Amos Megged From Pictoriality to Alphabetization: Comments on the Evolution of Nahua Visual Memory, 1570 to 1740 1. Mesoamerican Writing Systems Pre-Columbian Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya books were fig-bark (amatl) screen-folds of paintings, visual texts painted on deer skins, and lienzos  large-size cotton cloth that were still being used in Mesoamerican towns in the late 19th century. Among the Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya societies such histories were scattered in different and dis- tinct forms of records, complementary to each other. Local rulers, their nobility, and the professional classes usually relied on distinct pictographic fragments of past epi- sodes, related to specific operations and acts such as annexations and successions to a throne, recurring rivalries, droughts, and migrations. In the pre-Columbian and early colonial period, pictography was also used by priests and conjurors to obtain impor- tant information regarding fate, and rituals, and the prognosis of events. Visual infor- mation was used to elicit formulas for ritual reenactments. The 260-day calendar and sequence of the veintenas were the tools used for these purposes. In his classic work, La escritura del idioma nahuatl a travØs de los siglos (MØxico: Editorial Cultura, 1948), Ignacio DÆvila Garibai noted that phonetic elements in a rebus were employed in the Nahuatl to represent names of persons and places. Two or more signs could be combined to make a name based on sound, e.g., Coatlan (= coatl, snake; tlantli, teeth). By 1560 these were transliterated into Roman characters (Croft 1950). One of the best examples of hybridized, combined use of pictorial and an al- phabetic text during that time was the Cdice Cozcatzin (1572). The codex retains the entire stock of Nahua pictograms (representations of objects and actions) depicting native insignia, land parcels, and households, ideograms (qualities, attributes, or con- cepts associated with the object depicted), and pictograms indicating toponyms  side by side with their Latin letters, Arabic numbers and the text in Spanish. The transition from the traditional pre-contact systems of writing and recording to an alphabetical means of communication undoubtedly played a major role in the trans- formations of the native society in Mesoamerica under Spanish colonial rule and Christianization. Part of this process can be attributed to the extirpation carried out by the Church to eradicate all remnants of what they considered idolatrous (Ragon 1988). During the first half of the 16th century, the use of Spanish was generally confined to the Nahua area, where Spanish first and second names were adopted, and neolo-