The Codex Telleriano Remensis, created in the 16th century in Mexico, depicts earthquakes in pictograms that are the first written evidence of earthquakes in the Americas in pre-Hispanic times, according to a pair of researchers who have systematically studied the country’s historical earthquakes.
Gerardo Suarez of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Virginia Garcia-Acosta of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social studied pictograms reporting 12 earthquakes in the Telleriano-Remensis, occurring between 1460 and 1542.
The pictograms offer little information on the location, size or damage caused by the earthquakes, the authors note in the journal Seismological Research Letters. But along with other historical accounts found in annals written after the Spanish conquest, they extend the region’s seismic history back into the 15th century.
«It is not surprising that pre Hispanic records exist describing earthquakes for two reasons,» said Suarez. «Earthquakes are frequent in this country and, secondly, earthquakes had a profound meaning in the cosmological view of the original inhabitants of what is now Mexico.»
Mesoamerican civilizations viewed the universe as cyclical, with successive eras or «suns» destroyed by floods, wind, fire and other phenomena before the appearance of a new sun. The current and fifth «sun, «according to this view, will be destroyed by earthquakes.
Suarez and Garcia-Acosta began studying historical earthquakes in Mexico after the devastating magnitude 8.0 Mexico City earthquake in 1985, eventually publishing their findings in the book Los sismos en la historia de Mexico. «However, we had not tackled the pictographic representation of earthquakes,» said Suarez. «We recently embarked on a more detailed study of this pictographic representation and other texts written immediately after the Spanish conquest.»
Codex writing, a pre-Hispanic system of symbols and colors, was done by trained specialists called tlacuilos (in the original Nahuatl language, «those who write painting»). While many codices were burned as pagan objects after the Spanish conquest, some survived and the pictographic style was used in new codices up into the 18th century.
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