Prized Aztec manuscript returns to Mexico, on loan, nearly 200 years after France took it

MEXICO CITY, Sept 17 — A cherished 16th-century Mexican manuscript that tells the history of the Aztecs in pictograms goes on display Thursday in Mexico City, nearly two centuries after it was whisked off to France.

The Codex Azcatitlan recounts the history of the Aztec civilisation, from the creation of the Aztec Empire to its fall during the Spanish conquest, which ushered in Christianity.

Created shortly after the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, it is considered one of the most important accounts of Indigenous Mexica, or Aztec, history.

France’s National Library, which has had possession of it for over a century, loaned it to Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology to commemorate 200 years of relations between Mexico and France.

Its return to Mexico comes as successive left-wing Mexican governments step up efforts to recover colonial-era cultural objects held outside the country.

Since 2018, over 16,200 items have been repatriated from various countries, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History said last year.

President Claudia Sheinbaum pressed her counterpart Emmanuel Macron to return the Codex Azcatitlan and another precious manuscript, the Codex Borbonicus, during a visit by the Frenchman to Mexico City last year.

Both are “very important to Mexico,” she said.

The Codex Azcatitlan narrates the Aztec migration from Aztlan, the mythical birthplace of Aztec civilisation, to the promised land of Tenochtitlan, the forerunner of Mexico City.

“It combines the pre-Hispanic drawing system, but already incorporates figures with a more realistic vision,” Diego Prieto, former director of the Institute of Anthropology, explained at an event in July.

Those figures, he said, “clearly refer to figures from the conquest and figures related to the cultural, urban, and architectural changes that occurred afterward.”

History of tensions 

The manuscript, which fills 25 sheets of parchment that were imported from Europe in the 16th century, was donated to the National Library of France in 1898 by the widow of the Franco-Mexican collector Eugene Goupil.

It was brought to France half a century earlier by Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin, a French researcher specialising in Indigenous American cultures.

The codex is one of two volumes illustrating Indigenous Mexica life that have been kept in France, to Mexico’s annoyance.

The other is the Codex Borbonicus, which represents the “divinatory and solar calendars” of the Mexica civilisation, according to the French culture ministry.

It is kept at the library of French parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly.

In 1982, the issue of colonial-era relics led to tensions between Mexico and France when a Mexican lawyer, Jose Luis Castaneda, stole another manuscript, the Codex Tonalamatl, from France’s National Library and brought it back to Mexico.

France expressed anger over what it described as theft but the codex remained in Mexico.

Both the National Assembly and National Library say their possession of the two other codices is legal and defend the principle of “inalienability of public collections” in France.

Neither work was included in a law adopted by the French parliament in May on returning stolen colonial-era artefacts. — AFP