As part of the Spanish incorporation of indigenous into the colonial system, the friars taught indigenous scribes to write their languages in Latin letters so that there are huge corpus of colonial-era documentation in the Nahuatl language, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Yucatec Maya as well as others. Such a written tradition likely took hold because there was an existing tradition of pictorial writing found in many indigenous codices. Scholars have utilized the colonial-era alphabetic documentation in what is currently called the New Philology to illuminate the colonial experience of Mesoamerican peoples from their own viewpoints.