even hoped to achieve. Being published in Current Anthropology where it will be accompanied by essays by other experts reacting to it, it is likely to have an immediate impact on the field, and on how future scholars approach the study of Teotihuacan.

When published, this result will be diffused in two main ways: A. By organizing workshops in which we teach the principles of Teotihuacan writing, in order to demonstrate the validity of our methods, data and proposals, and make our results known to a wider field of practitioners working with Ancient Mesoamerica. B. By participating in media coverage and news outlet, describing the results to the public in general.

The result has already been exploited, as Pharao Hansen has successfully applied for an ERC starting grant, the SUAHIST Project (Grant # 101116662, starting in February 2024) which builds on the results of this project and seeks to reevaluate the role of speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages in the development of Mesoamerica in from the classic period onward.

Drawing of Tetitla mural at Teotihuacan by Christophe Helmke