Ancient civilizations-2

The codices

Aztec sacred books and works, which were kept in the temples, and other native books have become known in Western scholarship as codices. Sacred books were written (or rather, painted) on deerskin or agave-fibre paper by scribes (tlacuiloanime), who used a combination of pictography, ideograms, and phonetic symbols and dealt with the ritual calendar, divination, ceremonies, and speculations on the gods and the universe. Because of their religious content only a small fraction of these escaped destruction by the Spaniards; the few specimens that have survived—such as the Codex Borbonicus, the Codex Borgia, the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, and the Codex Cospi—usually come accompanied by Spanish notations. These sources are limited in scope and subject matter but nevertheless are valuable documents. Their interpretation is far from easy. Only a few of them, such as the Borbonicus, are truly Aztec, while others, such as the Borgia, seem to emanate from the priestly colleges of the “Mexica-Puebla” area, between the central highlands and the Oaxaca Mountains.

An illustration from a reproduction of the Codex Magliabecchi depicting an Aztec priest performing a sacrificial offering of a living human heart to the war god Huitzilopochtli.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZC4-743)

Other native books, either pre-Cortesian or post-Cortesian, also afford valuable material. Examples include such manuscripts as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, the Azcatitlan, and the Codex of 1576, which describe the history of the Aztec tribe and state and occasionally depict religious scenes and events; the Codex Badianus, an herbal with magnificent drawings of medicinal plants; and the Codex Mendoza and the Matrícula de tributos, both tax documents of the Aztec empire. A number of books were written in the Latin alphabet—either in Náhuatl or in Spanish—by learned Aztec chroniclers, who used ancient pictographic manuscripts as their basis. Among those that were prepared in central Mexico are the Codex Chimalpopoca (also called the Anales de Cuauhtitlán; “Annals of Cuauhtitlán”), in Náhuatl, and the Codex Ramírez (also called the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas; “History of the Mexicans Through Their Paintings”), in Spanish; both are anonymous compilations.