Books, documents, and writing

The administration of Tenochtitlán and its foreign provinces required a great deal of paperwork. Taxes had to be collected, lawsuits between villages or private individuals had all to be recorded, and the merchants kept accounts of their goods and profits. Instructions and reports passed to and fro between the capital and the outlying cities, and—like any civilized people of today—the Mexicans were familiar with both red tape and official correspondence. The clans maintained land registers, and when Cortés reached Tenochtitlán he had no trouble in procuring from the royal archive a map showing all the rivers and bays along a 400-mile stretch of the north coast. In addition each temple owned a library of religious and astrological works, while a large private household, like that of Montezuma, employed a full-time steward to look after the accounts which were so many that they filled an entire house.

Ixtlilxochitl, a brother of the last native rule of Texcoco, has left this account in the prologue to his Historia Chichimeca:

They had scribes for each branch of knowledge. Some dealt with the annals, putting down in order the things which happened each year, giving the day, month, and hour. Others had charge of the genealogies, recording the lineage of rulers, lords and noblemen, registering the newborn and deleting those who had died. Some painted the frontiers, limits, and boundary markets of the cities, provinces and villages, and also the distribution of fields, whose they were and to whom they belonged. Other scribes kept the law books and those dealing with the rites and ceremonies which they practiced when they were infidels. The priests recorded all matters to do with the temples and images, with their idolatrous doctrines, the festivals of their false gods, and their calendars. And finally, the philosophers and learned men which there were among them were charged with painting all the sciences which they had discovered, and with teaching by memory all the songs in which were embodied their scientific knowledge and historical traditions.

In the law courts, especially those dealing with land and property rights, the disputants supported their claims with genealogies and maps, showing the king’s land in purple, and the lords’ in red, and the clan fields in yellow.

Of this mass of paperwork hardly anything remains, and nearly all the surviving books for the Aztec homeland are of post-Conquest date. Some are copies of earlier works, while others are written in Aztec script with Spanish or Nahuatl commentaries in Europeans letters. The best collection of pre-Conquest books comes from Oaxaca, the land of the Mixtecs, where more than a dozen examples have been preserved.

Each book, or codex, consists of a strip, anything up to 13 yards in length and some 6-7 inches high, made of paper, maguey cloth, or deer skin, and folded in zigzag or concertina fashion like a modern map, so that wherever the user opened it he was confronted by two pages(28). The needs of the strip were glued to think plaques of wood which served as covers and were sometimes decorated with paintings or with discs of turquoise. Both sides of the strip were covered with writing and pictures, and the individual pages were divided into sections by red or black lines. Each page was normally read from top to bottom, though in some codices the arrangement is zigzag or even goes around the page. The strip was scanned form left to right.

This enormous production of documents was dependent on a steady supply of the raw materials, and each year 24,000 reams of paper, the equivalent of 480,000 sheets, were sent to Tenochtitlán. Aztec paper was made from the inner bark of various species of fig tree. The bark was soaked in a river or in a bath of limey water, and the fibres were separated form the pulp, then laid on a smooth surface, doubled over and beaten with a mashing stone which had a ridged surface(2). A binding material (probably a gum of vegetable origin), was added, and the fibres were beaten out into a thin, homogenous sheet. After smoothing and drying, the processed bark fibres had recognizably become paper, but the surfaces were still porous and rough, unsuitable for painting until they had been given a coasting of white chalky varnish or size.