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This article presents and analyzes a newly discovered petroglyph from Tetzcotzinco (mun. Texcoco, Mexico) in the form of arranged pecked dots. Based on what is known about Mesoamerican divinatory systems, calendars, and the perception of space, the interpretation takes into account both the encoded numerical values and the layout of the dots. The main argument is that this and similar representations' function was not limited to simple counting of days or serving as a kind of astronomical marker, in which the arms of the cross indicated, for example, equinoxes, which is by far their most common interpretation in academic literature. Instead, it represented calendrical cycles through the numbers, as suggested by some scholars. Based on this hypothesis, the article explores the possible connection between numbers registered in Tetzcotzinco's "pecked cross" and specific diagrams from indigenous divinatory books. Therefore, the plausible interpretation of the symbolism of this petroglyph is that it either expressed a series of meanings related to the agrarian period(s) and rain god(s) or less-known Mesoamerican calendrical cycles, such as half trecenas or seven- and nine-day periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reseña del libro de Jorge Prádanos Fernández, El corpus medieval de las Siete Partidas: catálogo de códices y fragmentos. Madrid: Dykinson.

This article examines the work of the Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez, who created the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, an ongoing project begun in 2017 that consists of botanical illustrations and large-scale maps of California and northern Mexico. Rodriguez’s Codex draws on pre-Hispanic, colonial, and Chicana/o/x antecedents, most notably the Florentine Codex (sixteenth century) and the Chicana/o/x codices of the early 1990s, produced in the context of the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage. This article posits Rodriguez’s Codex as a polyphonic text that exceeds both the linguistic of the literary and the visual of the artistic, drawing on a multiplicity of sources, both historical and contemporary, visual and textual, oral and aural, in her mapping of California’s land and history. The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón collapses precolonial, colonial, and contemporary histories to underscore continuities between the ruptures of conquest and our dangerous geopolitical moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durante el siglo XVI, Cuauhtitlan era conocido por sus especialistas en la producción de loza roja, muy demandada por las élites indígena y española. Una diversidad de estas vasijas fue representada en el Códice de los alfareros de Cuauhtitlan, documento que aborda el reclamo de unos ceramistas por la paga injusta que un juez español hizo por sus productos. De tal forma, el objetivo del presente trabajo es la identificación de las formas cerámicas plasmadas en el códice, a través del método comparativo

Pliny the Elder's Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article offers a new translation of their account and a careful analysis that draws on recent work by material scientists to construct an Indigenous ontology of the image, and gives a comparison to the Plinian ideal. Crucial to both accounts is the role of the shadow as it relates to the nature of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish priests burned hundreds of images of idols, cult objects, and manuscripts with Mayan hieroglyphs following the conquest of the Yucatan Peninsula, convinced that this would encourage the indigenous population to renounce their ancient beliefs and turn to the Christian God. In so doing they destroyed the memory of a written culture that had existed for over two thousand years. Only four Maya manuscripts—the so-called codices—survived this missionary zeal and the tropical climate of the Yucatan, and these are today kept in museums and libraries in Mexico City, Madrid, Paris, and Dresden. Unlike hieroglyphic texts on stone monuments they do not relay historical events, but instead are mainly divinatory and related to the 260-day Tzolk’in calendar, holding predictive information about the success or failure of everyday activities on favourable or unfavourable days. The author uses a farmers’ almanac from the Dresden Codex to explain the function of Maya calendars, to discuss the significance of time, and to reconstruct how Mayan calendar priests would read daily predictions in the correlated images and texts and apply them to daily practice.

