MesoAmerican Codices
Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico
Codices of Ancient Mesoamerica I decided to write my paper on the codices that the Mesoamericans who came in contact with the Spaniards wrote on to depict the everyday lives live by many civilizations such as the Maya and Aztecs. However, I will mainly focus on codices from the Aztecs in Mexico. Few preconquest books have survived, though we know that large numbers of them were produced before the coming of the Spaniards. The Mexican people continued to make them for some time after the conquest, picking up more and more European techniques as time went by. Types of pre-Columbian manuscripts or codices include religious books, histories, genealogies, books for determining suitable marriage partners and interpreting dreams, books used in divination and the practice of law, and a wide variety of bureaucratic documents including tribute lists, demographic surveys, and political dossiers. The system of writing was iconographic: it represented ideas by highly stylized pictures. Though some manuscripts employ forms of rebus writing, the iconographic system did not dictate a fixed sequence of words, as does our Roman alphabet, but rather a set of concepts that could be verbally formulated in a number of different ways. In fact, a book of this sort could be read by people who did not speak the language of the original scribe. This must have been particularly useful in the Valley of Mexico where many people speaking many different languages came together.
Aztec codices were less pictorially complex than Mixtec manuscripts, even though the Aztecs had learned bookmaking from the Mixtecs. No original Aztec manuscript has survived that does not show European influence. The Codex Borbonicus is thought to be the only one whose style matches the pre-Conquest Náhuatl style, nevertheless it is considered to be a colonial copy. Aztec codices were burned by the Spaniards for their pagan religious content, and by Aztec kings in an effort to
Codices of Ancient Mesoamerica I decided to write my paper on the codices that the Mesoamericans who came in contact with the Spaniards wrote on to depict the everyday lives live by many civilizations such as the Maya and Aztecs. However, I will mainly focus on codices from the Aztecs in Mexico. Few preconquest books have survived, though we know that large numbers of them were produced before the coming of the Spaniards. The Mexican people continued to make them for some time after the conquest, picking up more and more European techniques as time went by. Types of pre-Columbian manuscripts or codices include religious books, histories, genealogies, books for determining suitable marriage partners and interpreting dreams, books used in divination and the practice of law, and a wide variety of bureaucratic documents including tribute lists, demographic surveys, and political dossiers. The system of writing was iconographic: it represented ideas by highly stylized pictures. Though some manuscripts employ forms of rebus writing, the iconographic system did not dictate a fixed sequence of words, as does our Roman alphabet, but rather a set of concepts that could be verbally formulated in a number of different ways. In fact, a book of this sort could be read by people who did not speak the language of the original scribe. This must have been particularly useful in the Valley of Mexico where many people speaking many different languages came together.
Aztec codices were less pictorially complex than Mixtec manuscripts, even though the Aztecs had learned bookmaking from the Mixtecs. No original Aztec manuscript has survived that does not show European influence. The Codex Borbonicus is thought to be the only one whose style matches the pre-Conquest Náhuatl style, nevertheless it is considered to be a colonial copy. Aztec codices were burned by the Spaniards for their pagan religious content, and by Aztec kings in an effort to