Codex Mexicanus
Colonial · Paris
What it is
A landscape strip of amate bark paper, long and narrow, read across.
What sets it apart: the old count and the Latin alphabet run on the same line. A row of discs with day-signs, and beneath them, written by hand, the letters of the alphabet.
Pre-Hispanic or not
Colonial beyond doubt: the alphabet is painted into the document, and there are Arabic figures — a «1568» — and long paragraphs in Nahuatl written in letters.
But the support and the line are those of before. Amate, not European paper. The two writings live together on the same strip.
What can be seen inside
Bands of numbered cells running side to side — 106, 107, 108… — each with its figure inside. And above, hanging from vertical lines, heads of figures with their headdresses.
What those cells count, this app does not yet say. That would take the study, which goes in another volume. Here what can be seen is described.
Two counts, not one
It carries the count of days twice. The first, on plates xiii and xiv, begins at 1 Atl, the seventeenth trecena, not the first.
And it runs incomplete: ten trecenas and two days. The second begins at 1 Cipactli and closes the codex.
Where it is
In the National Library of France, in Paris, under the shelfmark Codex Mexicanus 23-24.
Read this entry in Spanish, where the sixteenth-century sources are quoted in full.
How to cite this page
Alma Mexica, «Codex Mexicanus», The codices. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/codex/mexicanus/