This essay explores the tense relationship between the oral and written transmissions in the history of the Qurʾān. While Muslim scholars consider "orality" to be the cornerstone in the process of transmitting their holy text, I argue that writing, in its various forms, was a crucial element in transmitting and validating the Qurʾān. Orality was also an important component in this process of transmission but it also played a theological role in establishing the superiority of the Qurʾān over the Bible. Indeed, the written transmission of the Qurʾān might have been more authoritative than its oral counterpart, which was/is mainly used as an argumentative device to establish the integrity of the text rather than to establish the text itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide a diachronic overview of the evolution of New Testament Coptic titles, taking into account their textual structure, location inside the manuscript, and ornamental devices. The evolution of a title is not only related to the role of the chronological phase of the book production it belongs to, but also dependent upon the geographic area where its translation—from Greek to Coptic—took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importantes testimonios sobre al-Andalus han llegado hasta nuestros días gracias a la conservación de distintos manuscritos realizados por cronistas e historiadores andalusíes permitiéndonos conocer las raíces de la historia. Los sabios andalusíes dominaron las humanidades, las ciencias y artes, lo que llevó a mostrar en sus tratados una amplia perspectiva sobre la vida cultural de al-Andalus. Para realizar una reconstrucción histórica de la música en al-Andalus, se cuenta con tres importantes fuentes de documentación. Por un lado, estarían los tratados, más o menos específicos sobre música, por otro la poesía, la cual refleja la gran presencia de la música en la vida andalusí, y por último la jurisprudencia, donde se puede observar el peso que la música tenía en al-Andalus a través de la legislación específica. El objetivo de este artículo se centra en mostrar las fuentes que citan instrumentos musicales dentro de un escenario especifico y detallar cuáles son los aludidos, para ello en primer lugar se hará un recorrido por los principales arabistas que han traducido y analizado los distintos códices, posteriormente se presentará cada uno de los perfiles musicales de los sabios andalusíes y sus trabajos al respecto, así como los medios donde los muestran.

We carry out a mathematical analysis of the quadrilateral fields from Codex Santa María Asunción and compare it with similar previous results from Codex Vergara, as well as analyze fields with more than four sides from both codices. We also provide a computational tool to draw all the possible shapes of the fields. Finally, we use the concept of maximum area to test the feasibility of the areas recorded in the codices and conclude that the Acolhua were very good surveyors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide a diachronic overview of the evolution of New Testament Coptic titles, taking into account their textual structure, location inside the manuscript, and ornamental devices. The evolution of a title is not only related to the role of the chronological phase of the book production it belongs to, but also dependent upon the geographic area where its translation—from Greek to Coptic—took place.

El artículo trata de la relación de música y sociedad en el contexto cultural mexica, las escuelas de enseñanza y la organización del servicio ritual de los templos, los cargos y diferencias de maestros que tenían para la instrucción de los jóvenes que se dedicaban al servicio de ellos. Las danzas dedicadas a deidades específicas, según los dictados del Calendario Ceremonial (Cempoalapohualli), la predestinación para la música, cifrada en el Calendario Adivinatorio (Tonalpohualli), los servicios prestados por los jóvenes a los templos (velar, coger leña, mantener los fuegos rituales y los cantos y bailes adecuados para cada momento litúrgico). El uso ritual de alucinógenos. Y los instrumentos musicales prehispánicos.

