According to a pair of researchers who have systematically studied Mexico's historical earthquakes, a 500-year-old Aztec manuscript is the first "written" evidence of earthquakes in the Americas, the Seismological Society of America reports.
The Codex Telleriano-Remensis, produced in sixteenth century Mexico on European paper, is one of the finest surviving examples of Aztec manuscript painting. It is a solar and lunar calendar that records historical events, such as the ascensions and deaths of rulers, battles, earthquakes, and solar eclipses, as pictograms - little drawings telling a story.
According to the study published in the journal Seismological Research Letters by Gerardo Suárez of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Virginia García-Acosta of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, the pictograms in the Telleriano-Remensis record 12 earthquakes occurring between 1460 and 1542.
The pictograms offer little information on the location, size or damage caused by the earthquakes, but thanks to symbols referring to specific solar eclipses or days, and explanations written in Latin, Spanish and sometimes Italian by later commentators alongside the symbols, it is possible to date the events. One pictogram shows an earthquake happening in the year 1507, an event associated with a solar eclipse, destroying a temple and drowning 1,800 warriors in an unidentified river, presumably in southern Mexico.
"It is not surprising that pre Hispanic records exist describing earthquakes for two reasons," said Suárez. "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 natural disasters before the appearance of a new sun. The current and fifth "sun," according to this view, will be destroyed by earthquakes. In Aztec mythology, Tepeyollotl ("heart of the mountains") was the god of darkened caves, earthquakes, echoes and jaguars.
In Aztec mythology, Tepeyollotl ("heart of the mountains") was the god of darkened caves, ... [+]
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Earthquakes, called tlal-ollin or nahui-ollin in the Nahuatl language, are represented by two symbols used in the pictograms: ollin (movement) and tlalli (earth). Ollin is a glyph consisting of four helices (representing the four cardinal directions of the Earth) and a central eye or circle. Tlalli is a glyphconsisting of one or several layers filled with dots and different colors (representing precious gemstones). In the Telleriano-Remensis, there are other modifications of the earthquake glyphs, but their meanings are still not clear to scholars.
Presentation of nahui-ollin (Four Movement), showing an eye (ixtli) is the center. From the Codex ... [+]
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Suárez and García-Acosta note that other annals offer information that complements the codex earthquake drawings, perhaps filling in more details about the impacts and locations of specific earthquakes. For example, a historical account by the Franciscan friar Juan de Torquemada describes a 1496 earthquake that shook three mountains in "Xochitepec province, along the coast" and caused landslides in an area inhabited by the Yope people.
The site is within the Guerrero seismic gap, a region of relative seismic quiet along the subduction zone in southern Mexico. The historical descriptions suggest that the 1496 earthquake might have been a very large earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or larger within the gap. There have been no recorded earthquakes of that magnitude in the gap since 1845.
The historical evidence "really does not change our view of the seismic potential of that region in southern Mexico," Suárez explained. "It simply adds additional evidence that great earthquakes have occurred in this segment of the subduction zone before, and the absence of these major earthquakes for several years should not be considered as though this region is aseismic."
Suárez and García-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 México. "However, we had not tackled the pictographic representation of earthquakes," said Suárez. "We recently embarked on a more detailed study of this pictographic representation and other texts written immediately after the Spanish conquest."
Codex writing was done by trained specialists called tlacuilos, meaning "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 eighteenth century.
The researchers plan to study other codices that are not as well-known as the Telleriano-Remensis, but have so far been unable to access the libraries that hold them due to COVID-19 restrictions.
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