No text, but a visual code

[Antonio García Jiménez]

One of the biggest difficulties encountered by those who think that the VM script is a language, that is, a sound system, is the large number of characters that we see in the script. Except for the 20 or 30 most frequent, there are more than a hundred rare characters. How can this be explained? We may think that when writing by hand there are variations, but there seem to be too many for that to be a correct explanation.

There are glyphs that are very illustrative that we are dealing with a system of graphic representation rather than sounds. For example, those gallows whose only leg rests on the glyph [c], or the benched gallows that have another [c] inserted in the middle. Not to mention the gallows with their legs separated by several glyphs in the middle and resting on benches.

For me all this is an attempt to represent the movement and positions of the sun and the moon on the sphere as they travel through the ecliptic. This game between the sun and the moon has been brought to a notation system using pictograms that, as there are several scribes, allows for differences in interpretation. Hence the number of symbols is so large.