6 ms·

There are remarkably few surviving Aztec codices. Wikipedia lists 39, of which only 3 are possibly pre-hispanic. The new codices all seem to be in the later gro

• alpacca-farm 3y ago
  That's pretty fascinating, dzdt. The idea of a palimpsest hiding older Aztec text opens up so many possibilities. Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing back then. Has anyone come across any initial findings or interpretations of the erased text?
  • dzdt 3y ago
    My impression is so far investigations are extremely preliminary, not much more than was necessary to validate the authenticity of the documents. Hopefully we will see a lot more detailed analysis come out in the coming years.
  • Tuna-Fish 3y ago
    > Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing back then. Generally, everything that they didn't know would be useful or important. These are written on parchment, which has great durability over time, but sadly this means that very little of all the material that was written on parchment survives. This is because parchment is both very expensive and easy to recycle, which means that for most of history the second someone no longer values the material written on their parchment, they are going to wash that off and use it for something else.
    • galaxyLogic 3y ago
      Etch-a-Sketch
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mistrial9 3y ago
  the Spanish systematically destroyed them in the early stages of contact, no?
  • navi0 3y ago
    Correct. To the great dismay and anguish of the Mexica at the time. The hubris and bigotry of the Spaniards (repeated elsewhere by them and other Europeans) was truly a loss for all of humanity. It’s on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in my book (pun intended).
    • roughly 3y ago
      They did the same to the Incan Quipu, which more recent study and discoveries suggest was an actual full written language, not just a counting system. The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with sophisticated arts and cultures who’d built cities that dwarfed their European counterparts with building techniques and on terrain that would’ve flummoxed western builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today) and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the plague.
      • mistrial9 3y ago
        > dwarfed their European counterparts I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so different.
        • helpfulContrib 3y ago
          [dead]
        • jcranmer 3y ago
          It's not that much of an exaggeration. Tenochtitlan--the capital of the Aztec Empire--is estimated to have been about 120-150k people at the time of contact, which is larger than any city in the Spanish Empire at the time. Even the Spaniards themselves, as they recorded in their journals, were astonished at the scale of Tenochtitlan.
• Aidevah 3y ago
  The survival rate for certain 15th/16th codices in Western Europe aren't great either. From England there are only three choirbooks (Eton, Lambeth, Caius) surviving from the first half of the 16th century, when the catalogue from just a single college at one university lists tens of choirbooks. Given the sheer number of cathedrals, colleges etc which supported musical institutions in pre-reformation England, the scale of the loss becomes apparent. Similarly there is almost a complete loss of all musical manuscripts from the royal court of France, such that the compositions of the leader of its court chapel need to be recovered (incompletely) from a Vatican manuscript.
  • VHRanger 3y ago
    Right, but the scale is entirely different. The Conquistadors actively tried to memory-hole Aztec/Maya culture post conquest by burning all their written content. If you break the oral tradition by dispersing groups and you burn written records, you can wipe a culture from history. Conquistadors didn't succeed at this, but they very well tried.