Collection of Mexican Codices
Documentary heritage submitted by Mexico and recommended for inclusion in the Memory of the World Register in 1997.
The collection known as the “Colección de Códices Originales Mexicanos” (Collection of Original Mexican Codices) of the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia” comprises one pre-Hispanic codex, 92 colonial originals and 68 period facsimiles.
Most of the pictorial documents which comprise this collection were made in the sixteenth century, although a small number date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a very small number, mostly the copies, date from the nineteenth and the early twentieth century.
The pictorial documents called “codices” are the only references we have as original sources of pre-Hispanic cultures, the early relations between the native peoples and the Spanish conquistadors, and they are the only surviving examples of a reading and writing system peculiar to the cultures of Mesoamerica.