Mexico Launches App to Study 16th-Century Colonial Codex

laht.com

MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History, or INAH, has launched an app that enables the general public to study the Mendoza Codex, a 16th-century document detailing economic, political and social conditions in the lands newly conquered by Spain.

The digital edition of the Mendoza Codex, preserved at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, is “a first effort made to repatriate in virtual form a Mexican document kept abroad,” INAH said in a statement.

The new app – accessible at www.codicemendoza.inah.gob.mx – and downloadable for free on mobile devices – allows users to read the codex and its “in situ” translations into English or Spanish, and also to examine its physical features and to link directly to related multimedia content.

The app is further enriched by maps that correlate with the information presented in the codex and by a timescale.

“Codices were systems for recording knowledge and operating on different levels of communication,” INAH said. “It is almost natural to employ multimedia and interactive tools to present them.”

Considered by the INAH as “one of the primary sources for the study of pre-Columbian Mexico,” the codex was compiled in 1542 on the order of the Spanish colonial viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza.

In 72 illustrated and annotated pages in Nahuatl – the language of the Aztecs – and 63 pages in Spanish, the Mendoza Codex provides an overview of the socio-economic conditions in the territories conquered by the Spaniards.

Mexican scribes illustrated the pages on Spanish paper and although the Mendoza Codex was dispatched to king, French pirates intercepted the document in 1549.