Interpreting the Mappe Quinatzin, leaf 2 and leaf 3

Tue Apr 21 19:58:26 UTC 2009

Recently, I said I would point out basic and serious errors in just two paragraphs of Jongsoo Lee’s recent article in Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl.  Here is the second post.   

Note:  Robert Barlow’s article on Mappe Quinatzin, leaf 3 can be found at this location, although, unfortunately the overall photo and line drawing have been obscured.  

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/jsa_0037-9174_1950_num_39_1_2384#

A quick search has found no other free-access on-line images of leaf 3, although those with on-line journal access—increasingly available with a public library card--can use the excellent illustration on the first page of Douglas’s discerning article in The Art Bulletin cited below).

Here are errors in the paragraph on the Mappe Quinatzin that spans pages 246-247.

1. Lee relates: “Regarding adultery, the Mapa Quinatzin describes three types of adultery and their punishments.”  This is not true.  It depicts three punishments for adultery dictated by only two separate fact sets of a given case, or in Lee’s terms, only two types of adultery and their punishments. These are shown in only two of the three rows of the third column of leaf 3.  The second row shows that in the case of “los adúlteros que mataban el adulterado” (Ixtlilxochitl’s explanation [1975:II,102]; the glosses on the codex offer no help), the man was roasted alive with water and salt (1975:II,102) splashed on him while the woman was executed by some form of strangulation. In the third row, adulterers are shown being stoned to death. The first row is not a crime and punishment vignette at all but instead deals with legal process—temporary imprisonment before the accused could be investigated and tried.  

2.  Lee then attributes his own false interpretation of the third column, row one to Ixtlilxochitl. “According to Ixtlilxochitl’s interpretation, adulterers were flattened by a large and heavy stone, or were stoned in the tianguis (market); or if the adulterers had killed their spouses, then the male was burned to death and the female was hanged.”  This is not Ixtlilxochitl’s interpretation.  I spend many pages discussing adultery legal rules in 1983 (257-266) and point out where Ixtlilxochitl’s descriptions do not resemble this column and the one instance where they do resemble it most closely (1983:258-59; Ixtlilxochitl 1975: II,101-102) and in this instance, Ixtlilxochitl does not mention head crushing by stones at all but instead describes the contents of column 3, rows two and three only.  What is clear is that Ixtlilxochitl does not confuse the first row of column 3 with being crushed by stones.  Lee must instead be the confused party, because he speaks of the Mappe Qu!
 inatzin describing “three types of adultery and their punishments” and then proceeds to describe rows two and three but also volunteers his own false description for the first row.  This is a fundamental error in pictorial interpretation contravened by plainly visible evidence and all other interpretations (except for Mohar Betancourt’s post-2001 confusion regarding this scene pointed out in my reviews recently in Ethnohistory [English] and ECN [Spanish, with additions] of her book on the Mappe Quinatzin).  

The scene in the first row of column 3 is not a legal rule and punishment, as is clear from Barlow’s article in 1950 and from my work in 1983.  My 34 year old photocopy of Barlow’s article (Journal de Ia Société des Américanistes, n.s., 39 [1950]: 111-24), which Lee cites, clearly shows the Nahuatl gloss describing the scene in the first row as a wooden structure or jail where people are put and Barlow correctly translates it and describes it as a wooden jail and surmises correctly that it contains an adulterous pair.  Barlow (1950:120) reports and interprets the large and bold Nahuatl gloss as “coauhcalco tetlaliloya” “lugar de la casa de madera, lugar donde se pone a la gente” (cf. very similar paleography and translation in Mohar Betancourt 2004:307).  In addition, Motolinia describes exactly this sort of holding cell and its general role in legal process (1971:359).  Chimalpopoca is shown in one in the Codex Xolotl prior to his death (X.080.J, using Thouvenot’s modern, s!
 tandard reference system).  

3.  Before these errors, Lee makes the claim that “The majority of the crimes and punishments that appear in Ixtlilxochitl’s texts are clearly depicted in leaf 3 of this map.”  This is a false claim. There are indeed eleven legal vignettes on this leaf, showing ten crime and punishment pairs, although Lee would probably only count eight because he prefers not to understand the content of the fourth column as I explained it in 1982 and in 1983 (confirmed by Eduardo Douglas in 2003; Art Bulletin, LXXXV, no. 2 [June 2003]:  281-309; Mohar Betancourt also largely mishandles this column; both Lee and Mohar Betancourt falter where legal process, as opposed to mere legal rules, is depicted).

In column 1, there are three forms of one crime, theft, each with the same punishment.  In column 2 are two forms of offenses against the state with their punishments, one of which is the same as in column 1, and in column 3, there are three punishments (two of which are new) for one crime: adultery.  The fourth column depicts no new punishments but it does record two crimes of judicial corruption, at least one of which we know was a violation of a legal rule or became the case basis (or precedent) for a legal rule.  One vignette is in the time of Nezahualcoyotl and the other during the reign of Nezahualpilli, whose elaborately drawn glyphs respectively appear in each scene.  (A third scene in this column is cut off and only partly decipherable but a gloss seems to name Nezahualpilli).  In all, four separate kinds of punishment are shown.  Lee would evidently count five kinds of punishment (to include heads being crushed by stones) and four types of crimes or even eight if h!
 e wishes to consider each form of theft and adultery (i.e. the three he mistakenly describes) a separate crime. 

