Codex Mendoza

I was watching the documentary "Out of the past: An introduction to archeology" last night. In the short segment on the Aztecs, they showed a brief snippet of the Codex Mendoza (1578?) which details the tribute paid to the Aztec king Moctezuma.

I was shocked: the style of the commentary text in this manuscript resembled the VMS text, and I recognized several of the distinctive VMS characters.

WSU library has a complete copy of the document. I checked out the manuscript today.

In the text (which is in 16th century Spanish) I see even more characters written in VSM style including:

(FSG)
4 O 8 G 2 E R T S H D A C 7

S and H !

And characters very similar to:

F and 6

The character mentioned just yesterday appearing on the coin (Re: Number in VSM) is used extensively in the document as a paragraph/list item marker.

One interesting feature of the document is complete absence of Arabic numerals, all numbers are either spelled out or are in roman numerals (in a style I have not seen before, anyone have a name for this style?). Was this common in documents of this era?

For example the number 400 has an uncanny resemblance to SG including the flourish above S which appears frequently in VMS.

"una" looks like the mirror of AM.

The words "los pueblos" "Ricas" "Rodelas" "Resumydos" "piecas", for example, could almost be lifted and put in the VMS text

Notably the P and R of these words are very VMSish.

The uppercase R is always capitalized when it occurs at the beginning of the word and looks like the VMS character 'H'. 'p' is similarly flourished as in the VMS 'P' or 'F'.

The letters 'd' (written is in the lowercase Greek delta) and 's' are also very much written in VMS style, thus the suffixes 'mas' 'des' 'sas' look like VMS suffixes.

When Aztec words are spelled out, wow!

The word "maxlatl" looks like MAEDAP

"Yztla" G2DA

"chian" 6M

"Tlaahuitlpan" DAOGMDIDIS

Here are some images [I will not keep these images on this machine long] If you don't know Spanish, I have added some transcriptions and translations to the images.

http://c100.bsyse.wsu.edu/~rnelson/temp/maguey.jpg

Notice the roman number 400 and the 's' and 'p' in "espesa"

http://c100.bsyse.wsu.edu/~rnelson/temp/400_cargos.jpg

Notice the word break and the detached cedilla in "cientas"

http://c100.bsyse.wsu.edu/~rnelson/temp/shield.jpg

Notice the style of the capitalized 'R' that looks like VMS 'H'

and how the letters aRo in "una Rodela" have a ligature as in VMS 'DZ'.

Notice the 'p' in "plumas" and the word "Ricas"

http://c100.bsyse.wsu.edu/~rnelson/temp/tortilla.jpg

Notice flourishes in the word "muchacho"

Here are some full pages (quite large).

http://c100.bsyse.wsu.edu/~rnelson/temp/f20r.jpg

Notice the spellings of the Aztec villages along the left side.

http://c100.bsyse.wsu.edu/~rnelson/temp/f43v.jpg
A page of text.

Notice how some words are connected and some words are broken
both when the word fits on the same line and at the end of the line.
Noticeably the word "y" (and) is often ligatured to the following word.
This may be similar in the VMS with the preponderance of words starting or ending with '2' as in "2A2" or "2AO2" as well as the word "2".

Is it a coincidence the Spanish word "y" looks like the VMS '2'??

I wonder what the text would look like if it had not been written in a cursive hand.

These images are from the book
The Codex Mendoza (vol III facsimile)
Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt
University of California 1992

The WSU library had several books with Codex Mendoza:
Coleccion de Menoza, Aztec Emperor Moctezuma's tribute roll,
Painting the Conquest (also Amerique de la Conquete),
Colonisation de l'imaginaire.

So finding books with these folios should not be difficult.

I also looked at several other manuscripts documenting the Aztecs from the same time period, (Such as the Selden roll, the Codex Ixtlilxochitl, the Codex Florentine) none of the text was written in this style of hand writing.

I am curious what other's impressions might be of the Codex Mendoza

By the way, I also look a little bit into the Aztec language Nahuatl.
The alliterated syllables, as in the following words, seem to be quite common in Nahuatl vocabulary.

kuakuake-beetle
chichiltik-red
ahtehuihui - it trembles
anpipiltzitzinti - you [pl.] are babies
toconanaz - you will take it.
tzatzatzini - crier

or even words like

tekolotl-owl
tepetl-hill

(I think this is also the case in the Hawaiian language)

So there is precedence for the repeated ?syllables? we see in the VMS that would otherwise look odd (at least to me) for European languages.