While the Aubin Codex may have been first written in 1576, the date on its frontispiece, various Nahuatl-speaking authors worked on it at least until 1608, the last recorded date in the manuscript. Its 17th-century history is unknown. By the mid-18th century, it was in the hands of Lorenzo Boturini-Benaducci. The codex was named after J.M.A Aubin, who owned it in the mid-1800s. He published a lithographic reproduction in 1893. The last person to own the original was Jules Desportes. It now resides in the British Museum.
Contents
The Aubin Codex is actually two manuscripts, bound together as one. The first is an annals account of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, beginning with their migration out of Aztlan in the year 1 Flint, correlated to 1168 in the manuscript. It includes the foundation of Tenochtitlan, and the cataclysmic events of the conquest-era, including the smallpox epidemic after the arrival of the conquistadors, and the massacre at the temple in Tenochtitlan in 1520. James Lockhart has published an English translation of the Codex Aubin's Nahuatl account of the conquest of Mexico. According to Lockhart, internal evidence suggests that the main author was a man from the Mexico-Tenochtitlan sector of San Juan Moyotlan, who drew on existing material, including oral sources, for his account of the earlier era, and then began an eyewitness account of the events of the late sixteenth century. Unlike the account of the conquest of Mexico in the Florentine Codex, which is primarily from the Tlatelocan viewpoint and denigrates the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, Codex Aubin offers the Mexica perspective and makes no reference to events in Tlatelolco.
Style
The Codex Aubin is written in mixed pictographic-alphabetic format, and a number of painters and writers worked on it. The first part of the Codex Aubin, consisting of the Mexica migration history from Aztlan to Tenochtitlan, is written in clustered annals structure. Years, represented by hieroglyphs in square cartouches, are grouped in rows or columns, these year blocks allowing more space for a longer alphabetic text. The years are written from left to right and top to bottom.The next part of the codex, covering the period after the foundation of Tenochtitlan, is written in a more conventional annals structure, with a vertical block of five years on each page, and a record of corresponding events, rendered with images and alphabetic text. From 1553 to 1591, each page is devoted to the events of a single year. The last part of the codex was originally an entirely separate manuscript, and lists the native rulers of Tenochtitlan from its founding until 1608.
Today
As of 2015, Fordham University has been hosting a project to translate the codex into English and further decipher its images and pictographs. Also called ", this codex is held by the British Museum in London. A copy of the original is held at the Princeton University library in the Robert Garrett Collection.
