It Happened Long Ago
When some of us want vacation, education, or adventure, we think in terms of space; that is, we travel a distance across the planet to achieve our goals. Anthropologists, art historians, and archaeologists travel spatially and ideologically across the planet to achieve the goals of social science, but, like scifi heroes, these adventurers in history also travel through time as well. The purpose of these great adventures of mind and knowledge is to illuminate modern humanity and its civilizations by connecting them securely to the past. Therefore, history is recovered before history was written, and given to us so that we may understand, at least to some degree, who and what we are, where we came from, how we got here, and, perhaps, where we are going.
These scientists of societies merely continue a noble human tradition in the pursuit of their endeavors. That is to say, it would seem that we human beings always try to preserve and pass on knowledge of what came before. This activity is ancient: it preceded the invention of alphabets and writing. It is rooted in memory and language, and transmitted from generation to generation, often by remembered stories. Storytelling is a vital activity that ensures the survival of succeeding generations. It is a gift to our children, a foundation stone of culture.
Long ago, in ancient Oaxaca, the Mixtec Indians did as we all do; namely, they passed on their memories of the past to succeeding generations. However, they were not Europeans; neither were they from the Middle East, nor from the Far East, nor from Africa. When Mixtecs developed their own form of writing to encode and transmit history and their knowledge of it, there was no European precedent. They did it in their own way using narrative pictograms painted elegantly on the panels of fan-folded books. With the passing of time and cultural changes, the culture-dependent hieroglyphic writing of earlier times (perhaps Olmec, then Zapotec and Mayan) ceased in general use, and pictograms, which were not language-dependent and were to some extent transcultural, persisted. Oral histories—genealogies, histories of great heroes, wars, and marriages—unfolded in the fan-folded panel pages of the codices. These were (and are) great treasures because the Mixtec Indians of Oaxaca were masters of codex painting, and the codices are even more precious now because so few of them remain. By the happen-stance of history, eight Mixtec manuscripts survived the European invasion subsequent to the discovery of the “New World.” Of the pre-Conquest Mayan books, only four are extant, and from the extensive pre-Hispanic Aztec corpus, none. Several examples of ceremonial and prognostication codices in the Borgia Group do survive and are the subject of intensive study by certain scholars, notably Elizabeth Hill Boone.
This present book is an attempt to tell Mixtec “stories”: their history as they understood it. These people were not us. They had no sharp dividing line in their minds between what we call the “physical” and the “metaphysical.” They were deeply religious. This quality of indigenous cognition in culture prevailed whether in Native American peoples north, central, or south. Theirs was an integrated, interactive universe in which spirituality and daily life were continuous, contiguous processes. As explained by John Lame Deer, a Miniconju Sioux, Native Americans
live in a world of symbols where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. To you, symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book. To us, they are a part of nature, part of ourselves—the earth, the sun, the wind and the rain, stones, trees, animals, even little insects like ants and grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us the meaning. (quoted in Newton and Hyslop 1992:9–10)
We are going to read those rarest of all things: stories, history, biographies, and genealogies from original, pre-contact books written by a literate society of Native Americans living in what is now the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Although the Mixtecs of old Oaxaca would be pleased to know that we still read their books and learn from them, they did not write them for us. Therefore, the world they recorded seems both strange and wonderful, and perhaps, as does our modern world, at times frightening. One of the Mixtec codices, Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (commonly referred to as Codex Vienna), deals with marvelous things described by the royal Mixtec scribes, who tell us of their world as they understood it, and as their gods manipulated it.
It is actually two documents: an older obverse and newer reverse. The first three pages of the Vienna obverse document provide a good introduction to this present study. With a little imagination, and a great deal of abbreviation, it says this: “It happened long ago when sky and earth were one, the gods sanctified Oaxaca.” We are going to travel in time and space to that Oaxaca—where the ancient Mixtecs lived and where their modern descendants still reside. In a sense, the Mixtecs provide us with insight into one specific Native American pre-Conquest culture that, to some extent, reflects the level of developmental potential of all native cultures prior to the Europeans’ arrival. The insight they give us is breathtaking.
