1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [127]
Ñudzahui writing survives in eight codices, the deerskin or bark “books” whose painted pages could be folded like screens or hung on the wall like a mural. (The Spaniards destroyed all the rest.) More purely pictorial than Zapotec or Maya script, the texts were arranged almost randomly on the page; red lines directed the reader’s eye from image to image. The symbols included drawings of events, portraits labeled by name (the king 4-Wind, for example, being shown by symbolic wind and four little bubbles in a line), and even punning rebuses. Enough writing has survived to give, when coupled with archaeological studies, a vivid picture of Ñudzahui life.
Like medieval Italian city-states, Ñudzahui principalities were rigidly stratified, with the king and a small group of kinspeople and noble advisers gobbling up much of the wealth and land. They constantly shifted configuration, some expanding by swarming over their neighbors, others imploding when their constituent villages seceded and joined other polities. More commonly, two states joined when their rulers married. Alliance through royal marriage was as common in eleventh-century Mixteca as it was in seventeenth-century Europe. In both, royal family trees formed an intricate network across national boundaries, but in Mixteca the queen’s lands stayed in her line—the king’s heir wasn’t necessarily the queen’s heir. Another difference: primogeniture was not expected. If the queen did not think her eldest son was fit for the crown, she could pass it to another child, or even to a nephew or cousin.
No fewer than four of the codices treat the story of 8-Deer Jaguar Claw, a wily priest-general-politician with a tragic love for the wife of his greatest enemy. Born in 1063 A.D., 8-Deer was a shirttail cousin to the ruling family of Tilantongo, which had been engaged for decades in a dynastic struggle with the kingdom of Red and White Bundle. (The name, a modern invention, comes from its name-glyph, which pictures the cloth wrapping used by the Ñudzahui to wrap holy objects; its exact location is still not nailed down.) Like his father, a high cleric, 8-Deer was trained for the priesthood, but political events and his own overweening ambition stopped him from following that path.
After an unprovoked attack on Red and White Bundle by Tilantongo raised hostilities to a fever, the warring parties agreed to meet in a sacred mountain cave with the Priestess of the Dead, a powerful oracle who had stripped away the flesh from her jaw, giving her a terrifying, skull-like appearance. Tilantongo’s representative was 8-Deer, who attended the meeting in place of his recently deceased father. To his dismay, the priestess sided with Tilantongo’s enemies and ordered 8-Deer, Tilantongo’s champion, to exile himself a hundred miles away, in a jerkwater town on the Pacific called Tututepec.
Tucked away in Tututepec, 8-Deer assembled a private army, staffed it with many relatives, and in a series of swift campaigns seized dozens of neighboring villages and city-states. In addition to assembling the greatest empire ever seen in the region, the conquests managed to kill off most of the siblings and cousins above him in the line of royal succession. After six years of war he returned home to Tilantongo. During this visit, according to John M. D. Pohl, the archaeologist whose interpretations I am mostly following here, 8-Deer accidentally encountered 6-Monkey, the young wife of the much older king of Red and White Bundle. Despite the long enmity between the two kingdoms, 8-Deer and 6-Monkey secretly became lovers.
In 1096 Tilantongo’s sovereign died in mysterious circumstances. The Priestess of the Dead selected 8-Deer’s beloved elder half brother to be the regent—that is, the half brother became the last person between 8-Deer and the throne of Tilantongo. Three years later, unknown assailants stabbed the half brother to death in a sweatbath. The inconsolable 8-Deer took the throne of Tilantongo and declared war on Red and White Bundle, which he claimed had orchestrated the murder.
In this fragment