This book is a long-awaited treatise on the Aztec hieroglyphic script as writing sensu stricto; that is, a system developed for recording a natural language (Classical Nahuatl). It is written by Gordon Whittaker, one of the leading experts in the field, and is richly illustrated. I enjoyed many of the observations and interpretations he suggests and agree with some wholeheartedly. It includes a chapter on Teotihuacan writing.

Aztec hieroglyphic writing was deciphered by Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin in his book Mémoires sur la peinture didactique et l’écriture figurative des anciens Mexicains (1849), an unrivaled masterpiece that should be translated into English. Aubin offered at least 134 correct phonetic readings and a thorough analysis of two documents: Mapa Quinatzin and Mapa Tlotzin. His work was possible because of abundant glosses in Roman script in both Nahuatl and Spanish and the fact that both the general context and language were well documented in sixteenth-century works. Aztec hieroglyphs were mislabeled as nonwriting, semasiography, and pictographies in the twentieth century and consequently have not been incorporated into the modern theory of writing. This is unfortunate because it is one of two phonetically deciphered systems in the Americas and is quite remarkable typologically; it is unique among logosyllabic scripts with the predominant reading order from the bottom up (cf. Ogham).

We frequently know from glosses how glyphs are read aloud. However, there remains a great deal of disagreement among scholars on how and which reading values can be assigned to signs (a transliteration level of analysis) and how they are transformed into speech (a transcription level). This is exactly what Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs is about. This is an urgent task because (1) the system possesses many hundreds of signs, (2) a number of manuscripts do not include glosses, and (3) several neighboring scripts of Central Mexico remain undeciphered.

Two innovative concepts, not stated explicitly, constitute the book's theoretical framework. First, Whittaker does not consider reading values to have been intrinsically assigned to signs in the system; he claims instead that they were created by a resourceful and playful scribe during the process of writing. Consequently, every attestation of a sign should be deciphered by itself. Second, there are no sign classes (phonetic syllables and word-signs) but there are sign functions: any sign can be read as a syllable, a word stem, a grammatical form of the word depicted by the sign, and so on. This is why the author does not define the system as logosyllabic; only names appear to be written syllabically, logosyllabically, and logographically. This is also why the book does not contain any sign-lists apart from basic numerals and day signs, illustrated by examples from Codex Magliabechiano (p. 59), which is a surprising choice because phonetic readings are absent in it; thus, it is impossible to prove that its language is Nahuatl and not any other one from Central Mexico. The descriptive model proposed can be applied to other systems, such as Maya Script and Linear B, and it has its advantages in locating context-dependent realizations and reading values of polyvalent signs (see Polis and Rosmorduc's “The Hieroglyphic Sign Functions,” 2015). The polyvalency of Aztec signs is somewhat exaggerated because the author does not always consider minor graphic variations. However, epigraphy is a predictive science, so we desire strict rules and closed sets of signs, which are essential for the communicants to encode and decode interchanged messages in the target language.

The book's title is slightly misleading: (1) the few reading values presented are not known from the works by Aubin and other scholars, and (2) Whittaker's methods of decipherment are not explained. It is not always clear how probable or well proven he considers his own interpretations to be or why he discards others. One example (p. 32) is the hieroglyphic spelling of an “Eagle” CUAUH devouring a snake on a “Prickly Pear” NOCH growing on a “Stone” TE, read both from bottom up as TE-NOCH, Tenochtitlan, and from top down as CUAUH-NOCH, Cuauhnochtitlan. Standard epigraphic procedure would have been to posit the logographic value TENOCHTITLAN for “Eagle Devouring a Snake on a Prickly Pear” and to treat the sign “Stone” as a phonetic indicator (te), hence TENOCHTITLAN, because (1) the complex sign refers iconographically to the mythical foundation of the city, and (2) the “Stone” sign te is absent in several examples. This alternative and more economical analysis is not discussed, but I consider it a better solution. The lack of glosses in figures and references to dictionary entries do not allow the proper evaluation of the author's proposals; for example, a “Double-feathered Device” is interpreted as temalli, “badge of honor” (p. 76), where dictionaries provide only “pus, infection” (https://gdn.iib.unam.mx/). The reading might have instead been derived from te-māl “someone's/personal captive” or māl-li “captive.”

I am happy to see the Nahuatl language being taken seriously. The decision to not differentiate long, short, and glottalized vowels in transcriptions is understandable because they are not often easy to determine. However, the underrepresentation of long consonants is unacceptable. I give one example (p. 146). Mēxihco is interpreted as “in the navel of the Moon.” It is hard to see how this can mean “in the center of Lake Texcoco.” More importantly, the morphological analysis of mētz-xic-co suggests the unattested spellings <mexicco>, <mexxico>, and <metzxico>. The author could propose that the discrepancies are due to interdialectal borrowings, but he does not, leaving the reader frustrated. I prefer to consider Mēxihco and Tenoch as loanwords from an unknown language as long as these and similar questions remain unanswered.

That the book exoticizes Aztec hieroglyphic writing is understandable and not heuristically bad. However, the author is sometimes negligent in acknowledging the work of others, and he also incorporates unpublished proposals (p. 11). Eduard Seler, who recognized phonetic spellings in Humboldt VIII, and other prominent authors such as José María Arreola, Manuel Orozco y Berra, Marc Thouvenot, and Robert Hayward Barlow do not appear in the bibliography. This is unfortunate because any evaluation of proposals requires a consideration of original arguments.

The book is an important contribution because it introduces Aztec hieroglyphic writing to a broader audience. However, as a professional, I would have liked to have seen greater transparency about Whittaker's methods and arguments. I would also have expected to find in a book on Aztec writing more discussion of how messages were constructed in the script and what social functions were accomplished by Aztec hieroglyphic documents.