Although this book includes chapters on various topics that augment the subject matter revealed in the Mixtec codex stories, the proper subject of this book is the first eight pages of Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse (Vienna’s sister document). The protagonist of these first eight pages is Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints of Suchixtlan. Therefore, the purpose of this material is to detail the history of Lord Eight Wind and to define him as his Mixtec descendants understood him.
Eight Wind was a mighty demigod/priest, the founder of an enduring lineage, and a great instrument for social change—alive and dead. He was born in AD 935 and lived for ninety-two years. His great-grandson called him back from the dead when Eight Wind would have been more than 140 years old, and this consultation started a war. His life spanned one of the most turbulent periods of change in Mixtec history, and his family was extant through the matriline when the Spanish arrived in Oaxaca in AD 1521. Because he was positively and powerfully remembered among the later Mixtec scribes of the northern Nochixtlan Valley in Oaxaca, his story begins the political history of his people, and through him the Mixtec histories enter into the arena of world civilizations. His story also involves the biographies of other great Mixtecs who lived later: his granddaughter, Lady Six Monkey, warrior queen of Jaltepec; his great-grandson, the ill-fated Lord Two Rain Twenty Jaguars of Tilantongo; and Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, the usurper of Tilantongo, who was unrelated to them but who became king by his own hand.
These great individuals and their deeds live for us in vivid pictogram text, and Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw—having the most extensive biographical material in the Mixtec codices—will have more than a passing appearance. As was Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan, Lord Eight Deer of Tilantongo was the man of his day. Therefore, in one way or another, these great heroes are pivotal figures in Mixtec history.
Sadly, we can never understand the Mixtec histories exactly as they wrote them because much of the narrative oral history between pictogram tableaux in the codices is lost forever. This demands comparison of various codices because, occasionally, we can find cognate scenes among Mixtec manuscripts elaborating similar data. Sometimes we encounter folklore that does the same. However, in general, most of the details of the memorized stories highlighted in the codices are unavailable to us. For this reason, there is a problem—not only of incomplete content, but also of interpretation.
Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse (museum numbered pages 1–41) is known as the most mysterious and resistant to interpretation of all codices in the recognized canon of Mixtec manuscripts, including its “sister” manuscript, Codex Vienna (Pohl, pers. comm., 1999). The manuscript is composed of two documents: the older “reverse” (ZN pages 42–84) is the political biography of Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw of Tilantongo. The newer Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse (pages 1–41) consists of three narrative sagas connected by various events and genealogies. Each saga is discrete from preceding and succeeding texts, although the War from Heaven unfolds from two different perspectives in Sagas 1 and 2. Comment on the codex obverse is scanty. In her introduction to the 1987 edition of Codex Zouche-Nuttall, Troike observes:
Scholars have made brief studies of sections of topics in the Zouche-Nuttall, but out of deference to [Alfonso] Caso’s role as virtual founder of the field, no one wrote a commentary to the codex. As a result, the contents of the manuscript have never been explained in any detail, and without such an explanation as a guide to the difficulties in the pictorial text, the codex is not utilized as frequently as other Mixtec texts. (26)
Troike implies that Caso wrote no commentaries on Zouche-Nuttall obverse because of the manuscript’s opaque text. It is simply resistant to interpretation.
Because this array of narrative in the obverse of Codex Zouche-Nuttall is not only mysterious and extremely diverse, it is desirable in the following pages to analyze, interpret, and detail the first of them, the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (pages 1–8). However, Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints’ story explores a complex problem existing in several narratives, all of which are necessary for a successful, comprehensive interpretation. Perhaps these sectional narratives are sequential songs or poems. This book explores several major points of interpretation.
To begin, the first eight pages present Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints as a historical personage throughout both parts that describe his life (ZN pages 1–2, 5–6a). In the literature, only one historical date assignment has been made relative to the second part of Eight Wind’s biography (Byland and Pohl 1994:238). The Mixtec scribes tell us the first fifty-two years of his life were spent as a supernatural santo, and the last forty years of it as a patriarch and lineage founder—a history that will be recounted in the following chapters.
