Mexicolore logoMexicolore name

Article suitable for older students

Find out more

How did the Aztecs write distances?

How did the Aztecs write distances?

Detail from the Selden Roll, Bodleian Library, Oxford

ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Enrico Paxton: I’m trying to write a fictional story, but am in desperate need of specific facts, that seems to be avoiding me...
If i had missed this on your wonderfull “Mexicolore” site, I am sorry. My question: How would Aztecs have written down distance to a specific place or like making a map to a far off place? In simple: (we traveled for three days in a north-east direction, on water half way and on land the rest.) Is this a complex question or did the Aztec have a system? Thank you.(Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore).

We can only partially answer this good question. We don’t think they wrote down ‘distances’ as we measure them today, though they DID write down ‘areas’ and ‘directions’ in their maps. We present a good example of directions here, taken from the Mixtec Selden Roll (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford). The 3.5 metre long scroll tells how rulership - through divine descent and emergence from a mythical cave - was brought from a sacred place of origin to a real-world foundation place in the Coixtlahuaca Valley.
The scribes used a ‘Travel past...’ system to guide the reader as to the journey involved in the foundation story.
The sequence shown here depicts travel (indicated by the line of footprints) past three conquered places - Hill of the Jaguar, Hill of the Eagle, and Hill of the Macaw - and a river (top of the picture) linked to the individual named as 6-Deer.

At this point we would like to add in a conjecture: even today in some rural parts of Mexico the tradition remains of measuring distance in (woven) hats: eg, a distance between two places, say, of ‘two-and-a-half hats’ simply means that a person can weave that number of straw hats in the time it takes for them to walk from place A to place B. Since this is a longstanding tradition, we would suggest that quite possibly something similar used to take place in pre-contact times: so one might have said - and possibly drawn - ‘That village is five sandals distant...’

Main source:-
• Stories in Red and Black by Elizabeth Hill Boone (2000), University of Texas Press.
Picture sources:-
• Main image: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Arch. Selden. A. 72 (3): https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/75a8f3db-69d3-4bef-bfc5-c61a55562114/ - used under CC-BY-NC 4.0
• Second pic: image scanned from our copy of the Tovar Manuscript, ADEVA facsimile edition, Graz, Austria, 1972.

Stop Press! Panel of Experts member Professor Barbara Mundy has kindly supplied us with this additional information:-
The best answer to this question comes from an image [supplied by Professor Mundy] found in the Florentine Codex, where we see a long-distant merchant at right, traveling to a new town. At bottom left, he instructs two lords about the location of the town and routes of access, certainly to plan an attack, as merchants often spied for the empire. The map in question, seen at the bottom left, is pretty schematic, but it is clear that the merchant is explaining the information it contains, given the speech scrolls emerging from his mouth (the flower attached to the speech scroll might convey the elevated speech one would use when talking to lords). So while the Aztecs had a system for recording small measurements on maps quite precisely (like the dimensions of a field), longer distances seem to have been conveyed orally, rather than through notation on the map.

Comments (0)

How did the Aztecs write distances?

Detail from the Selden Roll, Bodleian Library, Oxford

More Ask Us Entries