visits since 2019-09-23.|
0. Introduction (This Page),
1. Quetzalcöätl,
2. Toltecs,
3. Market,
4. Flaying, 5. Lord of the Dead, 6. Poems, 7. Murder, 8. Guadalupe |
Page Created: 2015-03-05 Go to site main page. Go to Aztec History. |
Very few of the societies in the past had fully functional writing systems. When they did, as in the case of Linear B or Early Egyptian, their use was seldom widespread and nearly always very specialized. The texts we have, even when we are able to interpret them, are few and rarely of general interest. Some of these societies are known to us largely through archaeological evidence or through the accounts of travelers or ethnographers coming from literate societies (as in the case of the Nyoro or the Hopi). (Ethnographic sketches are available on this web site: Nyoro, Hopi.)
Sometimes, however, we (also) have writings from people remembering “the old ways” after wrenching culture contact has brought them literacy. For Aztec society, early post-Conquest writings are in many ways quite rich. This folio presents some selections: two in Spanish, the rest in Nahuatl, all with English translations.
Most collections of “original texts” include only English, and for most English readers the inclusion of the Nahuatl or Spanish versions can be ignored. But (1) it is humbling to remember that none of this material was originally written in English, which was an obscure and irrelevant language at the time, and (2) an occasional, especially curious student may be interested in what the original texts were like, especially in the case of the two Spanish texts.
The two Spanish selections are by Spanish immigrants to Mexico and are based on what they saw or heard. The Nahuatl selections from the Florentine Codex are transcriptions of what Sahagún’s informants dictated to him, minimally edited, as far as can be discovered. The remaining Nahuatl works were written by ex-Aztecs or their descendants. Because all of this material is post-Conquest, it naturally is influenced by this fact. The account of the fall of Quetzalcóatl, for example, describes his tormentors as “demons.” A pre-Conquest account probably would have selected slightly different vocabulary.
The Nahuatl selections were originally objects of study in an informal “Recreational Nahuatl” reading group, to whom I express my appreciation for their collective efforts to understand these sometimes difficult works. Fuller notes and vocabulary for them, together with an elementary Nahuatl “textbook” and reference grammar used by the group are available. (Link) In some cases a link to the “Reading Group Format” will lead to additional vocabulary or usage notes of no interest to the non-Nahuatl student.
Linguistic Note: Nahuatl spelling in the XVIth century was quite unstable. Some of the selections here retain original spellings, while others have been modernized. In the modernized ones, long vowels are shown with two dots over them, an easily typed convention originally adopted for Nahuatl materials by our reading group. Scholars disagree about vowel length on some words. Although I have tended to follow Launey (1980) much of the time for the modernized transcriptions, in a few cases I have overruled his vowel length decisions. In contrast to the essay on the Aztecs (Link), this folio does not add hyphens or stress marks to the spellings of Nahuatl words, but length diacritics are included when modernized Nahuatl spelling is used.
Proceed to:
0. Introduction,
1. Quetzalcöätl,
2. Toltecs,
3. Market,
4. Flaying,
5. Lord of the Dead,
6. Poems,
7. Murder,
8. Guadalupe
Background Design: Coyolxauhqui Sacrificial Stone, Templo Mayor, Mexico City
visits since 2019-09-23.