Second, native chronology will be employed and subsequently interpreted as written in the narrative itself. The chronology of pages 1–8 displays twenty-six dates, including the one established by Byland and Pohl. These dates provide a reasonable chronological sequence that places the biography of Lord Eight Wind into the context of a human lifespan. Of even more significance is that this chronology demonstrates that Eight Wind’s biography records founding events of the Epiclassic culture of his people, the Mixtecs. He lived from AD 935 to AD 1027, and this span is adequate to define the Epiclassic period (a transition involving social reformation from the Late Classic to the Early Postclassic) for the Nochixtlan Valley Mixtecs.
Third, the entire text establishes 165 years of pre-Hispanic history of the Mixtec people, which their royal scribes wrote as beginning in AD 935 (page 1) and ending in this particular narrative in AD 1100 (page 8), well into the Mixtec Postclassic period and the biography of Lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw. The recovered history is political, ceremonial, military, biographical, and genealogical.
Fourth, despite the fact that both codices Zouche-Nuttall and Vienna have been known as related documents from the time of Zelia Nuttall’s 1902 commentary in the Peabody Museum edition of the manuscript bearing her name, it is necessary to draw comparisons between them not previously explored in the extant literature. These comparisons demonstrate that they are linked by at least one historical date, two ceremonies, one shared chronological sequence, and many personnel. The shared date is especially important because Codex Vienna obverse and, to some extent, Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse have been considered documents without historical dates, thus recording only allegorical or nondurational time (Pohl 2004a:390). At least two of these native manuscripts—Vienna (and, by implication, Zouche-Nuttall)—are linked not only by persons and places they both record, but also because they were linked at the time Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519. Therefore, at least one shared native date is both reasonable and expected.1
This study also attempts an exercise in an unusual type of ethnography, especially since the Mixtec scribes writing long ago are employed here as cultural informants. The subject is one of vital interest because, since the Spanish entrada into Oaxaca in 1521, the Mixtec Indians (and all Native Americans, no matter their location and source of contact with Europeans) have been rendered people without history. The admirable Mexican scholar Alfonso Caso (who determined the ethnicity of the Mixtec codices) was very clear about this in his article “The Map of Teozacoalco,” published in 1949.
It is very common when speaking about the history of America to say that it began with the [European] Conquerors and the first Spanish chroniclers and that [beforehand] the Indians have no written history: [implying] therefore, that the surviving written accounts that refer to the remote past of native peoples were recorded only when the Indians learned to write in Spanish after the Conquest. . . .
This opinion is completely false. The Indians not only of Mexico, but from the whole of Mesoamerica, possessed a true historical vocation, and they told and wrote history. . . .
Unfortunately, both in Yucatan (Mani) and in Mexico (Texcoco), Landa and Zumarraga burned a large number of indigenous manuscripts, actions that destroyed forever many historical works. . . .
It is a cruel injustice that, after burning the Indian histories, [the Spanish] denied that the Indians wrote them.
I can only add one thing to Dr. Caso’s remarks: the Spanish denied that the Indians could even write.
I use the word “unusual” to describe this book as an exercise in ethnography because the native informants have been deceased for 600 or 700 years, and they wrote about historical events occurring more than a thousand years ago: events which, in some cases, were almost 400 years before their time. These anonymous royal scribes are our informers and our primary sources.
“Ethnography” also applies to the Mixtec manuscripts in an unusual sense because the artifacts themselves speak and inform, not a living human being functioning as informer so as to have his words translated and written in an alien language. In a real sense they are vocalizations of deceased humans who function as timeless informers of culture. The manuscripts are written in icons: symbols like language, but without phonemes and grammar. They are provocateurs of image, environmental symbols imbued with a transcultural load of meaning. I, now or recently so, can have the phenomena represented affect me, but I as native informer’s subject must be affected by them in the ancient sense, somehow discovering the elements of original meaning and appreciating their transformation and translation across time within myself. The observer is, in a sense, written by them because the observer’s meaning is empowered with a new consciousness transmitted from antiquity. Words spoken or written are deleted in one genre (codices), impelled by a different genre (communication to an observer), but experience of original songs and impulses is conveyed and created by unusual evocation in yet another (interpretation by an observer). Tyler’s correlation of ethnography and poetry is insightful: “ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy” (1986:125).
