Codices

Codices, a term that is applied to diverse native-style documents produced in the pre-Hispanic and early colonial period by the indigenous peoples of central Mexico, the Mixtecs of southern Mexico, and the Maya of Yucatán. Earlier examples have been discovered, but were too fragile to survive excavation. Most postclassic native books were destroyed by the Spanish, and the extant corpus probably represents a small fraction of the total number produced in the New World.

These documents are mistakenly called codices, although none of the pre-Hispanic books is actually a volume bound on one side of the page. Instead, they are screenfold manuscripts (amoxtli in Náhuatl, tutu in Mixtec, and vuh in Maya) that were painted on strips of animal hide in the highlands and on native paper among the Maya. The strips were cut to the same width, sewn or glued together, and folded in accordion pleats into pages. Pigments were derived from mineral and vegetable sources. Some examples are painted on only one side. When both sides are painted, one side is designated as the obverse and the other as the reverse. Several have protective covers.

The manuscripts have no consistent starting point. Some are read from right to left, some from left to right, and some from the bottom to the top of the page. Genealogical manuscripts are usually read one page at a time, while divinatory information frequently stretches across two or more pages. Red or black guidelines divide sections and subjects or establish a meandering reading pattern.

Information is conveyed through conventionalized pictures that illustrate actions, gestures, and rituals; figures of speech; and complex linguistic puns in the indigenous language of a manuscript's patron. Pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic signs may be used in a single document. In Mexican examples, pictorial forms indicate basic outlines of a story or ritual, and the pre-Hispanic reader drew from his or her store of knowledge for details. The Mayan manuscripts also employ extensive hieroglyphic inscriptions. Europeans sometimes added glosses to identify ceremonies or the name of an owner, but frequently these glosses have no relationship to the pre-Hispanic pictorial information.

The codices are an elite art describing dynastic histories of rulers and records of ritual, calendrical, and divinatory matters. Genealogical manuscripts may have been recited to affirm or assert claims of dynasties to territories, while ritual and divinatory manuscripts may have been consulted on less public occasions for their guidance. In the decades soon after contact, the manuscripts were sent to Europe, presumably as curios to inform various sacred and secular authorities about native books. Their exact New World provenances are generally unknown, and they are named for the collections and libraries in which they have been deposited, or for the family or individuals who owned or made them known to the public.

Written in Náhuatl, Spanish, and Latin, well-known Aztec codices include the Codex Borbonicus, treating pre-Conquest and Conquest era calendars, rituals and ceremonies; the Codex Mendoza (1541), with dynastic histories, tributes, and records of quotidian Aztec life; the Florentine Codex, supervised by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún during the later years of the sixteenth century, consisting of twelve books, with Book Twelve chronicling first contact with the Spanish; and the Aubin Codex, narrating the mythical Aztec migration from Aztlán, the arrival in the Valley of Mexico, and subsequent history to the early Conquest period. The Boturini Codex, Codex Cozcatzin, Codex Ixtlixochitl, Codex Magliabechiano, and Codex Osuna are also of interest to scholars of Aztec culture.

The Borgia Group manuscripts, named for one member of the group, Codex Borgia, also include Codices Vaticanus 3773, Laud, Fejéváry-Mayer, and Cospi. All are concerned with ritual and divinatory matters, including the 260-day ritual calendar, the dispensations of repeating cycles of twenty- and thirteen-day periods, prognostications for auspicious and inauspicious days for traveling, auguries for marriage, and predictions about years with good and lean harvests. They may be deciphered to some extent through information in central Mexican chronicles. Nevertheless, they are not a unified group in style or emphasis. Various provenances have been suggested, but a Mixteca-Puebla origin may be correct for some of them.

The Mixtec manuscripts include Codices Selden 3135 (A.2), Bodley 2858, Colombino-Becker I (two fragments of a single document), Becker II, Sánchez-Solís, and Vindobonensis Mexicanus I. These six are concerned primarily with dynastic histories that describe the marriages, offspring, wars, and occasionally the deaths, of rulers of small city-states in southern Mexico. Codex Vindobonensis is a ritual manuscript that describes the beginning of the world, the first performances of rituals, and the establishment of Mixtec territories.

Only four Mayan manuscripts survived the Conquest: the Codices Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and Grolier (the last of which came to light only in 1971). Mayan manuscripts are concerned with ritual and astronomical matters, including tables of the movements of the planet Venus, eclipses, the 260-day count, rituals concerned with rain, agriculture, and prophecies for individual years and larger cycles of time.

See alsoMaya, The; Mayan Alphabet and Orthography; Nahuatl.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Most of the manuscripts have been published in photographic facsimiles with accompanying commentaries by the Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt of Graz, Austria. See also Karl Anton Nowotny, Tlacuilolli (1961); Mary Elizabeth Smith, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico (1973); John Glass, "A Survey of Native Middle American Pictorial Documents," in Handbook of Middle American Indians 14 (1975): 3-80; John Glass in collaboration with Donald Robertson, "A Census of Native Middle American Pictorical Manuscripts," in Handbook of Middle American Indians 14 (1975): 81-252; Thomas A. Lee, Jr., Los Códices Mayas (1985).

Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and the Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Lockhart, James, ed. We People Here: Náhuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. 2d ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

                              Jill Leslie McKeever-Furst