Painted Mixtec and Aztec manuscripts, like all writing systems, were permanent and readable, which meant that they were used to establish ideas, document facts, and present accountability.
Europeans recognized the painted records's function to the extent that those drafted for leaders were valid in legal proceedings. However, the Europeans were ambivalent about is as it really didn't conform to the European idea of writing. For example, Acosta ranks Aztec writing and Inca knot records just below Chinese ideograms. The ambivalence continues to this day with the classification of Aztec writing as pictography.
Ignace Gello defines writing as a "system of human intercommunication by means of conventional, visible marks". But pictography is placed as a "forerunner of writing" in the evolution of writing, leading to alphabetized and phonetically representative visual communication systems. It helps to remember that writing is a cultural construct that has been used to distinguish literates from pre-literates, people with history from those without, and civilized people from barbarians or primitives. Now, the working definition of writing is given by Sampson as the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks.