The Mixtec manuscripts are narrative, performance discourse. Perhaps they and their evocative content are culture’s poetry, for true representations of environmental phenomena and to some extent cross-cultural translation are shared a-linguistically by all who encounter them, even those who do not recognize the word “Mixtec” as signifying both a people and an Otomangean language. Non-Mixtec observers are empowered to share the native cultural system of meaning and integrate it with their own. This transaction is both effective ethnology and divorced from it as original native narrative experience becomes contemporary in content and context. This is not paradox: it is the apprehension and appreciation of meaning embodied in Mixtec history as they tell us the great deeds of their heroes, their gods, their fathers and mothers, their illustrious royal progenitors.
This text explores certain problems about the chronological and ideological interpretations of Codex Zouche-Nuttall pages 1–8 as a document of Native American history written by Native Americans. The central figure of this history is Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints, who has been interpreted as both a historical figure (Byland and Pohl 1994:238) and as a supernatural figure whose life is told in terms of ceremonies, with no clear distinction between history and myth itself (Furst 1978b:4b). He exemplifies Dennis Tedlock’s term, “mythhistory” (1985:64). Therefore, in the literature, Lord Eight Wind seems both fish and fowl: sometimes one, sometimes the other, giving us a certain truth to explore. The native chronology associated with him—especially for the first part of his life—seems metaphorical; thus he stands in Homeric or Virgilian fashion as floating free from time itself.
Mixtec use of dates as historical markers has been established, however, and is clarified in the literature by the work of Emily Rabin. In the majority of their surviving manuscripts (Zouche-Nuttall reverse, Vienna reverse, Bodley, Selden, and what can be deciphered of the Colombino-Becker I fragments, now called Codex Alfonso Caso), the Mixtecs recorded chronologies fixing events securely in time. The difficulty in other texts lies in determining when chronology is literal, when it is allegorical, and when it is used as an admixture of both (Troike 1978:555). Here is a clue: the Mixtecs recorded absolute time in their 365-day vague solar calendar, and they recorded absolute and/or metaphorical time in the 260-day sacred calendar. The one known example of both integrated calendars used as metaphor is Year 1 Reed Day 1 Alligator, which always means “beginning” yet is not necessarily exempt from calendrical time-measuring. More explication of this subject appears in the section titled “Method: Calendars, Chronology, and Scribal Errors.”
Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse consists of three sagas connected by genealogies. Lord Eight Wind’s pages are first (pages 1–8), the Ladies Three Flint pages second (pages 14–22), and the Four Lords from Apoala third (pages 36–39). In Lord Eight Wind’s saga/biography, twenty-six dates are used in the course of eight pages (3.25 dates per page). In the Ladies Three Flint saga, only fifteen dates appear in the nine pages, and at least two of those are allegorical (1.4 dates per page). The third saga has five dates on four pages (1.25 dates per page).
Because the first saga relies more on temporal markers, it is fair to ask if Lord Eight Wind’s story fits within the framework of a possible human lifetime. In the course of this investigation two more questions are asked: what is the order of the historical events recorded, and what is the purpose of the first eight pages of Codex Zouche-Nuttall? A necessary but ancillary series of questions concerns the relationship of, and interaction between, events in both manuscripts, Zouche-Nuttall and Vienna.
The three sagas of Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse are dramatic performance narratives (Byland and Pohl 1994:9) and sometimes little-understood statements by an indigenous people about the foundation of their complex culture centuries prior to contact with Europeans. This analysis provides recovery, definition, and insight into a portion of Mixtec history literally written in Mixtec style.
Stated in brief, the Classic period Mayans wrote their elite histories from approximately AD 100 to AD 1000. The Postclassic period Mixtecs wrote theirs about events that occurred from AD 935, and slightly before, until and after the arrival of the Spanish in Oaxaca in AD 1521. Interpretation of the Mixtec manuscripts provides historical sequences of events for a transitional period of Mesoamerican history beginning in the Epiclassic era, a time of great cultural reformation.
Mixtec history was interconnected as to eras, as is all history. Although this text focuses on the biographical history of Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints, his history is continuous with history of later times. That is how the Mixtecs understood it, and although their viewpoint does not make this present task easy, it does make it interesting because we readers acquire both data and insight exactly as the ancient scribes set it down.
