Traditions of Writing
FIGURE 4. Pages 15b-18b of the Codex Dresden.
FIGURE 5. Pages 4-6 of the Codex Borgia.
FIGURE 2. The screenfold format of the Codex Nuttall. Photo by Byron Hamann.
Roughly twenty prehispanic screenfolds still survive today. They are currently housed in European and Mexican libraries and museums. The majority of these surviving books have come from one of three traditions.5 Maya scribes were the creators of the Codex Dresden (Figure 4), the Codex Madrid (or Tro-Cortesianus), the Codex Paris, and the Grolier Codex. The subject matter of these screenfolds is divinatory and calendrical. Their contents are read from top to bottom, left to right.
Five screenfolds, probably painted in the region of the modern state of Puebla, form the “Borgia group.”6 Their names are the Codex Borgia (Figure 5), the Codex Vaticanus B, the Codex Cospi, the Codex Fejérvary-Mayer, and the Codex Laud. Their contents, like those of the Maya screenfolds, are divinatory and calendrical. Depending on the codex and the page, their contents may be read from left to right or from right to left. Two of Borgia group screenfolds—the Codex Borgia and Codex Cospi—were probably made in Tlaxcala, in the northern part of the Valley of Puebla. Around 1552, the people of Tlaxcala were partially inspired by the visual structure of these prehispanic books when they created the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a pictorial account of Tlaxcalan participation in the “conquest of Mexico” (see the “Introduction to the Lienzo de Tlaxcala” Nahua tutorial).
As an aside, note that the Aztecs (who lived in the Valley of Mexico, just west of Puebla and Tlaxcala) also created screenfold books. Unfortunately no securely prehispanic Aztec screenfold seems to have survived. The one prehispanic Aztec document that does exist, the Matrícula de Tributos, was originally created as a number of loose sheets of bark paper, painted on one side. Some time in the early sixteenth century these were glued together, back-to-back, and are now bound together as a spine-bound volume (see the “Introduction to the Matrícula de Tributos” Nahua tutorial).
Finally, the largest surviving corpus of prehispanic-style manuscripts comes from a region of southern México called the Mixteca. The names of these Ñudzavui or Mixtec screenfolds are the Codex Becker II, the Codex Bodley, the Codex Colombino-Becker (or Alfonso Caso), the Codex Egerton (or Sanchez Solís), the Codex (Zouche-) Nuttall (see Figure 2), the Codex Selden, and the Codex Vienna (or Vindobonensis). As with the screenfolds of the Borgia group, the directionality of reading varies from codex to codex, and may be left to right, right to left, or bottom to top. The layered contents of these Ñudzavui books are discussed in the pages that follow.
The Ñudzavui Screenfolds >
5 For recent proposals to rename these documents see Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2004, 2011; cf. Boone 2007: 12; Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2000, 5; Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2011, 67.
6 On the provenience of the various Borgia group manuscripts, see Boone 2007.