STONE IDOL: THE GODDESS COATLICUE, WITH MOSAIC DECORATION
NATIONAL MUSEUM, MEXICO
PL. III
STAFF AND RATTLE OF WOOD WITH MOSAIC DECORATION
PEABODY MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE
The second part was a copy of the Tribute Roll above referred to. These pictures were given to other Indians for the interpretation of their import, which was written down in the Nahuatl language, and another person, well versed in both the Indian and Spanish languages, made a translation into Spanish, which was incorporated in the book. It was then despatched to Spain, probably about the year 1549, but the vessel was captured by French pirates, and the book came into the hands of the French geographer, André Thevet, in 1553. After Thevet’s death it was purchased, about the year 1584, by Richard Hakluyt, at that time chaplain to the English Ambassador to France. Hakluyt bequeathed the volume to Samuel Purchas, who published it, without colors, with an English translation of the text, in Purchas His Pilgrimes, London, 1625. The English text was translated into French and accompanied with the plates was published by Melchisedec Thevenot in his Relations des Divers Voyages, in 1663. The codex ultimately became the property of Selden, and with some other original Mexican codices later became a part of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it is now preserved. In 1831, Lord Kingsborough issued it for the first time in colors, together with a new and more accurate English rendering of the Spanish text, in his monumental work on the Antiquities of Mexico.
The Tribute Roll was published by Archbishop Lorenzana in Mexico in 1770, in his edition of the Cartas de Cortés, the drawing, uncolored, being traced in a very inferior manner from the original in Mexico. Finally, Dr. Antonio Peñafiel included a beautiful colored facsimile of the Tribute Roll in his work, Monumentos del Arte Mexicano Antiguo, published in Berlin in 1890, the missing leaves, in Philadelphia, being reproduced from a very poor drawing of the codex on European paper, probably executed for Boturini. These leaves were published in exact facsimile in 1892, with an article entitled, The Tribute Roll of Montezuma, edited by Dr. D. G. Brinton and Henry Phillips, in vol. XVII of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.
Fig. 1