Technical terms will be defined in text as they occur. However, for general purposes, Mesoamerican cultural eras occur within a specific timeline that can vary somewhat from source to source (table 1.1). As mentioned, the Mixtec transitional era called “Epiclassic” corresponds roughly to the life of Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints, our protagonist. Individuals’ names are their birthdays (number and day) in the sacred calendar; therefore, birth-name numbers are spelled out in text, while actual dates such as Year 1 Reed Day 4 Flint employ numerals.
The phrase “Middle America” refers to a geographical zone that includes territory from the Isthmus of Panama northward through the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States (Evans 2004:19). However, “Mesoamerica” refers to a culture area that begins somewhat south of the U.S. border and ends north of the Isthmus of Panama (Evans 2004:19). This study focuses on Mesoamerican territory in the modern Mexican state of Oaxaca. A laudable tendency among recent commentators is to use original Mixtec language names for various towns mentioned in the codices (Troike 1978; Pohl, variously; Jansen and Jimenez 2005). “Añute” is Mixtec for the town of Santa Magdalena Jaltepec; “Yuta Tñoho” is Santiago Apoala; “Nuu Tnoo” is Santiago Tilantongo; and the Mixtec themselves are “Ñuu Dzaui,” or “Rain People.” Non-Mixtec terminology is a combination of later Nahautl and Spanish colonial nomenclature and is retained here because it is commonly used on official maps and in previous scholarly work.
Table 1.1. Mesoamerican Cultural Eras
Early Formative |
1600–1200 BC |
Middle Formative |
1200–900 BC |
Late Formative |
900–250 BC |
Preclassic |
250 BC–AD 100 |
Classic |
AD 100–800 |
Early Postclassic |
AD 800–1200 |
Middle Postclassic |
AD 1200–1400 |
Late Postclassic |
AD 1400–1521 |
Primary data sources are drawn from photographic facsimiles of the Mixtec codices themselves, and these manuscripts are described and illustrated in text and listed in the bibliography. Secondary sources include various authors and their publications, cited in text and listed in the bibliography.
Geographical data about Oaxaca comes from electronic documents available on the Internet, cited in the bibliography as “electronic documents.” Some illustrations by Dr. John M. D. Pohl (Princeton University Art Museum) from the undated FAMSI Web site section titled “Pohl’s Mesoamerica” are used with permission and identified in text.
Interpretation of Mixtec codices must be to some extent inferential since they are mnemonic pictogram texts written in sequential tableaux and intended to supplement oral tradition as memorized and recited by royal bards. In reference to this book, some interpretation is original and based on my research not only in codex pictorial tableaux, but also on the physical structure of the artifacts themselves. I assert that the application of cautious inference based on intrinsic evidence is valid because were we to restrict this investigation only to scientifically verifiable data, many interesting areas of valid research would be negated, and such evidence as is presented rendered vague or inaccessible (Paddock 1985b:358).
I have mentioned previously that codex interpretation involves an important native technology; namely, the Mixtec use of the Mesoamerican calendar. Methodology used herein employs the Mesoamerican calendar round corresponded with the European calendar to establish events recorded on pages 1–8 of Codex Zouche-Nuttall (and other native manuscripts) as historical events in the lifetime of the protagonist, Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints. In doing so, Lord Eight Wind’s position in the Mixtec culture of the Epiclassic (the transition from Classic to Postclassic for the Mixtecs) and Early Postclassic will be explicated chronologically, his family detailed, and the foundational culture of the Mixtec Indians of Oaxaca demonstrated as a chronological progression of historical events, many of them religious ceremonies.
As already mentioned, there is debate on the allegorical versus absolute nature of Mixtec temporal markers, and this discussion appears in the literature (Furst 1978:69–72; Pohl 2004:390). In fact, Furst (1978ak:69, citing Caso 1954:12–13) has asserted that the Mixtec date Year 13 Rabbit Day 2 Deer has no European calendar equivalent at all. Therefore, much has been said about nontemporal, nondurational time (Jansen 1988:156–192). I have also noted that most Mixtec manuscripts—Zouche-Nuttall reverse, Bodley, Vienna reverse, Selden—have no difficulty recording literal chronology. However, agreement between manuscripts—and even events in one manuscript—can be problematical.
