Article suitable for older students

‘Codex Corner’: page reading order

2nd Sep 2022

Front cover of The Codex Mexicanus book by Lori Boornazian Diel

Just what is the page order when reading an Aztec/Mesoamerican codex? Are they all the same? Do they go right-to-left? Left-to-right? Top-to-bottom? Bottom-to-top? It’s confusing. We try to give an entry-level introduction... Essentially, most ‘screenfold books’ - that we commonly call ‘codices’ - are ‘uni-directional’, ie the reading order follows a single (story) line; a good example of this is shown here (right) in the Codex Mexicanus, Aztec annals that feature a continuous year count, where each double-page strip (the first is arrowed) is read left-to-right following a historical time line (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore).

The problem is, the reading order often varies from one manuscript to another. However, there is one codex genre - Mixtec genealogical and historical screenfolds - that tend to be both unidirectional and have a reading order that, roughly, follows a set pattern. In fact, there’s a name for this pattern - ‘boustrophedon’ - though you and I would probably find the term zig-zag a hundred times more familiar. ‘The stories flow back and forth, the way an ox plough would work a field [’boustrophedon’ means in Greek ‘as the ox ploughs’], across one or two pages. The painters used red lines to divide the pages into registers, leaving the lines open on those ends where the story flows onto the next register’ (Hill Boone, 200: 61). Glass (1975: 8) refers to this zig-zag reading format as ‘meander-fashion’, evoking the laborious, labour-intensive, pre-industrial character of the scholarly activity of the time (see animation below)...

A screenfold, incidentally, has been defined as a manuscript painted on a long and relatively narrow strip composed of sheets of animal hide or paper glued together, and folded, accordion-pleat-fashion, like a screen (ibid).

The Codex Bodley (now known as the Códice Tilantongo y Tlaxiaco) contains a mass of information relating to the dynasties of the Mixteca region; it is a splendid example of a screenfold in which ‘the boustrophedon reading convention acquires a special elegance and complexity, up and down five horizontal registers over pairs of double pages’ (Brotherston, 1995: 177) (pic 3).

In 1973 Mary Elizabeth Smith wrote an in-depth study of Mixtec codices and included in it a diagram titled ‘Patterns of guidelines in the Mixtec history manuscripts. The beginning of the sequence of reading in each example is indicated by an asterisk...’ (pic 4). At the bottom of her diagram is the reading order for the Bodley screenfold, showing how the zig-zag reading path weaves its way up and across the first four pages of the manuscript. Scholars are unsure whether the boustrophedon format might perhaps be a hangover from earlier straight-line annals.

It’s worth noting that there are other pictorial histories that have no fixed reading order nor visual guidelines. These tend to be cartographic (map-style) in structure, so you can ‘dip into’ the codex in a number of ways.

Sources/references:-
• Brotherston, Gordon (1995) Painted Books from Mexico, British Museum Press
• Glass, John B. (1975) ‘A Survey of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscript’, in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 14: Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Part Three, General Editor Robert Wauchope, University of Texas Press
• Hill Boone, Elizabeth (2000) Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs, University of Texas Press
• Marcus, Joyce (1992) Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth and History in Four Ancient Civilisations, Princeton University Press
• Smith, Mary Elizabeth (1973) Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps, University of Oklahoma Press.

Picture sources:-
• Photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Animated GIF: animation by Mexicolore of an original illustration by Daniel Parada (commissioned by Mexicolore)
• Pic 4: image scanned from Smith (1973), op cit.

‘An Introduction to pre-Hispanic Mixtec Codices’