Aztec illustrations are the first written records of earthquakes in the Americas | smart news

A 16th-century Aztec manuscript known as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis contains the oldest surviving written record of earthquakes in the Americas, David Bressan reports for Forbes.

As Gerardo Suárez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Virginia García Acosta of Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social write in Seismological Research Letters, the manuscript contains references to 12 separate earthquakes that occurred in the region between 1460 and 1542.

“It is not surprising that there are pre-Hispanic records describing earthquakes for two reasons,” Suarez says in a statement from the American Seismological Society. “Earthquakes are frequent in this country, and secondly, earthquakes have had a profound meaning in the indigenous cosmology of what is now Mexico.”

Illustrations or drawings provide little information about the location and magnitude of earthquakes or the extent of their destruction. Together with other records written after the Spanish conquest, they offer contemporary scholars a new perspective on the seismic history of Mexico. Forbes notes that the team used symbols representing solar eclipses or specific days, as well as Latin, Spanish, and Italian annotations that later observers added to the manuscript, up to the date of the earthquakes.

One of the illustrations featured in the study depicts soldiers drowning while a building burns in the background. Researchers have compared the event to the 1507 earthquake that destroyed a temple and drowned 1,800 warriors in a river likely located in southern Mexico. The earthquake coincided with a solar eclipse – a phenomenon represented in the manuscript by a circle from which lightning bolts emerge.

Page from Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Public Domain via Commons Wikimedia)

According to the Spanish newspaper Vozpopuli, pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican societies viewed the universe as cyclical, with periods known as “suns” ending in floods, fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters before the onset of new eras. Each of the five suns was divided into multiple cycles of 52 years.

Referred to as tlal-ollin or nahui-ollin in the original Nahuatl language, earthquakes are represented in Aztec illustrations by two symbols: ollin (movement) and tlalli (earth). According to the study, ollin consists of four spirals that symbolize the four cardinal directions, while tlalli is characterized by one or several layers of multi-colored markings that denote gemstones. The manuscript contains other iterations of these glyphs, but experts are not sure what they refer to.

Aztec manuscripts chronicle the civilization’s history and myths through “unique symbols, writing systems, and calendars,” Fordham University notes. The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is divided into three sections: calendar; a pamphlet detailing ritual practices; A description of Aztec migration from the late twelfth century to 1562, when Mexico was under the control of Spanish colonists.

As David Keyes wrote for The Independent earlier this year, contemporary historians have long overlooked the “intellectual and literary achievements of the Aztecs.”[s]. But new research by British anthropologist Gordon Whitaker challenges this limited view, showing that the Aztec text was much more complex than is often thought.

“Unfortunately, many scholars over the centuries have tended to reject the Aztec hieroglyphic system because it seemed to Europeans like pictorial writing,” Whitaker, author of Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, told The Independent in April. “Actually, it was not – but many art historians and linguists have mistakenly conceived it this way.”

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