Codex Vienna, by virtue of its qualities as both a book of ritual and of extensive maps of the Mixtec world (see figure 1.2, a map page from Zouche-Nuttall), does contain dates that are difficult to sequence chronologically and difficult to identify in metaphorical context. They are associated with persons, man-made and natural places in the landscape, and ceremonies. Zouche-Nuttall obverse is often compared to the Codex Vienna obverse as a “sister” document, and the assumed, vague metaphorical content of the latter is attached to the former (Furst 1978:4b). However, as will be demonstrated, both manuscripts share a recorded historical date for at least one critical event: a lineage-founding ceremony.
A detailed study of Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse pages 1–8 was written by Jill Leslie Furst and titled “The Life and Times of Lord Eight Wind Flinted Eagle” (1978b). Two elements of her discussion are immediately relevant. First, she details the relationship between codices Vienna and Zouche-Nuttall, and, second, she observes that the Mixtec concept of time was “cyclical.” This latter point is critical because she qualifies it by saying of the Mixtec calendar that “it may not have been a calendar in the Western sense of the word” (Furst 1978b:12a). I concur with her statement, but not precisely in the sense she intended. Our culture identifies or finds historical events by dates; apparently the Mixtecs found or identified dates by historical events. Their texts are event-driven. The difference is subtle, but critical. Although acknowledging the cyclical nature of time-counting, we tend to see history as linear, progressing from past to present to future along “time’s arrow.”
Cyclical time-counting, however, is standard in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. There is nothing unusual about it. The precedent Mayan long count calendar round system expires and resets itself every 5,126 years and is thus cyclical in an expansive chronological framework. John Pohl (2004:368–418) notes that the Maya employed two basic calendars. One was a 365-day solar haab that measured time relevant to the annual agricultural cycle, divided into eighteen months of twenty days each. The second, concurrent calendar to the haab was the 260-day tzolkin, or ritual calendar, imbued with allegorical content. These two were mathematically coordinated and reset every fifty-two vague solar years (Schele and Miller 1986:16–17).
The Mixtec calendar had both these solar and ritual components, there being seventy-three 260-day ritual cycles per every fifty-two-year solar cycle of 365 days per year. The Mixtecs counted days and metaphorical content in the 260-day ritual calendar, and years as specific chronology in the solar one. Occasionally they used the day-count 260-day calendar to record the specific length of events with or without allegorical content. The appendices dealing with Codex Zouche-Nuttall reverse demonstrate both allegorical and precise day-counting of events as they appear on Codex Zouche-Nuttall reverse.
Unlike the Maya system, however, the Mixtec repeating cycles have no long count added to tell them in progression or regression one from another. Also, there is no evidence that the Mixtecs measured twenty-day months. Codex Borgia, a manuscript in the Mixteca-Puebla style but of unknown provenance, does indicate the observance of a thirteen-day trecena, or week. Each day beginning with the number “one” began a thirteen-day trecena. Otherwise there is no evidence that the early Mixtecs were interested in recording vast cycles of time, as were the Classic period Maya.2 Rather than dealing with religious time cycles covering millions of years (as at the Maya town of Quiriguá), the Mixtecs recorded the duration of their history over hundreds of years. Ancient things merely happened “long ago.”
Integration of solar and ritual calendars indicates that Mesoamerican calendars were temporal recording technologies with both historical and allegorical content running “parallel” to one another. Anyone would be hard-pressed to name any modern calendar without both chronological and metaphorical content. Therefore, one does not necessarily exclude the other, and we will see that the majority of dates recorded in Codex Zouche-Nuttall pages 1–8 are in most instances historical temporal indicators of solar years, even if loaded with ritual, augural allegory to enrich data in the ritual 260-day calendar. They are chiefly markers for ceremonies and rituals, most of which are “hard” history.
The twenty-six year-dates on Codex Zouche-Nuttall pages 1–8 are usually sequential in occurrence, with one exception noted in text. The criterion for interpreting dates is this: when a year-date occurs within a progressive sequence of dates but has no relevance to that sequence, it is either ritualallegorical, an inset flashback or flash-forward, or a scribal error. The technology implied by an accurate calendar does not exempt it from recording historical events, no matter the allegorical content embedded within it. Allegory is, after all, a means of enriching data in mnemonic texts.
