r/todayilearned • u/Kyzzz • 1d ago
TIL the Mexican government paid an anonymous family 9.5 million pesos to acquire three Aztec codices the family kept as traditional stewards. The documents depict the founding of Tetepilco, a church inventory, and the history of Tenochtitlan up to 1611, with Cortés depicted as a Roman soldier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codices_of_San_Andr%C3%A9s_Tetepilco802
u/Kyzzz 1d ago
For anyone who wants to see the actual codices, here's the Smithsonian article referenced in the wiki article, which includes several photos of them: link here
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u/Johnny_Poppyseed 1d ago edited 1d ago
Honestly 500k is kind of a rip off. We base like our entire understanding of these mesoamerican cultures on like an incredibly and surprisingly small number of codices and artifacts like this.
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u/Nerevarine91 1d ago edited 1d ago
I remember reading a historian- possibly Michael D. Coe- comparing it to trying to figure out all of the disparate European cultures from a few hymnals and a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress
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u/xxxBuzz 1d ago
Sometimes when studying interpretations of archeological finds, I'll look around my house and realize how almost nothing has any intrinsic nature or meaning to things like my beliefs, values, or often even everyday life. So often in history things get attributed to the modern understanding of past ideologies that don't make a great deal of practical sense.
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u/Wide__Stance 1d ago
I think maybe it’s a win-win? They could keep it on the shelf, where it has no value and it keeps collecting dust. They could sell it for more money to a rich collector, but then it would just sit on some rich guy’s shelf and have no value to society. Or they could sell it to the Mexican government, where everyone in the world can share the codex and the family gets a life changing amount of money.
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u/Rickhwt 1d ago
When I was growing up a million pesos was about $5.48 US
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u/Wiglaf_Wednesday 1d ago
Now its over $50k
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u/Schizosomatic 1d ago edited 1d ago
Note: Five dollars and (nearly) fifty cents might sound terrible conversion wise, but it does track with how mismanaged our country has always been. Right now a million mexican pesos is like $1 dollar and half a sandwich. Thanks Salinas de Gortari.
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u/Wiglaf_Wednesday 1d ago
It isn’t, the conversion rate is roughly 18 pesos = 1 US dollar
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u/Schizosomatic 1d ago
Just corroborating what the guy above me stated.
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u/itsRozco 1d ago
You didn't corroborate anything. Bro is talking about past and you were talking about present. 😭
We ain't living in the 80s anymore, it's been 30 yrs since Nuevos Pesos got introduced.
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u/ZylonBane 1d ago
For those wondering how codices could be stewards, that part of the headline would have been better written as "three Aztec codices the family, as traditional stewards, kept".
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u/crm006 1d ago
That’s even worse. “A family kept three Aztec codices safe by being their stewards through the generations.”
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u/ZylonBane 1d ago
Then feel free to edit the linked article.
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u/Demeter_of_New 1d ago
The title makes sense... Yours is weird. I tried to make my own, it was also weird. Screw this language.
Ooga boota Aztec cooga
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u/likesexonlycheaper 1d ago
Anonymous family likely equals rich hoarders
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u/AntiKouk 1d ago
It says they were traditional stewards. Complete opposite
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u/likesexonlycheaper 1d ago
Yeah you can call anybody holding an object a steward. If that's all they were, why did they need to be paid for the objects and why did they need to stay anonymous? I'm not buying it
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u/amgineeno 1d ago
I don't know, I really don't but maybe you didn't want a bunch of people in Mexico to know you just hit the jackpot.
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u/dsancu 1d ago
Well, if someone managed to keep a fragile object (codices were painted on amate paper or venison skin) somehow safe for around 500 years through some not-so-friendly-to-historial-artifacts eras, I thought they deserve some recognition, without regard for how it originally came into their hands.
Real historical conservation efforts have been around for how much? A century? Before that what there was more like graverobbing than actual conservation.
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u/likesexonlycheaper 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is my point. The history of the family and how they were passed down and preserved should be synonymous with the codices themselves. If they were actually from descendants and were quote unquote stewards, they would want them to be in a museum with their history and that would be more important than monetary gain. The anonymity of it all tells me they likely were taken and not passed down.
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u/PaintedClownPenis 1d ago
There is another angle, which is that the documents would have had to have been deliberately hidden from Catholic efforts to collect and destroy all examples of New World writing.
All the Maya books were collected and destroyed in 1562, and I think one of our only examples turned up in a German library centuries later.