Scholars have proposed that for decades after the conquest of Yucatan Maya scribes wielded competence in both the old hieroglyphic and the new Latinbased alphabetic scripts. During that time some scribes apparently worked furtively to transfer parts of their pre-conquest traditions, encoded in hieroglyphic codices, into new forms of alphabetic-based writing such as the Books of Chilam Balam and other forbidden works. Various types of evidence --historical and philological-- have been offered to substantiate claims concerning the lingering effects of hieroglyphic writing practices upon Maya use of the alphabetic script in early colonial times. In the light of new evidence from twentieth-century Maya scribal practice, this paper demonstrates that previously published arguments, especially those developed in an influential series of papers by distinguished Mayanist Victoria Bricker, can no longer be considered valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grapheme T648 in the Maya script occurs exclusively in the Postclassic period. Whether it is a CV syllable or a CVC logogram has been in question. In this paper we resolve that issue. Also, we suggest that the Classic version of the sign is T694, which led us to query relevant environments of both versions of the grapheme. We have found a solid substitution in the Postclassic codices with which we can answer several unknown collocations in the Classic Period. We offer CVC and V values for T648/694 and demonstrate their productivity in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of several historical texts in the Maya codices reveals that droughts were a significant concern to the pre-ColumbianMaya that ultimately resulted in the collapse of their civilization. The effects of such droughts mentioned in those texts include damage to crops, famine, and wildfires. The dates assigned to five droughts in the codical texts agree with dates obtained from the analysis of lacustrine cores and stalagmites in caves by climatologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Holy Qur'an is the most protected book revealed by Allah but a number of orientalists are resolutely a devouring to prove this reverend book as falsified like other revealed books. There has been a great difference of opinion between Easter Muslim theologians and the orientalists on the preservation of book of Allah. Although Orientalist admits the reality of unanimous consent about Mushaf-e-Usmani and used non-recurrent traditions in their favor. A.T. Welch the author of Al Kur'an article in Encyclopedia of Islam has based on Jeffery's book "Materials for the History of the text of the Qur'an", traditions attributed to the names of companions and successors and all were included in the compilation of Holy Qur'an in the time period of (...), Abu Baker and Usman (R.A). Orientalists could not know that such a large number of Muslims particularly the companions (R.A) could not think of implement a dialect that had not been attributed to the person other than the Holy Prophet (...). While discussing different dialects of the Holy Qur'an. Orientalists could not follow the principles of Higher criticism in spite of the unrealistic claims because they did not include the findings research report of the Head of Qur'anic Archive Professor Bergistarasser in their analytical study. According to that report there are errors of copying in all the 42000 Qur'anic scripts but no difference of text is found in any of them. The Muslim Ummah has unanimously stated three reasons to accept dialects: i.e:, Conformity of Arabic dictionary, continuous documentation and dialect according to the orthography of 'Usman Script'. All other-dialects were considered infrequent. In this article different readings of the of Holy Qur'an and preservation have been discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often said that palaeographic analysis of Greek literary manuscripts from the Roman era has progressed from an aesthetic judgment to more of a science, thanks largely to increased data (in the form of newly discovered papyri and parchments from Egypt) and to more sophisticated ways of describing similarity and difference in handwriting. This progress is frequently taken to mean that we may now use the analysis of handwriting to assign dates to undated manuscripts with much greater precision and accuracy than was possible a century ago. This article questions this conclusion by focusing on neglected methodological points that specifically relate to the problem of palaeographic dating of codices, namely the size and character of the corpus of securely datable samples to which the handwriting of undated codices is compared. This problem is especially relevant for early Christian books, the surviving examples of which tend to be copied in the codex format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 6 November 2018 until 10 February 2019, the National Széchényi Library organized an exhibition of surviving items from the Bibliotheca Corviniana under the title The Corvina Library and the Buda Workshop. The exhibition, as its title suggests, focused on a single scholarly issue, the book production workshop established at the royal court. It showed how the purposeful process of library building (including the commissioning of books from Italy) was directed from Buda and which methods were used for the systematic development of the library. The exhibition had a monographic character and can be regarded the first survey of the subject. Therefore, the intention was to present not only the results of the research involved but also the process of reasoning and reaching the conclusions presented in the narrative. As a result, at the time of the exhibition and during its preparation, information transfer was happening at both cognitive and emotional levels. The nature of this information transfer was determined by the role certain pieces of information played in the story, depending on whether these were of primary or secondary character, explicitly communicated and centrally positioned, or used as a 'supporting act', making peripheral statements, acting as an emotionally charged but figurative account. Information was communicated explicitly through the detailed texts (object labels and summaries) and audiovisual displays accessible on screens, which demonstrated the process of research that went into the exhibition. The accompanying publications transmitted the main message on three levels. The exhibition, displaying 62 renaissance luxury codices, showed the power of homogeneity in a special way. The cultural and artistic aspect of the exhibition was exceptionally intensive, which enriched the visitors' reception of it, creating a sense of completeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[pt] Portugal herdou do reino mater de Leão as fontes jurídicas e os seus primeiros códices de Direito. Com o renascimento jurídico do Direito romano, os textos de Ius commune –que chegam muito cedo, logo no século XII– passam a preencher o quotidiano jurídico do reino, desde a media aetas até ao movimento iluminista de finais do século XVIII. Ingentes esforços de investigação se tem feito para localizar cronológica e espacialmente os restos indiciários desses medievos textos jurídicos. Este trabalho pretende fazer uma súmula, com vista a uma perspectiva integral e actualizada, do status quaestionis desta temática.

