The Mixtec

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A strip of deer-hide, dressed with white gesso and folded like a screen, opens the way a fan opens. On its first panels a hand working in red and black has painted a man, and beside the man a small cluster of eight dots and the head of a deer. The dots and the head are his name. He was born on the day the sacred count called 8 Deer, and so 8 Deer he is for life, on this page and on every other page that shows him — a lord identified not by a sound but by a day. The book runs on from him in an unbroken chain of such persons, each fixed to the day that named him and to the parents who begot him, generation behind generation, until the strip of hide carries more named and dated ancestors than any other document made by any people of the Americas before Europe arrived. The people who painted it call themselves the Ñuu Savi, the People of the Rain. This is one of their books.

The People of the Rain and the three roads to their record

The name is a covenant before it is anything else. In the Mixtec languages the people are Ñuu Savi — also written Nuu Dzavui, and reaching the early friars through a related form, ñuudzahui, “people of Dzahui,” the rain deity — a name the living speakers render as the People of the Rain. Dzahui, the rain, is the power whose people they are; to be Ñuu Savi is to belong to the rain. Their languages, many and mutually distinct, form a major branch of the Oto-Manguean family, among the deepest-rooted language stocks of Mesoamerica, and their homeland is the mountainous western third of Oaxaca and its margins in Puebla and Guerrero — a country the people themselves divide into three: the Mixteca Alta, the high cold sierra; the Mixteca Baja, the lower northwest; and the Mixteca de la Costa, the hot Pacific slope down to the sea. It is a hard, folded, eroded land, and out of it came one of the great literate civilizations of the ancient world.

That civilization reaches the record along three distinct roads, and keeping them separate is the whole discipline of speaking about it. The first road, and the deepest, is the people’s own. The Ñuu Savi wrote their history and their cosmology in screenfold books — long accordion-folded strips of deerskin, prepared with a white lime ground and covered edge to edge in a precise pictorial script of persons, places, days, and deeds. Most were burned in the colonial centuries. A handful of pre-conquest examples survived and reached the libraries of Europe: the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Codex Bodley, now in Britain; the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, the “Vienna,” in Austria; the Codex Selden; and the Colombino-Becker. Scholars read them as the deepest indigenous documentary record on the continent. But a caution rides with them, and the books impose it themselves: a painted page is not a caption. It is closer to a score, a prompt for a performance that a knowing reader once sang aloud, and every modern reading — every scene named, every date pinned to the Christian calendar — is an interpretation, careful and well founded but contested at its edges.

A page from the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, one of the surviving pre-conquest Mixtec screenfolds, painted on lime-coated deerskin and read in boustrophedon columns; the persons are named by the day-signs of their birth. Facsimile by Zelia Nuttall, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The second road is the archaeology, and it has one door above all others. On 9 January 1932, in a Classic-period chamber cut into the ridge of Monte Albán — a tomb built centuries earlier by the Zapotec, the Cloud People whose city that mountain was — the archaeologist Alfonso Caso lifted a slab and found that the old Zapotec chamber had been opened again in Postclassic times and reused for the burial of Mixtec lords. What lay inside is still, by the reckoning of the record, among the richest single finds ever made in the Americas: over five hundred objects, and among them 121 pieces of worked gold weighing some 3,598 grams, together with roughly two dozen objects of silver. Tomb 7 was the material proof of a people the sources had called the finest goldsmiths of their world. The third road is the thinnest and the most vexed: the colonial sources read against the grain — the Dominican Francisco de Burgoa in 1674, the friars’ dictionaries and grammars — through which pre-conquest names survive, but filtered through the hands of men who came to end the religion they were describing.

The rain, the tree, and the two arts of lineage

Within the world the codices open, the founding fact is the rain. The Ñuu Savi are the People of the Rain because rain is the first covenant of their existence, and the sacred landscape of their origin begins at a single place: Yuta Tnoho, “the River of the Lineages,” the green highland valley the Nahuatl-speakers to the north renamed Apoala. There, the Codex Vindobonensis shows, the first lords and ladies of the Mixteca were born — not descended from, but literally born out of — a great tree that rose from the bank of the sacred river and split at its trunk to bring them forth one at a time. To be a lord of the Mixteca was to be able to trace one’s body back along the reckoned generations to this tree, on this bank, in this valley. The tree is the axis of the world and the root of nobility at once, and every ruling house measured its claim by its distance from it.

