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Originally Posted by Ayatollahgondola
I'm sure they are very thankful for those things the Europeans brought, because the lack of them was their biggest problem at the time.
As far as I know, they did have a written language, albeit symbols. But then again, most written languages are symbols. What concepts, thoughts and ideas they had were conveyed by a whole lot less symbols than what it generally takes us to do the same thing today. I write alot obviously, and I think highly of the written word, but after having been exposed to numerous lawsuits, pages and sentences which I had to read numerous times in an attempt to grasp, I can't help but wonder if we haven't been led astray by concentration on every last, minute detail and trying to express it with a zillion words.
Take McCain, Obama, Nightingale, etc... We spend hours and pages writing down all the intricate details of our thoughts on their actions, words, and speeches. In contrast, the Mayans probably had one single symbol that stood for lying, cheating, back-stabbing, gutter crawling fraud who cannot be trusted  |
Excellent observations. Yes, the written language was well developed among native Central Americans. As was art and architecture. They were missing a lot of basic things like, of all things, the wheel. It has been speculated that the reason they had no wheel was because they had no draft animals like the horse or oxen. They just had llamas, which are not serious load haulers. They are great pack animals, but can't carry as much as a mule, for example.
It is not hard to imagine that given time, the written languages of Central America might have evolved into something like the Chinese written language, which is also symbolically based, rather than phonetically based like our own. We can also speculate that most cultures go through a period in which they practice slavery and human sacrifice, two institutions that have been early rejected by cultures in Europe. Although the degenerate Romans practiced something similar with the gladiators and similar blood spectacles in their arenas.