A 50-page codex of colourful, complicated pictograms that dates to the early sixteenth century consists of essentially the most full — and one of many oldest — written chronologies of early earthquakes within the Americas.
The Telleriano-Remensis, which was created by an unknown pre-Hispanic civilization, describes 12 separate earthquakes that rocked what’s now Mexico and Central America from 1460 to 1542, researchers report August 25 in Seismological Analysis Letters. The well-known codex was written by specialists referred to as tlacuilos, that means “those that write portray” within the Nahuatl language spoken by Aztecs and different pre-Hispanic civilizations within the space (SN: 3/13/20).
Utilizing different codices from the area, researchers had beforehand recognized the mix of two pictographs that denotes an earthquake. One exhibits 4 helices round a central circle or eye, and stands for ollin, that means “motion” in Nahuatl. The opposite pictograph exhibits a number of rectangular layers stuffed with dots, and means tlalli, or “earth.” For daytime earthquakes, the attention is open; for nighttime quakes, it’s closed.
In codices written by pre-Hispanic civilizations who spoke Nahuatl, such because the Aztecs, the mix of two symbols represents an earthquake, or tlalollin. One pictograph (left) exhibits 4 helices with a central eye and stands for ollin, or “motion.” The second (proper) is an oblong field stuffed with dots, typically in layers, and represents tlalli, or “earth.”G. Suárez and V. García-Acosta/Seismological Analysis Letters 2021
Seismologist Gerardo Suárez of the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico and social anthropologist Virginia García-Acosta of the Heart for Analysis and Larger Research in Social Anthropology, each in Mexico Metropolis, pored over the Telleriano-Remensis. The researchers have been searching for representations of quakes, evaluating what they discovered to accounts of quakes in different pre-Hispanic codices and texts written later by Spanish friars.
The Telleriano-Remensis makes use of a pictorial illustration of a 52-year cycle to roughly date the quakes. Years are represented by 4 indicators— tecpatl (knife), calli (home), tochtli (rabbit) and acatl (reed) — organized in 13 permutations. These pictures helped the researchers match some pictorial accounts of quakes, together with one in 1507, to later descriptions of the occasions.
Little extra is recounted in regards to the exact places of those quakes or the injury they induced, though one picture suggests {that a} quake triggered flooding that drowned warriors. Different codices might include extra clues, the researchers say, which may assist create a extra full chronology of the quakes that shook this historic world.
