Tilantongo

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The bone goes through the septum, and a lord is made. On a day the painted books fix in the year that scholars read as 1097, in the great pilgrimage-city the Nahua called Cholula, a Toltec-Chichimec lord named 4 Jaguar took a younger son of a Mixtec priest and pierced his nose, setting into the wound a turquoise ornament — the nariguera — that no ordinary man could wear. The younger son was Iya Nacuaa Teyusi Ñaña, Lord 8 Deer “Jaguar Claw,” and he had been born some thirty-four years earlier beside a throne he had no right to inherit. He was the son of a high priest of the Temple of Heaven, not of its king. The piercing changed the reckoning. It marked him a tecuhtli, a lord in the Toltec order, and it turned raw military success into something the People of the Rain would recognize as rightful: the sanction to sit at Nuu Tnoo, the Black Town, the pre-eminent seat of the Mixteca Alta. The town where that throne stood — where 8 Deer was born, where he ruled, and where, eighteen years later, a rival alliance would take him to be killed — is the place around which the whole painted record of the Mixtec turns.

The Black Town and the Temple of Heaven

The town reaches the record under three names at once, and each holds part of what it was. Living speakers of Sahin Sau — the language of the Ñuu Savi, the People of the Rain, whom the wider world calls the Mixtec — still render its name as ÑūTnúu, and the older written form is Nuu Tnoo, “Black Town.” The Nahua of central Mexico translated the name into their own tongue as Tlilan-tongo, from tlilli, “black,” with their locative endings; the English record of the place preserves that Nahuatl form as the root of the modern spelling. To it the colonial church added the name of a patron saint, and so the municipal seat became Santiago Tilantongo, in the Nochixtlán district of the Mixteca Alta highlands of Oaxaca. But the fullest name is the one the town gave itself in its own painted books: Nuu Tnoo-Huahi Andehui, “Black Town of the Temple of Heaven.” The name is a claim. It says that here the sky came down and touched the earth, and that the lords who held the town held the sanction of the celestial line.

Those painted books are the record, and they are the deepest indigenous documentary source in the Americas. The Ñuu Savi wrote history and genealogy in screenfolds — long strips of prepared deerskin, folded like an accordion and covered with a precise pictorial script of persons, places, dates and deeds — and three of the greatest of the surviving books turn on Tilantongo: the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, the Codex Bodley, and the Codex Colombino-Becker. They do so because the town was the dynastic seat, the throne whose comings and goings a Mixtec historian could not tell the region’s story without. The manuscripts are the peoples’ own record of their own past. But a caution belongs with them, and it is the caution the books themselves impose: a painted page is not a caption. It is a score for a performance a knowing reader once sang aloud, and every modern reading of it — every date pinned to the Christian calendar, every scene named — is an interpretation, however well founded. Reading a codex is careful reconstructive work, and it is contested at its edges.

A section of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, the pre-conquest Mixtec screenfold painted on deerskin that carries the fullest account of Lord 8 Deer of Tilantongo; the original is in the British Library. Photograph by Szilas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Read that way, the books trace the town’s kingship back to the origin place. The dynastic line of the Mixteca descends, in the Ñuu Savi telling, from Yuta Tnoho — the “River of the Lineages,” the origin-valley the Nahuatl called Apoala — where the first lords and ladies were born from a sacred tree that split at the trunk to bring them forth. Behind that founding stands Lord 9 Wind, the culture-hero who came down from the sky to open and order the world; his central-Mexican counterpart is the wind-and-feathered-serpent god the Nahua worshiped as Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, the same office held in another tongue. From that origin the codices run downhill into the reckoned generations of real dynasties, and it is at Tilantongo that the two greatest of those dynasties are seated. The town is where the sacred descent from the tree-born ancestors becomes political fact — a throne, a succession, a war.

