The Narrative Structure of Codex Zouche-Nuttall Obverse
Each page of every Mixtec codex usually displays painted tableaux that can be interpreted individually as stating temporality in years and days. In these tableaux are symbols defining places, actors who are chiefly elite personnel, and actions such as marriage, conquest, peregrination, and diverse religious ceremonies.
Taken collectively these tableaux demonstrate narrative sequences and reveal highlights of historical events, biographies, and detailed genealogies. The pictogram tableaux are mnemonic devices, spotlights on ritual moments and narrative performance, and, like a movie storyboard, reveal only certain highlights of action. The connecting data between them is lost. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, those trained to do so passed on these memorized stories from generation to generation.
The reader’s progress through pictogram text is usually guided by red lines that determine the movement of narrative. This line-guided movement is boustrophedon, up-and-down or side-to-side—literally, “as the bull plows.” Different scribes used a variety of pictorial conventions to suit their needs, including abbreviation or conflation, variation of reading order, omission of red guide lines (as in Zouche-Nuttall’s last narrative sequence on pages 36–39), and use of page-length red lines to separate one narrative sequence from another, to name a few. In the case of ZN pages 1–2, the scribes have not provided a set of red guide lines because these two pages of painted tableaux introduce their subject (Lord Eight Wind) and proceed chronologically. However, as with all of the major intact Mixtec codices, reading begins in the lower right (for documents reading from right to left) or lower left (for documents reading from left to right).
Events such as marriage have various representations according to local custom but usually husband and wife face one another on a mat, and are perhaps enthroned with a vessel filled with liquid between them. Their children are usually pictured next, in order of importance, with or without temporal indicators.
The following illustrations (figures 3.1–3.3) picture the temporal indicators of year bearers and day signs, and toponyms. Table 3.1 gives the sequence of years in numerical progression through a fifty-two-year cycle. Colored circles attached to years and days establish their enumeration; i.e., Year 5 (colored circles) Flint, Day 6 (colored circles) Alligator.
Figure 3.1. The four year bearers and the A-O year sign. (Drawings by John M. D. Pohl)
Table 3.1. The Fifty-Two Years in the Mixtec Calendar and Their Numbers in Sequence
Figure 3.2. The twenty days. (Drawings by John M. D. Pohl)
Figure 3.3. The four basic toponyms. (Drawings by John M. D. Pohl)
Although complex in content and variable in reading order among its diverse sections, the narrative structure of the entire Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse is simple in plan: three sagas are each followed by events and genealogies. Full-page vertical red lines divide one section from another. The following schematic outline lists the codex obverse contents, focusing in detail on pages 1–8.
I. Saga of Lord Eight Wind Eagle Flints, pages 1–8
A. Biographical introduction, pages 1–2
B. The War from Heaven, pages 3–4
1. War with the Stone Men, page 3
2. War with the Striped Men, page 4
C. Lord Eight Wind and his family, pages 5–6a
1. Lord Eight Wind at Monkey Hill, page 5a
2. Lord Eight Wind rain god ceremonies, page 5a–b
3. Lord Eight Wind’s three wives and children, pages 5c–6a
D. Two processions, pages 6b–7c
E. Lord Eight Wind’s mummy and Two Rain, pages 7d–8a
F. Lord Two Rain’s mummy, page 8b
G. Ceremonies and genealogies, pages 9–13
II. Saga of the Ladies Three Flint,
mythological events and genealogies, pages 14–35 (not analyzed in this book)
III. Saga of the Four Lords from
Apoala, genealogy, pages 36–41 (not analyzed in this book)
Generally speaking, the Mixtec scribes exercised significant freedom to record their narratives within this structural framework. If reading order is established without using red lines placed on the page in various ways to guide the eye, then either similarity of dates, chronological sequence of dates, or perhaps mnemonic systems familiar to the original bards but unknown to present-day scholars are intended. The first two sagas of Zouche-Nuttall obverse end with a full-length red line separating them from the pages that follow. The narrative text is res gestae (Boone 2000:70–77), or event-driven, and qualified by literal and allegorical temporal markers recording solar years and days within them.
The physical structure of the Zouche-Nuttall manuscript itself was utilized by the scribes in creative ways. The rigid in-fold, out-fold form that creates the pagination is fixed; that is to say, one cannot fold pages contrary to their original directions without breaking them, establishing a rigid folding format.
This format is used advantageously in two instances to augment narrative sequences in Codex Zouche-Nuttall obverse by creating “parentheses” whereby two pages can be eclipsed or omitted from recitation. Both these parentheses are histories of the War from Heaven sequences, first on pages 3 and 4 in Lord Eight Wind’s story, and also on pages 20 and 21 in the Ladies Three Flint narrative. In the first example the war story is told from the political perspective of the northern Nochixtlan Valley settlements; in the second, from the political point of view of the southern Nochixtlan Valley (Pohl, pers. comm., 2004).
As I demonstrated during the Mixtec Pictogram Writing Workshop (University of Texas, March 2004), in both cases these war pages can be deleted by taking advantage of the folding scheme, connecting in the first instance page 2 to page 5 to produce a continuous biography of Lord Eight Wind. In the second instance, double-page 19 connects to page 22, omitting pages 20 and 21 (the second telling of the war) in order to demonstrate that the founding of the first dynasty of Tilantongo (page 22) was similar in prestige to the founding of the earlier, and subsequently exterminated, dynasty at Wasp Hill (ZN double page 19).
The reciting bards had the option of including the war narratives or omitting them, depending on the occasion. The conclusions drawn from these data are obvious: although of extreme importance, the War from Heaven sequences were secondary stories inserted into two primary stories for purposes of elaboration. A similar example in Western literature is the Ajax story inserted into Homer’s Iliad. The importance of the War from Heaven as an event is obvious: it is twice-told in Codex Zouche-Nuttall from the point of view of two different polities. It is also twice-told in Codex Bodley, first on pages 3 and 4, then on pages 34–36.
The first war narrative does not mention the Wasp Hill lineage exterminations at all, but emphasizes Lord Eight Wind’s activities at Yucuñudahui (Rain God Hill) and the subsequent conflict with the Stone Men. The first section that includes the war narrative also emphasizes Lord Eight Wind’s participation in the founding of a new lineage franchise at Apoala—that is, the Tree Born nobles who became rulers of Postclassic Oaxaca.
For both areas of the Nochixtlan Valley, the war had extreme dynastic implications as an old order of rule at Wasp Hill was swept away by a long, terrible war and replaced by new ruling families. The culture was altered by violent change beginning in the Epiclassic era and entered the Postclassic transformed by new kinship ties.