The collection of manuscripts at the Cistercian library in Szczyrzyc amounts to 100 volumes, including four medieval codices dated between 1460–1494; 12 manuscript books dated to the 17 th century; 57 dated to the 18 th century, and 27 manuscripts dated to the 19 th century. Most of them are textbooks, copies of theological, philosophical and legal treatises, works on rhetoric, liturgy, world history, mathematics and herbal medicine, as well as books of homilies for special occasions and feasts. The collection of manuscripts at the monastery in Szczyrzyc is mostly a functional one – it was used by the monks to study and broaden their philosophical, theological, legal and liturgical knowledge. Several codices contain the texts of homilies delivered at various churches on feast days and solemnities, written down by the monks of Szczyrzyc. The surviving codices are bound in simple covers made of damaged folios taken out from liturgical codices, including antiphonaries and graduals. Considering the small number of surviving books, it is difficult to discuss the interests or influences of particular authors and their works on the intellectual level of the religious community of Szczyrzyc.

Este trabajo combina el estudio de los ritos sacrificiales y las reflexiones sobre el poder expresivo y la agentividad de ciertas imágenes del arte prehispánico de Mesoamérica. Se propone un enfoque que parte del estudio etnográfico de la complejidad relacional de los rituales. Se estudian casos donde se observa un “desdoblamiento de la representación” en el sentido de Boas y Lévi-Strauss: la estatua conocida como la Coatlicue de la Sala Mexica del Museo Nacional de Antropología y la página 32 del códice Borgia. En ambos casos el desdoblamiento de la representación aparece en contextos de decapitación ritual; aparece una nueva cabeza en face formada por dos serpientes de sangre o por dos cuchillos de sacrificio personificados en perfil. La ambigüedad de estas figuraciones expresa el estatus ontológico problemático de los seres creados en el sacrifici

The casting of maize seeds is a tool used by contemporary daykeepers in the Ayöök (Mixe) area of Oaxaca, Mexico, which along with the prognostications and prescriptions of the 260-day calendar, helps to cure illnesses and afflictions. This divinatory practice was also employed by precolonial tonalpouhque, who were experts of reading the tonalamatl, the pictographic manuscripts with calendrical, ritual and oracular content, such as the now called Borgia Group codices. In this article maize divination will be described and analyzed, arguing that maize divination results in images that can be read in a similar way to these codices. The reading of maize is approached here by employing the concepts of signs and symbols as described by Carl Jung and the notions of chronotope and dialogical narratives by Mikhail Bakhtin. The Jungian understanding of divinatory practices as a means of gaining consciousness of oneself is also applied to argue in favor of the therapeutic capacity of reading maize, as it offers relief and triggers action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se hace un resumen de la biografía de Leonardo da Vinci y se mencionan las diferentes facetas de su genio, sin embargo, se procura hacer énfasis sobre sus inquietudes científicas y, principalmente, técnicas. Esto con el fin de poder sopesar desapasionadamente las reales contribuciones de Leonardo a la ingeniería. Se concluye que esos aportes fueron muchos más en el campo de las ideas que en el de las aplicaciones prácticas. Sin embargo, la visión, la inquietud, la correlación entre el saber ver, la ciencia y la praxis hacen que Leonardo sea, verdaderamente, el primer ingeniero moderno

El documento del que en estas páginas se habla es un importante manuscrito pictográfico del México antiguo elaborado durante la Colonia. Como otros muchos documentos de aquella época, pasó de mano en mano formando parte de las grandes colecciones de los personajes de más renombre del México colonial, moderno y contemporáneo. Finalmente, en 1904, fue rescatado por el entonces Museo Nacional de donde había sido sustraído, al tenerse noticias de que estaba a la venta en un bazar de antigüedades de la Ciudad de México. El objetivo del presente trabajo es dar a conocer las vicisitudes por las que pasaron muchos de los documentos con los que hoy trabajamos, así como los pasos a seguir en su búsqueda. Para esto hemos tomado como ejemplo La Pintura de la Peregrinación de los culhuas-mexitin.