Beneath the Postclassic town the ground holds a far older city. Just south of the modern village, on the summit of Cerro Negro, stand the ruins the Mixtec call Yucu Tnoo or Nuu Ndoho and the maps call Monte Negro — one of the earliest true urban sites of the Mixteca Alta. Alfonso Caso, the pioneer of Mixtec archaeology, excavated it across three seasons between 1937 and 1940, with Jorge Acosta directing the last; the Spanish record of the site dates its building to the Early Ramos phase, roughly 300 to 100 BCE, in the Late Formative, contemporary with the proto-urban rise of Monte Albán across the mountains in the Valley of Oaxaca. It sits high — about 2,600 meters above the sea, some 500 meters over the present town — a defensible summit city built when the first great capitals of the Oaxacan highlands were taking shape. Its stone tells no dynastic story; it predates the codices by more than a thousand years. But it means that Tilantongo’s own soil holds better than two millennia of continuous Ñuu Savi settlement, from a Formative hilltop city down through the throne of the Temple of Heaven to the living municipality of today.

The axis of legitimate kingship

Within the Ñuu Savi world Tilantongo was not merely a capital among capitals. It was the axis against which every ambitious highland lord measured his own claim — the throne whose legitimacy came, in the codex cosmology, from the sky. Its rulers were iya, sacred lords, descended from the celestial line and from the tree-born ancestors of Yuta Tnoho, and the town’s own name announced the source of that authority: the Temple of Heaven, the place where the sky touches the earth. To hold Tilantongo was to hold the sanction of the celestial dynasty itself. This is the significance the whole painted record arranges itself around, and it is why the biography of Lord 8 Deer — the single most fully documented life in ancient America — is, in the tradition’s own telling, a story about a throne.

The scholar John Pohl, whose reading of the Mixtec group codices underlies much of the modern account, sets 8 Deer’s problem plainly: he was born in 1063, the son of Lord Five Alligator, a high priest of the Temple of Heaven, and of Lady Eleven Water — born, that is, into the priestly house of Tilantongo but not into its royal succession. He was a younger son of a second marriage, outside the line of the throne. What he had instead was ability and ambition, and he spent them first away from home. By 1084 the codices show him ruling on the Pacific coast at Tututepec, Yucu Dzaa, “Hill of the Bird,” a kingdom he built into a coastal power. From that base he made himself the only Mixtec lord ever to bind the highlands and the coast under a single hand. The record of his life counts the cost of it in the manuscripts: the Codex Zouche-Nuttall credits his reign with ninety-four conquered cities.

Lord 8 Deer “Jaguar Claw” (Iya Nacuaa Teyusi Ñaña), king of Tilantongo, identified by the eight dots and deer-head of his calendar-name; a scene from the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, Mixtec, c. 1500. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

But conquest alone did not make a man an iya. This is the teaching the town holds, and it is written into the sacred grammar of the nose-piercing. The Temple of Heaven’s throne fell empty when its last legitimate ruler, Lord Two Rain “Twenty Jaguars,” died — the closing of the town’s first dynasty. Into that vacancy 8 Deer moved, but not as a conqueror simply seizing a seat. He went to Cholula, to the Toltec-Chichimec lord 4 Jaguar, and there received the turquoise nariguera through his pierced septum — the ornament that marked a tecuhtli, a lord of the Toltec order. Only with that sanction did he take the Tilantongo throne, in 1097, and found its second dynasty. The piercing is the pivot of the whole story: it is the ceremony by which an outsider’s raw power becomes rightful kingship, the ritual through which the celestial throne could be held by a man not born to it. To be lord of the Temple of Heaven required more than an army; it required that the sacred order recognize the claim, and the nose-ornament was the visible sign that it had.

Around this center the codices arrange the entire political theology of the Mixteca Alta. Royal marriages fused lineages and carried thrones from house to house. The dead were kept as sacred ancestor-bundles and venerated. Persons and days alike were named by the two-hundred-and-sixty-day sacred count, so that a lord’s name — 8 Deer, 4 Jaguar, 6 Monkey — was the day of his birth carried for life. And the wars, 8 Deer’s above all, were the means by which the sanction of the celestial throne extended its reach across the three Mixtec regions. The town was the still point of all of it: the seat that made a king a king, and the measure of every claim.

