Mesoamerican Codices

Some examples of facsimile versions of Mesoamerican codices

Mesoamerican codices are manuscripts that present traits of the Mesoamerican indigenous pictoric tradition, either in content, style, or in regards to their symbolic conventions.[1] The unambiguous presence of Mesoamerican writing systems in some of these documents is also an important, but not defining, characteristic, for Mesoamerican codices can comprise pure pictorials, native cartographies with no traces of glyphs on them, or colonial alphabetic texts with indigenous illustrations. Perhaps the best-known examples among such documents are Aztec codices, Maya codices, and Mixtec codices, but other cultures such as the Tlaxcaltec, the Purépecha, the Otomi, the Zapotecs, and the Cuicatecs, are creators of equally relevant manuscripts. The destruction of Mesoamerican civilizations resulted in only about twenty known pre-Columbian codices surviving to modern times. [2]: 8 

  1. ^ Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume fourteen, volume fifteen, Guide to ethnohistorical sources. Robert Wauchope, Howard Francis Cline, Charles Gibson, H. B. Nicholson, Tulane University. Middle American Research Institute. Austin. 2015. ISBN 978-1-4773-0687-1. OCLC 974489206.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  2. ^ Raven, James (2020). The Oxford illustrated history of the book (1st ed.). Oxford (GB): Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-870298-6.