Codex Bodley

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.

The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, as the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today. This copiously illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos. Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans used pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual "language" that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

The only value-priced, full-color edition of the pre-Columbian Mexican (Mixtec) book. Features 88 color plates of kings, gods, heroes, temples, sacrifices, and more. New introduction.

In this study of warfare in ancient Mesoamerica, Ross Hassig offers new insight into three thousand years of Mesoamerican history, from roughly 1500 B.C. to the Spanish conquest. He examines the methods, purposes, and values of warfare as practiced by the major pre-Columbian societies and shows how warfare affected the rise of the state.

In the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world, histories and collections of ritual knowledge were often presented in the form of painted and folded books now known as codices, and the knowledge itself was encoded into pictographs. Eight codices have survived from the Mixtec peoples of ancient Oaxaca, Mexico; a part of one of them, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, is the subject of this book. As a group, the Mixtec codices contain the longest detailed histories and royal genealogies known for any indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall offers a unique window into how the Mixtecs themselves viewed their social and political cosmos without the bias of western European interpretation. At the same time, however, the complex calendrical information recorded in the Zouche-Nuttall has made it resistant to historical, chronological analysis, thereby rendering its narrative obscure. In this pathfinding work, Robert Lloyd Williams presents a methodology for reading the Codex Zouche-Nuttall that unlocks its essentially linear historical chronology. Recognizing that the codex is a combination of history in the European sense and the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, he brings to vivid life the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (AD 935–1027), a ruler with the attributes of both man and deity, as well as other heroic Oaxacan figures. Williams also provides context for the history of Lord Eight Wind through essays dealing with Mixtec ceremonial rites and social structure, drawn from information in five surviving Mixtec codices.