The killing of the king, and the recovery of the record

The kingdom of the Temple of Heaven outlived its greatest lord, but 8 Deer’s own reign ended as such reigns often did in the codices — abruptly, and by the same instrument he had wielded. In his rise he had destroyed the rival lineage of the Red-and-White Bundle and, the manuscripts show, put to death the kin of a noblewoman, Lady 6 Monkey, whose house had opposed him. In 1115 the reckoning came. A surviving heir of that lineage, Lord 4 Wind, gathered an alliance against him and took him prisoner. The codices record 8 Deer’s death by sacrifice — the ritual counterweight to the many such deaths he had himself commanded. The Ñuu Savi historians painted it soberly, as the closing of a cycle rather than as spectacle: a king who had lived by the taking of thrones lost his own in the same coin. The exact circumstances are debated among readers of the books — one line of interpretation has him sacrificed after capture, another has him killed on a later hunt — but the shape of the ending, and its date, are not much in doubt.

The dates themselves are the register scholars have argued over for a century, and the honest account keeps that argument in view. The chronology of 8 Deer’s life — the 1063 birth, the 1097 accession, the 1115 death — was first fixed by Alfonso Caso, who both dug Monte Negro and, more consequentially, was the first to show that the painted scenes of the Mixtec books were history and genealogy rather than ornament, and to read their dynasties as a continuous record. Later scholars, Emily Rabin foremost among them, revised his correlation, shifting the absolute dates by working the codices’ own interwoven cycles against one another. The books count in their own time; pinning that count to the Christian calendar is precisely the kind of problem that keeps a chronology alive. What is not contested is the sequence of the life, or that Tilantongo was its beginning and its end.

After 8 Deer the dynasty of the Temple of Heaven continued for four more centuries. Then the wider world pressed in. The Mexica empire reached into the Mixteca in the fifteenth century, exacting tribute; after 1521 came the Spanish, and with them the church that overwrote the Temple of Heaven and gave the town its saint’s name — a church that even so took Mixtec elements into its own fabric. The colonial campaign against the ancestral religion, the so-called extirpation of idolatry, burned painted books and sacred objects across Oaxaca; that campaign was religious persecution, and the frame it carried — idolatry, superstition — is a distortion to be named and refused, not a description of what the screenfolds were. They were a literate civilization’s own record of its own sky and its own descent. The fuller history of that conquest and that burning belongs with the account of the Mixtec people themselves; Tilantongo’s own share of it is written in the present addresses of its books. That the surviving Mixtec codices are today scattered through the libraries of Europe — the Zouche-Nuttall in London, the Bodley in Oxford, the Vindobonensis in Vienna — is the direct legacy of that dispossession. The books that turn on the Black Town outlived it only by being carried away.

Yet the record was not erased, and the twentieth century set much of it right. Caso’s decipherment of the codices’ dynastic chronology, and his spade on Cerro Negro, opened the recovery. Ronald Spores carried it into the ground of the region itself, directing the Nochixtlán Valley Project out of Vanderbilt University in the 1970s, excavating the settlements of the valley that the Tilantongo kingdom had governed and giving the codical history an archaeological floor. John Pohl worked the books as political history, mapping the alliances and marriages that the paintings encode. And Maarten Jansen and Aurora Pérez Jiménez read them from within the Mixtec language and in partnership with Ñuu Savi communities, restoring to Ñuu Tnoo its own name and its own reading; the fuller arc of that recovery belongs to the account of the Mixtec.

The town, meanwhile, never stopped being a town. Santiago Tilantongo is an inhabited Mixtec-speaking municipality of the Nochixtlán district today, seated above 1,700 meters in the highlands; the Spanish record of the place counts 484 inhabitants in the village at the 2010 census, keeping the feast of Santiago the Apostle each July. Above them on Cerro Negro the Formative stones of Monte Negro still stand, and below the village the fields are worked by people who, asked the name of their home, do not say Tilantongo. They say ÑūTnúu — the Black Town — which is the name the codices painted, and the name the sky-thrown lords once held, and the name it answers to still.

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