What Is The Florentine Codex?

Ancient writings about the cultures of the Mesoamerican people before 1532 are very rare, however there are a few codices that exist even now. Hundreds of years after the Spanish conquest of the region in the fifteen hundreds, there are only a limited number of these ancient books still in existence and only 3 authentic Mayan tomes survive. A codex that sheds a great deal of light on the ancient Mayan and Aztec people is the Florentine Codex, a collection of 12 books that exposes much about the people of the region before the 16th century

The Florentine Codex is actually a nickname for a project called 'The History of the Things of New Spain'; it was written between 1545 and 1590. Bernardino de Sahagun was a Franciscan friar who arrived in Mexico with the intention of converting the native population to Christianity. Intended to be something of a dictionary of the Aztec language, Nahuatl, he also went along way into describing in detail the ancient culture of the New World. His research took place over several decades and the original manuscript consisted of 2400 pages, spread out over twelve books.

Details about the civilization's kings, general population, merchants, elements of the natural environment, philosophies,ceremonies,gods, and the Aztec calendar were chronicled in the 12 sections. The codex contains over 2000 illustrations drawn by the locals, many of whom were Bernardino's students. One interesting thing about the friar is that he had a good strategy for compiling good quality data about the local cultures, and he was careful about verifying the information; he was, in effect, one of the world's first ethnographers, of not the first anthropologist.

Bernardino was unique in his methodology in that he used Nahuatl as the primary language of the codex, spoke with local elders and looked to his students for their expertise, and adapted himself to the Aztec culture. The diverse number of penmen and illustrators resulted in the book being a more balanced (and seemingly contradictory, at times) look at the local population, rather than taking a tone which regarded the indigenous peoples as savages.

The Florentine Codex was translated into English, though it took 30 years to do so. As a social science endeavor it was many decades ahead of its time, and is considered by some to be amongst the most important documents about non-Western culture ever conceived.. Bernardio's use of questionnaires and partnership with the Aztec locals resulted in a book which described Mesoamerica from the perspective of its inhabitants, rather than from the Europeans who were colonizing it. finally published in complete form in 1979, it's an indispensable artifact in regards to the civilization it describes and to the history of anthropology as a whole.

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