This appeal of the exotic and the foreign was mapped onto the material culture of Spain. The arrival of the Spaniards did not simply mark the arrival of book-burning and the Inquisition. The arrival of the Spaniards marked the arrival of new forms of clothing, new forms of architecture that could create cavernous interior spaces of stone, and a new means of writing.(30) The
act of adopting the foreign writing brought by men from beyond the sea is not so different from acquiring a nose ornament from the foreign peoples who lived in the mountains to the north, or from trading cacao with the traders who came from the jungles to the south.
If the use of alphabetic writing to acquire prestige seems rather ephemeral, alphabetic writing was also used in more concrete ways. The alphabet is an amazing technological innovation. Although the imagery of the Mixtec codices allowed the narratives and poetic structures of epic poetry to be preserved for the interpretation of a performer, alphabetic writing is much better at quotation, at transcribing the contours of specific statements. Alphabetic writing (indeed, phonetic scripts in general) can record the spoken word far more accurately than can a pictorial text. It is hard to convey
