by Mildred Boyd
It
isn’t really a codex and Zelia Nuttall was neither it’s creator,
it’s discoverer nor it’s owner, though her scholarly interest
did result in it’s first publication. The Codex Nuttall is made
of deerhide, pieced together to make one continuous strip over 40 feet
long and roughly 6-1/2 inches high, then folded fan-wise into 10 inch
sections to form a compact, 98 page “book”. Both sides were
coated with fine lime plaster and 88 of the pages were painted with the
vivid little scenes and date glyphs in bright colors.
Such “screen folds” contained the
religious texts and historical records of the pre-Columbians, and they
bear no resemblance to the illuminated and bound codices of Medieval Europe.
Like all the surviving pre-conquest documents,
the early history of this one is obscure. It may have been one of the
“...two books such as the Indians have” that were mentioned
by Cortez in his first letter as forming part of the treasure being shipped
to the Emperor Charles Fifth. If so, it was little valued and even less
understood. After being judged as “...probably intended for the
amusement of children but...so foolish it would bore them,” the
document spent centuries in an obscure Dominican monastery in Florence.
It was as a gift from an Italian friend that the
manuscript came into the possession of the English Lord Zouche and later
into the custody of the British Museum. Until 1898, when Zelia Nuttall
received permission to make the copy which was published in 1902 by the
Peabody Museum, this important historical document was virtually unknown.
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