First republication of remarkable repainting of great Mexican codex, dated to ca. AD 1400. 76 large full-color plates show gods, kings, warriors, mythical creatures, and abstract designs. Introduction.

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

The Codex Borgia, a masterpiece that predates the Spanish conquest of central Mexico, records almanacs used in divination and astronomy. Within its beautifully painted screenfold pages is a section (pages 29-46) that shows a sequence of enigmatic pictures that have been the subject of debate for more than a century. Bringing insights from ethnohistory, anthropology, art history, and archaeoastronomy to bear on this passage, Susan Milbrath presents a convincing new interpretation of Borgia 29-46 as a narrative of noteworthy astronomical events that occurred over the course of the year AD 1495-1496, set in the context of the central Mexican festival calendar. In contrast to scholars who have interpreted Borgia 29-46 as a mythic history of the heavens and the earth, Milbrath demonstrates that the narrative documents ancient Mesoamericans' understanding of real-time astronomy and natural history. Interpreting the screenfold's complex symbols in light of known astronomical events, she finds that Borgia 29-46 records such phenomena as a total solar eclipse in August 1496, a November meteor shower, a comet first sighted in February 1496, and the changing phases of Venus and Mercury. She also shows how the narrative is organized according to the eighteen-month festival calendar and how seasonal cycles in nature are represented in its imagery. This new understanding of the content and purpose of the Codex Borgia reveals this long-misunderstood narrative as the most important historical record of central Mexican astronomy on the eve of the Spanish conquest.

Appearing for the first time in English, Karl Anton Nowotny’s Tlacuilolli is a classic work of Mesoamerican scholarship. A concise analysis of the pre-Columbian Borgia Group of manuscripts, it is the only synthetic interpretation of divinatory and ritual codices from Mexico. Originally published in German and unavailable to any but the most determined scholars, Tlacuilolli has nevertheless formed the foundation for subsequent scholarly works on the codices. Its importance extends beyond the study of Mexican codices: Nowotny’s sophisticated reading of these manuscripts informs our understanding of Mesoamerican culture. Of particular importance are Nowotny’s corrections of errors in fact and interpretation in the Spanish edition of Eduard Seler’s commentary on the Borgia Group. George A. Everett and Edward B. Sisson have translated Nowotny’s masterwork into English while maintaining the flavor of the original German edition. To the core text they have added an extensive bibliography and constructed a framework of annotation that relates the principles in Tlacuilolli to current research. This edition includes a selection of eleven stunning full-color images chosen from the original catalog.

This volume offers new calendrical models and methodologies for reading, dating, and interpreting the general significance of the Madrid Codex. The longest of the surviving Maya codices, this manuscript includes texts and images painted by scribes conversant in Maya hieroglyphic writing, a written means of communication practiced by Maya elites from the second to the fifteenth centuries A.D. Some scholars have recently argued that the Madrid Codex originated in the Petén region of Guatemala and postdates European contact. The contributors to this volume challenge that view by demonstrating convincingly that it originated in northern Yucatán and was painted in the Pre-Columbian era. In addition, several contributors reveal provocative connections among the Madrid and Borgia group of codices from Central Mexico. Contributors include: Harvey M. Bricker, Victoria R. Bricker, John F. Chuchiak IV, Christine L. Hernández, Bryan R. Just, Merideth Paxton, and John Pohl. Additional support for this publication was generously provided by the Eugene M. Kayden Fund at the University of Colorado.

Consists of v. 2 and 4 of Berdan and Anawalt's The Codex Mendoza (4 v. -- Berkeley : University of California Press, c1992).

The Codex Bodley has long been recognized as one of the most important Mixtec manuscripts. Painted shortly before the Spanish Conquest of Mexico (1521), in the Mixtec region (state of Oaxaca), it is an excellent example of native Mixtec pictorial historiography in all its complexity. Because of its detailed information on genealogical relationships and dated events, it is a fundamental source for the study of precolonial Mixtec writing and history, from approximately 900 AD till the Spanish conquest (1521).For the first time, the entire manuscript is reproduced in a handy, single volume format. The commentary, based on many years of research on this manuscript and related documents, both in archives and in the Mixtec region itself, makes it possible to read the figurative paintings as a narrative text. Beginning with the history of the manuscript the author then discusses the main characteristics of Mixtec pictography before turning to the narrative of the manuscript, in a page-by-page explanatory reading of the pictograms and their significance. Highly illustrated, this is an essential text for all readers with an interest in pre-colonial Mexican history, art, and culture.

Mesoamerican communities past and present are characterized by their strong inclination toward color and their expert use of the natural environment to create dyes and paints. In pre-Hispanic times, skin was among the preferred surfaces on which to apply coloring materials. Archaeological research and historical and iconographic evidence show that, in Mesoamerica, the human body—alive or dead—received various treatments and procedures for coloring it. Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins in Mesoamerica. Chapters explore the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied to a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices made of hide and vegetal paper, and even building “skins.” Contributors offer physicochemical analysis and compare compositions, manufactures, and attached meanings of pigments and colorants across various social and symbolic contexts and registers. They also compare these Mesoamerican colors with those used in other ancient cultures from both the Old and New Worlds. This cross-cultural perspective reveals crucial similarities and differences in the way cultures have painted on skins of all types. Examining color in Mesoamerica broadens understandings of Native religious systems and world views. Tracing the path of color use and meaning from pre-Columbian times to the present allows for the study of the preparation, meanings, social uses, and thousand-year origins of the coloring materials used by today’s Indigenous peoples. Contributors: María Isabel Álvarez Icaza Longoria Christine Andraud Bruno Giovanni Brunetti David Buti Davide Domenici Élodie Dupey García Tatiana Falcón Álvarez Anne Genachte-Le Bail Fabrice Goubard Aymeric Histace Patricia Horcajada Campos Stephen Houston Olivia Kindl Bertrand Lavédrine Linda R. Manzanilla Naim Anne Michelin Costanza Miliani Virgina E. Miller Sélim Natahi Fabien Pottier Patricia Quintana Owen Franco D. Rossi Antonio Sgamellotti Vera Tiesler Aurélie Tournié María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual Cristina Vidal Lorenzo

One of the great documents of colonial Mexico, the Codex Chimalpopoca chronicles the rise of Aztec civilization and preserves the mythology on which it was based. Its two complementary texts, Annals of Cuauhtitlan and Legend of the Suns, record the pre-CortŽsian history of the Valley of Mexico together with firsthand versions of that region's myths. Of particular interest are the stories of the hero-god Quetzalcoatl, for which the Chimalpopoca is the premier source. John Bierhorst's work is the first major scholarship on the Codex Chimalpopoca in more than forty years. His is the first edition in English and the first in any language to include the complete text of the Legend of the Suns. The precise, readable translation not only contributes to the study of Aztec history and literature but also makes the codex an indispensable reference for Aztec cultural topics, including land tenure, statecraft, the role of women, the tribute system, warfare, and human sacrifice.