Building on preceding work by Emily Rabin, Byland and Pohl (1994:231– 264) produced a chronological sequence of historical events applicable to all Mixtec manuscripts, specifically codices Zouche-Nuttall, Bodley, Selden, and Alfonso Caso (Colombino-Becker I fragments). This sequence covers fourteen fifty-two-year cycles from AD 883 to AD 1610, inclusively. Their seminal work has become standard, and much of it is used for this analysis and interpretation. In the context of their chronology, the events related in the codex pages scrutinized in this book occur in the historic AD Mixtec cycles as follows: Cycle 2, 935 to 986; Cycle 3, 987 to 1038; Cycle 4, 1039 to 1090; Cycle 5, 1091 to 1142. It is important to note that these codices are not strict chronicles—that is, they do not record events in each successive year, and often gaps of several years occur between events.
Mixtec scribes appear to have made mistakes in enumerating dates and day names of individuals. These errors are usually uncorrected, presumably because doing so was difficult.3 For errors consisting of too many number-circles, existing images and foundational gesso had to be scraped and repainted (Jansen and Jimenez 2005:30b). Because codex scenes were mnemonic devices for oral recitation, it was probably easier for scribes and bards to simply correct erroneous dates from memory.
One obvious example of scribal date correction occurs on Zouche-Nuttall reverse page 50, column D (figure 1.1): the six units for a House year have been scratched out and replaced with seven units, although it is unclear why another unit simply was not added to the existing six. In the example cited, the entire date has been shifted up in position on the page.
An apparent error in recording a personal day name occurs in Codex Selden (6-IV). Lord Eleven Wind (the future husband of Lady Six Monkey of Jaltepec) is named Ten Wind; then, in subsequent narrative his name is corrected. I do not know why another unit was not simply added to correct the error. This same scene begins in Selden register 6-III with what seems to be yet another scribal error. The correct year, 6 Reed, is drawn as 5 Reed (Pohl 1994:70). So, two scribal errors occur with the same event but without subsequent repetition. This seems suspicious, and perhaps in context of this particular narrative the numbers 10 and 5 had a favored, allegorical significance that eludes us now.
Therefore, the possibility exists that the scribal errors mentioned above are not errors at all, but rather a kind of pun understood as glossed into text. So one must do just what the Mixtec bards very likely did from memory and
Figure 1.1. Codex Zouche-Nuttall page 50 (British Museum folio no. 55). The corrected year date is in column D (reading right to left). (© Trustees of the British Museum, The British Museum Company, Ltd.)
Comparing and contrasting cognate scenes in other codices, or subsequent scenes in the same manuscript, can help to identify scribal errors. Codex Bodley, for example, reverses the names of Lord Five Alligator’s wives. However, for unique scenes this comparison technique is unavailable. Therefore, when examining dates in chronological sequences, the investigator must be alert, and when a single date occurs remarkably out of context in a sequence, the existence of one too many or one too few units in year numeration can be inferred. This procedure is followed here cautiously (Oudijk 1998:19). For Zouche-Nuttall pages 1–8, there appear to be two scribal errors involving one numeral and perhaps a third example, too. These are mentioned in text. Even if they are not errors, they do not invalidate the historical sequences recorded through some twenty-six dates therein. When these errors are noted, the recorded number is stated with the correction following it in parentheses; for example, Year 5(6) Reed. A complete numeration of the fifty-two years is provided in table 3.1.
Figure 1.2. Codex Zouche-Nuttall page 22 (British Museum folio no. 23). This map mural page is read from right to left and shows people, dates, events, and places in the vicinity of Monte Negro. It is specifically the introduction to the first dynasty of Tilantongo. (© Trustees of the British Museum, The British Museum Company, Ltd.)
1. Zelia Nuttall first advanced the connection with Cortés in 1902; nevertheless, not all scholars agree with it.
2. Ethnographic evidence indicates, however, that after the Aztec conquest, later sixteenth-century Mixtecs believed in previous creations (Hamann 2002:5).
3. Classic period Maya did not correct scribal errors in their inscriptions either, presumably for the same reasons. make one-digit corrections if necessary, though sparingly. It is not necessary to do this often.