Among the powers present at that beginning is Lord 9 Wind, in Mixtec Coo Dzavui, the culture-hero the Vindobonensis paints descending from the sky along a rope let down from the heavens, dressed by the elder gods in the buccal mask of the wind before he goes down to open and order the unfinished earth. He brought, the tradition holds, the knowledge of agriculture and of civilized life. He is the Ñuu Savi form of the feathered-serpent wind-god whom the Nahua worshiped, in another tongue and another land, as Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl — the same office held under a different name, named here in prose as a parallel and not as one god. Nine Wind is the breath that goes before the rain, and it is fitting that the People of the Rain should place him at their dawn.

From that sacred beginning the order of the world is carried forward by two arts, and the argument of this people is that they are two faces of one thing. The first art is the book itself. The Mixtec codex is not chronicle, cosmology, and property deed by turns; it is all three at once, and inseparably. It binds each ruling house to the gods and to the origin-tree through an unbroken chain of named ancestors, and it reckons that chain in the 260-day sacred calendar, the count in which every person, like every day, bears the day-sign of his birth as his name for life — hence Lord 8 Deer, Lady 3 Flint, Lord 4 Wind. To hold the book was to hold the proof of one’s descent, and therefore the title to one’s throne. The scholarship on the Mixtec kingdoms reads these manuscripts as political documents of the first importance: genealogies that were also charters, painted to establish who had the right to rule where, and why.

The pages were read in a fixed way, guided by red lines that turned the corners of the panels so that the eye ran up one column and down the next, back and forth across the folds like a plow across a field. Nothing on them is idle. A place is a hill-sign with its own emblem; a marriage is two seated figures facing; a conquest is an arrow driven into a temple; a death is a bundled body. The scribe who could paint this and the reader who could sing it were the memory of the state, and the training that made them was among the most demanding intellectual disciplines of the pre-Columbian world.

The second art is gold. The Mixtec goldsmith worked by the lost-wax method — modeling the form in wax, encasing it in clay, burning the wax away, and pouring molten metal into the void it left — and turned soft gold into the hardest of political statements: the regalia of divine kingship. The pectorals, the ear-flares, the labrets and pendants and diadems that came out of Tomb 7 were not ornament. They were the wearable proof of a lineage’s descent from the powers of rain and fire and maize, worn on the body of the lord who claimed that descent. To gold the goldsmiths joined turquoise, fitting hundreds of cut stones into mosaic over masks and disks and hafts, so that the blue-green of water and sky overlaid the metal of the sun. And so the goldwork and the codex do the same work by different means. The book makes the lineage legible; the gold makes it visible. Both are the making-manifest of a house’s line back to the tree at Yuta Tnoho — one in paint on deerskin, the other in metal on the body of a king.

A Mixtec gold-and-turquoise pectoral in the form of a chimalli, a war-shield, from Yanhuitlán, Oaxaca, Postclassic period — regalia of the kind the lost-wax goldsmiths of the Mixteca made for their lords. Gary Todd, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The apogee, the conquest, and the living nation

The codices preserve the height of that world. One side of the Zouche-Nuttall alone narrates roughly five centuries of dynastic history — from about 890 to 1382 of the Christian era — of the kingdoms of Tilantongo, Teozacualco-Zaachila, and Tututepec, their marriages and their wars. At the center of the whole painted record stands one man: Lord 8 Deer “Jaguar Claw,” in Mixtec Iya Nacuaa Teyusi Ñaña, whose life is the most fully documented of any person in ancient America. He was born, in the reading first established by Caso, on 5 October 1063 — the younger son of a high priest of Tilantongo, the Black Town of the Temple of Heaven, and so born to the priestly house but not to its throne. He made his own fortune away from home: by 1084 the record of his life shows him ruling the coastal kingdom of Tututepec, Yucu Dzaa, which he built into a Pacific power. From that base he became the only Mixtec lord ever to bind the Alta, the Baja, and the Costa under a single hand.

