Writing systems are communication technologies that record verbal language by graphic signs. The Sumerians were the first civilization in the world that used a writing system (ca. 3300 BCE), while around 1000 BCE the Olmec seem to have invented the first writing in America. At the arrival of the Spaniards, cultures such as the Mixtec or Nahua used a communication technology that was 2500 years old in Mesoamerica. Each indigenous "literate" society adapted the writing resources to their own language, and as happens in the modern world, a given written text can only be read in a particular language, while there may be languages with more than one writing system.
In addition to the Olmec, several other Native American cultures used writing systems, including Istmeña, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Ñuiñe, Mixtec, Nahuatl, and those who ruled on sites like Cacaxtla, Cotzumalhuapa, Maltrata, Tula, El Tajín, and Xochicalco. The scriptural skills were considered sacred and prerogative to the ruling elites.
The Maya had a logosyllabic system, that is, a combination of graphs representing words (logograms) with others, which only read as meaningless syllables or vowels (syllabograms). The same can be said about the Nahua, who used a similar system for expressing dates, names, and short phrases sporadically. Examples of other logosyllabic scriptures in the world are the Sumerian, Akkadian, Mycenaean (linear B), Hittite, Chinese, and Japanese.
The progress made in understanding the systems of Maya and Nahuatl writings suggest that the rest of the writing systems in Mesoamerica were logosyllabic, which recorded verbal language. The main reason why systems like Teotihuacan or Zapotec cannot be read today as we do with the Maya and Nahua hieroglyphs is because no bilingual text- similar to the Rosetta Stone- has yet been discovered to provide the key.
