Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate PDF Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate PDF Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527

Get Book Here

Book Description
In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico

The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico PDF Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks
ISBN: 9780884021100
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


The Codex Borgia

The Codex Borgia PDF Author: Gisele Díaz
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486155218
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
First republication of remarkable repainting of great Mexican codex, dated to ca. AD 1400. 76 large full-color plates show gods, kings, warriors, mythical creatures, and abstract designs. Introduction.

Mesoamerican Writing Systems

Mesoamerican Writing Systems PDF Author: Elizabeth P. Benson
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks
ISBN: 9780884020486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description


Stories in Red and Black

Stories in Red and Black PDF Author: Elizabeth Hill Boone
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292783124
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
The Aztecs and Mixtecs of ancient Mexico recorded their histories pictorially in images painted on hide, paper, and cloth. The tradition of painting history continued even after the Spanish Conquest, as the Spaniards accepted the pictorial histories as valid records of the past. Five Pre-Columbian and some 150 early colonial painted histories survive today. This copiously illustrated book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican painted history as an intellectual, documentary, and pictorial genre. Elizabeth Hill Boone explores how the Mexican historians conceptualized and painted their past and introduces the major pictorial records: the Aztec annals and cartographic histories and the Mixtec screenfolds and lienzos. Boone focuses her analysis on the kinds of stories told in the histories and on how the manuscripts work pictorially to encode, organize, and preserve these narratives. This twofold investigation broadens our understanding of how preconquest Mexicans used pictographic history for political and social ends. It also demonstrates how graphic writing systems created a broadly understood visual "language" that communicated effectively across ethnic and linguistic boundaries.

Peace and War

Peace and War PDF Author: Mary LeCron Foster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000678547
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Is war necessary? In Peace and War prominent anthropologists and other social scientists explore the cultural and social factors leading to war. They analyze the covert causes of war from a cross-cultural perspective: ideologies that dispose people to war; underlying patterns of social relationships that help institutionalize war; and the cultural systems of military establishments. Overt causes of war—environmental factors like the control of scarce resources, advantageous territories, and technologies, or promoting the welfare of people “like” oneself—are also considered. The authors examine anthropologists’ role in policy formation—how their theories on the nature of culture and society help those who deal with global problems on a day-to-day basis. They argue that both covert and overt mechanisms are pushing the world closer to a devastating war and offer strategies to weaken the effects of these mechanisms. This anthropological and historical analysis of the causes of war is a valuable resource for those studying war and those trying to understand the place of social science in framing pacific options.

Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca

Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan and the Heroes of Ancient Oaxaca PDF Author: Robert Lloyd Williams
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world, histories and collections of ritual knowledge were often presented in the form of painted and folded books now known as codices, and the knowledge itself was encoded into pictographs. Eight codices have survived from the Mixtec peoples of ancient Oaxaca, Mexico; a part of one of them, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, is the subject of this book. As a group, the Mixtec codices contain the longest detailed histories and royal genealogies known for any indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall offers a unique window into how the Mixtecs themselves viewed their social and political cosmos without the bias of western European interpretation. At the same time, however, the complex calendrical information recorded in the Zouche-Nuttall has made it resistant to historical, chronological analysis, thereby rendering its narrative obscure. In this pathfinding work, Robert Lloyd Williams presents a methodology for reading the Codex Zouche-Nuttall that unlocks its essentially linear historical chronology. Recognizing that the codex is a combination of history in the European sense and the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, he brings to vivid life the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (AD 935–1027), a ruler with the attributes of both man and deity, as well as other heroic Oaxacan figures. Williams also provides context for the history of Lord Eight Wind through essays dealing with Mixtec ceremonial rites and social structure, drawn from information in five surviving Mixtec codices.

Archiv 72

Archiv 72 PDF Author: Weltmuseum Wien Friends
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643996993
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description


Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest

Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest PDF Author: David Carrasco
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826342836
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
The culmination of recent restoration and analysis, these richly illustrated essays examine the history and meaning of one of Mesoamerica's surviving documents dating from the 1540s.

Caciques and Their People

Caciques and Their People PDF Author: Joyce Marcus
Publisher: U OF M MUSEUM ANTHRO ARCHAEOLOGY
ISBN: 0915703378
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A volume of essays by Mesoamerican scholars on topics ranging from Zapotec archaeology to Cuicatec irrigation and Mixtec codices to Aztec ethnohistory. Authors use a direct historical approach, the comparative method, or develop models that contribute to ethnological and archaeological theory. Contributors: J. Chance, G. Feinman, K.V. Flannery, F. Hicks, R. Hunt, M. Lind, J. Marcus, J. Monaghan, J. Paddock, E. Redmond, M. Romero Frizzi, M.E. Smith, C. Spencer, and J. Zeitlin.