But conquest alone did not make an iya, a sacred lord. When the throne of Tilantongo fell empty, 8 Deer went north to the great pilgrimage-city of Cholula, to a Toltec lord the books call 4 Jaguar, and there received through his pierced septum a turquoise nose-ornament — the nariguera, a symbol of Toltec royal authority — that no ordinary man could wear. Only with that sanction did he take the Tilantongo throne, on a day the books fix in 1097, and found its second dynasty. By the Codex Zouche-Nuttall’s own count he conquered ninety-four towns before he was done. His end came in the same coin he had spent: in 1115 a surviving heir of a lineage he had destroyed, Lord 4 Wind, brought him down, and the books record his death — whether by sacrifice after capture or, in another reading, killed on a later hunt, the manuscripts’ interpreters still differ — on a day corresponding to 10 November. The absolute dates have been argued for a century, first fixed by Caso and later revised by others working the codices’ interlocking cycles against one another; what is not in doubt is the sequence of the life, or that Tilantongo was its beginning and its end.

The kingdoms endured beyond him, and then the wider world pressed in. Aztec forces defeated the Mixteca in 1458, and by 1486 the Mexica had planted a garrison on the hill above the Valley of Oaxaca from which to enforce the tribute — gold and goldwork foremost among it — that the Mixtec and Zapotec lords now owed the distant capital. Then, in 1521, came the Spanish: forces under Francisco de Orozco reached the Valley of Oaxaca on 25 November of that year, and the Mixtec kingdoms passed under the Crown. What followed for the books was catastrophe. The colonial campaign against the ancestral religion — the so-called extirpation of idolatry — burned painted screenfolds and sacred objects across Oaxaca as “idols,” and that campaign must be named for what it was: religious persecution, carried under a frame of idolatry and superstition that distorted what the books were and is to be rejected, not repeated. The screenfolds were not idols. They were a literate civilization’s own record of its own sky, its own descent, its own dead. That the surviving Mixtec codices sit today in London, Oxford, Vienna, and Paris is the direct legacy of that dispossession: the books that survived are, in large part, the ones that were carried out of the country early, beyond the reach of the fires.

Yet the fires did not erase the people, and this is the fact that governs every sentence about them. The Ñuu Savi are not a civilization that ended. They are a living nation — approximately 830,000 people today, with several hundred thousand still speaking the Mixtec languages across the Alta, the Baja, and the Costa of Oaxaca and into Puebla and Guerrero, and with large communities carried by generations of migration into California, where an estimated 150,000 lived as of 2011, and into New York City, with some 25,000 to 30,000 more. The calendar, the languages, the ties to the origin-valley of Yuta Tnoho — all of it survived the burning. And the reading of the codices has changed with the recognition of that survival. Where Caso opened the record as a decipherment, scholars after him — John M. D. Pohl working the books as political history, Maarten Jansen and Aurora Pérez Jiménez reading them from within the Mixtec language and in partnership with Ñuu Savi communities — have restored the towns’ own names to their own past: Ñuu Tnoo for Tilantongo, Yuta Tnoho for Apoala. The account has stopped being a European puzzle about a vanished people and become again what it always was, and what it is now read alongside the descendants of the lords who painted it: the People of the Rain telling, in a script of days and names and a metal that does not tarnish, the story of where their nobility was born. Their neighbors the Cloud People, the Zapotec, and the never-conquered Mixe of the eastern sierra keep their own such accounts; the Ñuu Savi keep theirs in the deepest painted history the continent produced, and in the mouths of the people who still answer to its names.

→ Related: The Zapotec · The Mixe · Nine Wind · Dzahui · Cocijo · Pitao Cozobi · Coqui Bezelao · Monte Alban · Mitla · Apoala · Tilantongo