Aubin Codex

Aztec textual and pictorial history book

[[File:Aubin codex. jpg|thumb|right|Folio 59 of the Aubin Codex It is now in the British Museum in London.

The first date written in the manuscript is 1576, on the frontispiece. The latest date written is 1607. It appears that various Nahuatl speaking authors worked on it over that time. It is not known where the codex was during most of the 17th century, or indeed until Italian historian and ethnographer of the New World, Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, added it to his collection in the mid 18th century. His collection was impounded by Spanish authorities after he was arrested in 1744 for entering New Spain without license. In the early 19th century, the codex was acquired from whereabouts unknown by fr, a French Americanist and collector, whose name the codex now bears. Somehow the codex ended up in the collection of a French bookseller living in London, Jules Des Portes. Des Portes sold the codex to the British Museum in 1880, in amongst another 300 or so objects over the course of their commercial relationship. Aubin published a lithographic reproduction in 1893. The manuscript was hand copied and partially translated numerous times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; many of these copies are in collections in Europe and Mexico.

The Aubin Codex is 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. 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 the Aztec Empire. 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 the Aztec Empire 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.

[[File:Aubin Codex. png|thumb|Detail of folio 26, showing the foundation of Tenochtitlan, as an eagle, the avatar of the deity Huitzilopochtli, landed on a nopal cactus with a snake in its beak The first part of the Codex Aubin, consisting of the Mexica migration history from Aztlan to Tenochtitlan, is written in clustered annals structure.

Also called Manuscrito de 1576 ('Manuscript of 1576'), the codex is in the British Museum in London. As of 2015, Fordham University has been hosting a project to translate the codex into English and further decipher its images and pictographs.