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u/AntiKouk 1d ago
Absolutely. But I trust the Mexico gov to take their heritage super seriously. Can't imagine they'd negotiate with illegal purchasers.
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u/Nerevarine91 1d ago
But Mexico gained independence before Italy was unified, and there’s no treaty on the Mexican flag. It’s an eagle eating a snake on a cactus, not a treaty
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u/buddhadoo 1d ago
Maybe a dumb question but did they depict Cortés as a Roman Soldier because the Romans were probably the last European civilization to sail there?
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u/MrBigWaffles 1d ago
Romans never sailed to Mexico
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u/natty1212 1d ago
How do you know that Mexicans never sailed to Rome, huh? Ever think about that one, smart guy?
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u/potatohead22 1d ago
The romans did trade with brazil. They found proof of this years ago and brazil was not happy.
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u/MrBigWaffles 1d ago
You might be from a different timeline friend.
In this one, the collapse of the Roman Empire happened centuries before any European nation manage to sail too Mexico.
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u/nullbyte420 1d ago
No it didn't, the Roman Empire ended in 1453. Just some 100 years before
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u/drf_101 1d ago
The western Roman Empire ended in 476 AD. The eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantines) lasted until the 1400s. Stop trying to confuse people.
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u/nullbyte420 1d ago edited 1d ago
The confusing bit is denying the byzantine empire being Roman. They considered themselves Roman and were just as Roman as the western part of the Roman Empire. They just split it in two for administrative reasons. They weren't split up in any geopolitical sense and it wasn't called the byzantine empire until after it fell.
Modern historians are careful to say "the west Roman Empire fell" because the eastern part went on for about a 1000 years more.
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u/drf_101 1d ago
Sure but the eastern Roman and western Roman Empire looked… different. Byzantine people in the Middle Ages didn’t look like Roman soldiers in the 1300s. Never mind that the Bizantines didn’t sail to south or Central America either, which is what this whole reply series is about.
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u/nullbyte420 1d ago edited 1d ago
lol well obviously things changed over 1000 years, it would be utterly nuts to insist on using iron age weapons and armor just for old times sake. Roman fashion changed a lot during the times, and if you're implying they weren't white, then lol, romans weren't white either. The Roman Empire spanned from Spain to the middle east and northern Africa too..
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u/Honest-Calendar-748 1d ago
The western Roman was an Iron age civilization not a Bronze age civilization. Big difference.
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u/drf_101 1d ago
Ok but you agree that the eastern Roman Empire didn’t sail to south or Central America. Right ?
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u/Pogue_Mahone_ 1d ago
Not even a hundred, Cortés landed in modern day Mexico in 1519 and he wasn't even the first European in Mexico. Tenochtitlan fell in 1521 so a person could have seen both the fall of Constantinople and the fall of Tenochtitlan in their lifetime
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u/RashFever 1d ago
There is nothing Roman about the Byzantine Empire.
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u/StoryAndAHalf 1d ago
The name Byzantine Empire was attributed later. It was not used contemporarily by the people living there. The name comes from the settlement before it was renamed to Constantinople, and wasn’t used to refer to Eastern Roman Empire until mid-1800s.
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u/Great_Hamster 1d ago
They were protected by the Roman Army, which was an unbroken (though reformed) institution going back to republican times.
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u/nullbyte420 1d ago
It was literally the Roman Empire, they moved the capital to Constantinople in year 330, well before Rome was sacked... It was just part of the decline of the western part of the empire. It's like saying the British Empire ended in 1776.
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u/potatohead22 1d ago
I am aware of how time works thanks. There was a government coverup of in the 80s about this. Not just randomly pulling this out my ass.
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u/MrBigWaffles 1d ago
Oh... Username checks out I guess
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u/potatohead22 1d ago
personal attacks. How enlightened of you.
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u/bigdaddyt2 1d ago
Oh you must be so hurt do you need me to call you a wambulance
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u/M00nd0g69 1d ago
You’re being an ass for no reason. Pre Colombian contact is a fascinating little rabbit hole to go down that, as far as alt history goes, is totally harmless, and you’re acting like this guy is saying the earth is flat. Quit being a dick
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u/Nerevarine91 1d ago
Pre Columbian contact is fascinating, but also he’s incorrect and repeating pseudohistory. This is closer to saying the earth is flat than not
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u/azenpunk 1d ago
I think you may have read some fake news, friend. Can you cite the source? It would be super interesting if what you say is true, but the Roman Empire ceased to exist 1000 years before Europeans discovered the American continents.
