Mesoamerican codices


Mesoamerican codices are manuscripts that present traits of the Mesoamerican indigenous pictoric tradition, either in content, style, or in regards to their symbolic conventions. The unambiguous presence of Mesoamerican writing systems in some of these documents is also an important, but not defining, characteristic, for Mesoamerican codices can comprise pure pictorials, native cartographies with no traces of glyphs on them, or colonial alphabetic texts with indigenous illustrations. Perhaps the best-known examples among such documents are Aztec codices, Maya codices, and Mixtec codices, but other cultures such as the Tlaxcaltec, the Purépecha, the Otomi, the Zapotecs, and the Cuicatecs, are creators of equally relevant manuscripts. The destruction of Mesoamerican civilizations resulted in only about twenty known pre-Columbian codices surviving to modern times.

Formats

During the 19th century, the word 'codex' became popular to designate any pictorial manuscript in the Mesoamerican tradition. In reality, pre-Columbian manuscripts are, strictly speaking, not codices, since the strict librarian usage of the word denotes manuscript books made of vellum, papyrus and other materials besides paper, that have been sewn on one side. Instead, precolumbian pictorials were made in native, non-codical formats, some of these being the following:
  • Tira A manuscript painted or drawn on a long and more or less narrow strip composed of sheets of animal hide or paper. This is the most important format, for many of the rest derive of it. A well known example is the Codex Boturini.
  • Screenfold A tira folded into a folding book manuscript. A classic example is the Codex Borgia.
  • Roll A tira that has been rolled. An example is the Selden Roll.
  • Lienzo A sheet of cloth, sometimes of grand format. The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan is a notable example.

    Classification

According to Donald Robertson and John B. Glass, the first scholars to propose a comprehensive census of such documents, five categories can be discerned among them. The first is that of traditional pictorials, comprising numbers 1-599 in their catalog. The second is that of paintings and maps from the Relaciones Geográficas, a set of questionnaires elaborated by the colonial bureaucracy of the Spanish Empire during the reign of Phillip II. The third category is that of Techialoyan manuscripts, a number of late colonial manuscripts created during the 17th century with the intention to serve as legal documents for indigenous communities, which display a noticeable similarity in style and format, as well as sharing a regional origin. The fourth category is that of pictorial cathecisms, also known as Testerian cathecisms. The fifth category is that of falsified pictorials. Finally, the category of nonpictorial texts which describe pictorials is contemplated, but not used, by Robertson and Glass, but examples of such documents exist too.
Besides this primary classification, these documents can be further classified according to their origin, their region, and subject, Thus, in regards to their origin, manuscripts can be distinguished as pre-Columbian, those produced under Spanish patronage, native colonial, and mixed colonial. In regards to their topic, these documents can be classified as dealing with the following topics: ritual-calendrical, historical, genealogical, cartographic, cartographic-historical, economic, ethnographic, and miscellaneous.
These manuscripts can comprise many regions: Western Mexico, Central Mexico, Oaxaca, Southeast Mexico and Guatemala. Regional schools have been identified: the classic division in the Central Mexican region was proposed by Donald Robertson, who distinguished among them the schools of Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco and Tezcoco.

Traditional Mesoamerican codices

This category comprises most pre-Columbian and colonial Mesoamerican pictorials, and is by far the best-known and studied. Individual manuscripts in this category are numerous, totalling 434 in Robertson and Glass original census, and their number keeps increasing thanks to the discovery of new native traditional codices in Mexican villages. An example of a recent addition would be the Codex Cuaxicala, a pictorial document from the 16th century currently kept by the homonymous community of Huachinango, Puebla. A list of the most representative manuscripts from this category would be the following:
Within these categories, some sub-groupings of codices that are closely related in subject or that share a common prototype exist. Among the most famous are the following:
  • Borgia group: This well-known group comprises Codex Borgia, Codex Cospi, Codex Féjérvari-Mayer, Codex Laud and Codex Vaticanus B,
  • Huitzilopochtli group: This grouping establishes the relationship between Codex Telleriano Remensis and Rios.
  • Lienzo de Tlaxcala group: This group comprises all versions of the pictorial account of the Spanish Conquest in the point of view of the Tlaxcaltec, collectively known as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. It is composed by three originals, all unknown nowadays, and 11 copies, many incomplete.
  • Maya screenfolds: The Dresden Codex, Codex Madrid, Codex Paris and the Maya Codex of Mexico
  • Magliabechiano group: This group has been studied in depth by José Batalla Rosado. Pictorials belonging to it are the Codex Tudela, Libro de Figuras, Códice Ritos y Costumbres, Codex Magliabechiano, Codex Ixtlilxochitl I, Codex Veytia and some images from the Décadas of Antonio de Herrera. Non pictorial accounts in this group include: Códice Fiestas, Códice Cabezón and the Chronicle of New Spain of Salazar.
  • Nutall group: Codex Colombino, Codex Bodley, Codex Nuttall, Codex Selden anc Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I.
  • Sahagun drawings: Primeros Memoriales and Florentine Codex.

    Paintings from the ''Relaciones Geográficas''

This group comprises all the paintings and illustrations from the Relaciones Geográficas, a series of documents produced as a result of questionnaires distributed to the territories under the jurisdiction of Phillip the Second, King of Spain, during the years 1579–1585. Besides their invaluable ethnohistorical, ethnological and geographical data, the Relaciones often includes a series of paintings and maps, some considered to display elements of the native cartographical tradition.

Techialoyan manuscripts

The Techialoyan manuscripts is a group of indigenous Mexican manuscripts named after the Codex of San Antonio Techialoyan. These documents were produced during the 18th century, and reveal a set of common elements, including the use of amate paper, the presence of Nahuatl alphabetic glosses, their artistic style, their legal purpose and the fact that they were created in a number of villages in and around the State and the valley of Mexico. They were first classified by Robert Barlow. Some of them were produced by local indigenous artists in order to be recognized as legal documents for the colonial Spanish administration, but were deemed as forgeries. A foremost example of this class is the Codex García Granados.

Pictorial cathecisms

Pictorial cathecisms, also known as Testerian manuscripts, are documents containing prayers, articles of faith, or any part of the Catholic cathecism, either drawn or written through mnemonic images or ad-hoc hieroglyphs. They are called "Testerian" because they were once taught to be an invention of the Franciscan friar Jacobo de Testera; however, most documents of this tradition are unrelated to Testera, who was not even the first friar to use them. For this reason, some scholars consider them as being an indigenous rather than a Spanish creation. Therefore, the use of the term has been avoided in recent academic works. Regardless, pictorial cathecisms form a clear group, characterized by the use of a new iconographic and a hieroglyphic repertoire unrelated to that of Mesoamerican cultures. Due to the fragmented and dispersed state of the manuscripts, many of which are still not even individually named yet, the study of this group is still incipient. Relevant works include those of Galarza, Anne Whited Normann, and Hill-Boone.