The Aztecs had proto-writing, which is to say that they couldn't write down a complete Nahuatl sentence, but they generally could identify proper nouns and action verbs. For example, you could describe an event such as "we attacked Texcoco, and defeated them, and forced them to give us tribute" with a glyph for your city, a glyph for an attack, a glyph for Texcoco, and a glyph for tribute, with orientation indication who attacked whom and who gave whom tribute. The Indus Valley script and the Quechua quipu are other examples of proto-writing, although the exact extent of what they recorded is under very vigorous dispute.