Created in late sixteenth-century Mexico City, theCodex Mexicanusis an extensive bound book of miscellaneous contents, including a rare pictorial genealogy of the Tenochca dynastic lineage that traces the family line from its ancient origins to its colonial descendants. TheCodex Mexicanus, as a whole, represents an attempt by its patrons and contributors to reconcile the Mexica past and the Christian present, and the inclusion of a genealogy in the larger book suggests that the Mexica royal house was believed to play an important role in this process. By providing a reading of the genealogy and comparing it with others, both native and European, I show that it presents a unique view of the Tenochca royal house that emphasizes its integrity and antiquity and in so doing effectively excludes outsiders who, at the time the codex was being created, were increasingly making claims on Mexica privileges without the proper family connections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT The discovery of mural paintings at the Classic Maya site of Xultun, Guatemala, provides an important context for the study of ancient literacy and writing in practice. The mural chamber was a place of writing where the hands of multiple scribes recorded events and astronomical tabulations on walls that were also painted with portraits of ritual specialists and the reigning king. We present evidence suggesting that creation and inscription of indigenous Maya books, called codices, also took place onsite by a specific cohort of ritual specialists called taaj. In this article, we seek to archaeologically 'situate' these codex-like inscriptions in the mural room-revealing a crucial and distinctly Precolumbian window (as opposed to colonial Spanish view) into Maya bookmaking, its practitioners, and the physical contexts in which it was carried out. Together, the images, texts, and archaeological materials found in and around the chamber enable us to contextualize acts of writing and their authorship as well as engage larger questions regarding the social and political structures shaping literacy in Maya society during the eighth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Os fragmentos de antigos códices em pergaminho, especialmente quando manuscritos em séculos anteriores ao aparecimento do livro impresso, constituem uma fonte extremamente preciosa para o conhecimento dos antigos autores da cultura ocidental e mediterrânica. Muitos desses fragmentos, utilizados nos séculos XVI a XIX como capas de livros de contabilidade e de gestão, constituem mesmo o único testemunho material de obras desaparecidas ou mesmo desconhecidas. O Projecto FRAGMED - Corpus Fragmentorum Portugaliae pretende fazer um levantamento sistemático dessas fontes para as disponibilizar à comunidade científica.

The calendar of 260 days, made up of the combination of 20 signs and 13 numbers, was one of the essential traits of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Interestingly, this calendar system persists in some contemporary communities in Mexico and Guatemala, where it is still utilized by daykeepers, also experts in ritual, divination and medicine. The present article offers a brief documentation of one of these calendars, among the Ayöök (Mixe) people of Oaxaca, Mexico. Derived from this, an analytical view is offered to provide a better understanding of its function and social significance. This work attempts to shed light on the study of Mesoamerican calendars as well as to approach the calendrical and mantic pictorial manuscripts of the Teoamoxtli (Borgia) Group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract This article gives an overview of the David Kaufmann Geniza (DKG)/Cairo collection of Arabic documents conserved at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Almost entirely unpublished and unexploited, they are the subject of a catalogue raisonné in preparation by the author. Appendix 1 provides a complete list of the DKG documents that are in Arabic or somehow bear Arabic. In Appendix 2 one item of the collection, the text of a folio of the Kitāb al-fityān, a lost book by al-Jāi, is published with two plates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A summary of Leonardo da Vinci´s life is presented and many facets of his genius are mentioned. However, emphasis is on his scientific and, mainly, technical concerns. This is done in order to dispassionately weight his actual contributions to engineering. It is concluded that those contributions were much more in the idea field that in practical applications. However, his vision, inquiring mind, and correlation between knowledge, science and praxis, make Leonardo, indeed, the first modern engineer.

Abstract: Maya Blue, a pigment composed of very low concentrations of natural indigo and the clay mineral palygorskite, is one of the most brilliant blue dyes, intensively used for more than 2000 years in Mesoamerica. It is extremely stable against environmental attacks and was applied by the Indians for inside and outside mural paintings, ceramics, textiles and for colouring their famous codices. In the present paper it was studied as a powder (compared with modern synthetic indigo) and as colour on tissues, a Maya clay head, and fragment IV of the famous Codex Huamantla. Investigations using Raman spectroscopy in the visible and near-infrared range showed a high degree of correspondence among all Maya Blue-carrying samples and a good agreement with synthetic indigo. Additional spectral lines may be explained by a transformation of the planar indigo molecule when binding to the palygorskite lattice. Thermal investigations of the original “amatl” paper of the codex and of recent paper from fig-trees showed a high similarity and thus proved that this tree was chosen for paper making by Mayas, Aztecs and other Indian tribes. This was also true for the codex. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]