Las flores en los códices indígenas de México

Abstract

The indigenous tribes inhabiting the area of the present Mexico in the pre-Hispanic times managed to develop various systems of graphic register. Although the usage of phonographic writing was well documented only for two of those cultures, namely the Mayas and the Zapotecs, most of the groups of the region had some kind of graphic representation to code chosen messages. The communication used by the Nahua and the Mixtec tribes could be classified as basically semasiogarphic, that is able to represent the ideas but not the language. The main aim of the proposed work is to focus on the representations of flowers in the codices of the ancient Nahuas and Mixtecs, and analyze their direct and symbolic meaning encoded not only in the form, but also in the context in which given representations are situated. The graphic information will be then compared and contrasted with the other colonial sources such as chronicles, annals, ethnographic descriptions and transcriptions of the indigenous oral tradition. The language used in the last ones will serve as a basis for the reconstruction of the way in which the ancient Nahuas used to conceptualize some aspects of the surrounding reality