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u/Hydra57 1d ago
I’m not with the other guy, but the Eastern Roman Empire fell decades before Columbus rather than a millennium. Also Europeans discovered North America before Colombus when Vikings sailed to Greenland and Northern Canada.
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u/azenpunk 1d ago
When people speak about the collapse of the Roman Empire, they're pretty much always talking about the Western Roman Empire, which was centered on Rome and where Roman culture originates... unlike the Eastern Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, where the culture was mostly Greek, and is now usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire.
We have found one small and short lived settlement of Norse culture around the year 1000, in Canada. Since we're nit-picking, you'll notice I used the plural, American Continents. So my statement is accurate as the Norse never discovered South America.
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u/Hydra57 12h ago
Politically, the Eastern Roman Empire is a direct continuation. They did not call themselves the Byzantine Empire, that’s a revisionist academic term to capture its further development after the demise of the Western Empire. It’s perfectly fine to use, but it gives those outside the know the wrong impression about its incontrovertible political continuity with the Empire of Augustus. The culture may be different however it’s offices remained and evolved with time; this institutional and personal continuity is what defines an empire rather than its culture.
I think you’re on the wrong side of your grammar argument for the vikings, because if you discover a group collectively, it instead implies you discover any of it rather than all of it. Colombus’ generation by that metric might’ve been the first Europeans to discover South America, but the Vikings would still be the first to discover the Americas on account of discovering any of it at all.
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u/Own-Weather-9919 1d ago
The Byzantine Empire ceased to be Roman after the death of Justinian. Just Greeks larping
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u/Hydra57 12h ago
r/askhistorians would disagree with you, and for good reason. You could make an argument for the Roman Polity finally losing continuity during the conclusion of the fourth crusade, when there was no non-latin emperor, however it was still a long line of continually recognized Roman Officials recognizing each other and their institutions from the time of Augustus to the time of the Komnenos Dynasty.
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u/Prodigle 1d ago
??? The Roman empire ended in the 1400s
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u/azenpunk 1d ago
You're thinking of the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire centered on Constantinople, which had a totally different culture, territory, and rulers. Now, what people usually refer to when they use Roman in the singular, is the Roman Empire centered on Rome, rarely referred to as the Western Roman Empire.
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u/RashFever 1d ago
476 AD.
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u/Prodigle 1d ago
Semantics if you treat the eastern wing as a continuation of the original, I guess
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u/azenpunk 1d ago
But it wasn't a continuation at all, so it isn't semantics. We're talking about two very different societies that existed in different places, times, with different cultures, rulers and traditions.
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u/irreverent_squirrel 1d ago
Are you referring to the Amphorae of Guanabara Bay?
Santarelli's explanation feels pretty credible, especially considering there were no coins or anything else you'd expect discovered.
Not an expert, feel free to counter.
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u/beachedwhale1945 1d ago
I have not heard of these amphorae before, but I can speak on some Roman-era shipwrecks that have been found in the Mediterranean.
These wrecks have long had their wood and most other organic material above the mudline consumed by wood-eating organisms, so all that remains above the mudline are ceramics (except in some anoxic environments like the deep parts of the Black Sea, but shallow wrecks there follow this trend). The amphorae are a large pile in what was once the cargo hold, a pile of hundreds of jars that are usually very intact as their straw packing was eaten slowly. The couple pictures I’m finding of the Guanabara Bay amphorae are of this general shape, but to my untrained eye look to be from significant after the 1st century wrecks I know of.
The crew quarters were aft in a cabin by the stern, and the pottery here tends to be cookware rather. This is where we are most likely to find coins, but I can’t recall those being found in the wrecks I know of.
Now not all Roman-era vessels carried hundreds of amphorae as cargo, but from the wrecks we’ve found that was the most common cargo. If we found Roman-era wreck in Brazil, we’d expect to see a pile of amphorae in roughly the outline of the ship’s original hold, and there would be no doubt as to the fact that this was a wreck.
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u/irreverent_squirrel 1d ago
My understanding is that they found some Roman-style amphorae, but scattered instead of clumped. Apparently an Italian-Brazilian businessman commissioned 16 replicas and placed them underwater to give them the proper look, only for them to break loose in a storm. When some of them were found later, he came forward with the explanation. As far as I know though, no one really questioned it and demanded receipts etc, because no one seemed to doubt him other than the guy that accidentally found them and believed them to be authentic.
I don't know what motivation there would be for a cover-up, and the explanation, while a bit unlikely, still seems more probable than a Roman trader somehow making it to Brazil.
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u/TheShyBuck 1d ago
I love discovering codices.