Lee himself cites a group of legal rules found in Ixtlilxochitl (1975:I, 385-386) earlier in this same paragraph.  These rules are considered without hesitation by O’Gorman to be his work (1975:I, 199), and contain at least seventeen additional offenses and three additional punishments—most of the time it does not define the exact punishment involved.  And there are a good number of other legal rules dealing with (additional) crime and (additional) punishment pairs in other places in Ixtlilxochitl, not to mention other sources with close ties to Texcoco. Lee’s mathematics is incorrect.  

4. Lee states:  “His (Ixtlilxochitl’s) alphabetic texts are supported by a pictorial source, the Mapa Quinatzin.”  This assertion of “a source” is a very weak argument from absence.  Lee cannot be sure this was the sole pictorial source and he would be clearly wrong if he is implying it was his sole source (see below).    Lee goes on to say:  “A comparison between the description of the crimes and punishments and the third part of the map reveals that the alphabetic texts are exact transcriptions/translations of the map.”  This is another false claim, and on two counts.

First, as can be seen by the variety of reports of legal rules in Ixtlilxochitl that are presented in my book from 1983, the simple reason that the alphabetic texts are not  “exact transcriptions/translations of the map” is that the very great majority of legal rules reported in the alphabetic texts are not shown on the Mappe Quinatzin at all. Second, Ixtlilxochitl provides information that is not found on the Mappe Quinatzin, leaf 3 itself.  For example, without Ixtlilxochitl’s additional information, we would not know why there are differing punishments for the adulterous man and woman in column 3, row 2, nor would we know the details of the case of judicial corruption in column 4, row 2, and we would only have Vetancurt’s creative narrative transformation (or perhaps only defective explanation) of column 2, row 2, cited by Lee later in the article.  A careful consideration of the content of the alphabetic sources in comparison with the content of the Mappe Quinatzin shows!
  that the Mappe Quinatzin was not Ixtlilxochitl’s principal source of information on Texcocan law.  

5.  Having misinterpreted and misrepresented the Mappe Quinatzin, leaf 3 and its role in Ixtlilxochitl’s work, Lee closes the paragraph with a singular misrepresentation of the work of Ixtlilxochitl:  “Based on his [actually, Lee’s erroneous perception and presentation of Ixtlilxochitl’s] reading of the Mapa Quinatzin, therefore, Ixtlilxochitl sees Nezahualcoyotl as the greatest lawmaker in all of Anahuac.”  Ixtlilxochitl, thoroughly bilingual beyond Lee’s or any modern person’s abilities, and with decades of intelligent fieldwork exploring Texcocan history and culture, with Texcocan and many other informants from the sixteenth century with whom any one of us would pay a great price to spend a single hour, and with access to many documents now lost to us, based his opinion on a rather broader set of evidence than Lee wishes to admit or advise the reader to perceive.  Lee consistently writes to diminish what evidence there is and thereby diminish and demean the judgment of pe!
 ople such as Ixtlilxochitl, Motolinia and Duran who knew more about Nahua culture and history than Lee or any of us can imagine.  

It is important to note that these errors are not differences in interpretation or differences in opinion.  They are serious mistakes in interpreting the central pictorial documents of Texcocan political and legal administration and history and relating them to the alphabetic texts.  Barlow, Dibble, Gibson and others were modern pioneers in the correct interpretation of such materials and their links to the alphabetic texts.  With regard to proper understanding of leaf 3 of the Mappe Quinatzin, first recognized by Barlow and published in 1950, Lee has set the clock back by more than half a century.  

Ethnohistorians take on a special burden in understanding a dead culture and must struggle to acculturate themselves into that culture through years of dedicated practice with the scant information available.  Lee is not well along in this process.  

For me it boils down to this:  what evidence is more credible:  (1) the opinions of people such as Duran and Motolinia, who lived and worked with the people on the ground in the early colonial period, regarding the origin, history, quality and relative reputation of the Texcocan legal system, or (2) the opinion of a literary critic well over four centuries later who wishes to expose such sources as somehow gullible or incompetent but who cannot interpret the scant available basic legal and political pictorial information accurately, relate it to the alphabetic texts correctly and report it accurately?  Careful and well-reasoned criticism of sixteenth century sources is valuable, but only when it is carried out without such basic errors involved. 

I am glad to hear that at least one of these errors in the ECN article was revised out by Lee and expunged during the peer review of the manuscript for Lee’s recent book. Hopefully, enough were caught so the trajectory of argumentation was significantly changed, but perhaps instead, blindered and boxed-in by this early demonstrably poor basic research, it has persisted unrevised.  If so, then this misrepresentation and disfigurement of Nezahualcoyotl, Texcoco, Duran, Motolinia, Ixtlilxochitl and others will simply expand.

It is time to set limits on such involuntary masquerades for the dead, arranged and conducted by practitioners proclaiming their superior critical abilities and going out of their way to demean those of others, while thrusting false masks in the face of the far more accomplished dead. This overconfidence in the discipline and the subsequent objectification and excessive and faulty criticism of these worthy sources need study and the resulting problems require correction. 

Can sources be effectively and critically handled within the limits of our current knowledge?  The answer of course is yes, with the best recent example being Sylvie Peperstraete’s La Chronique X : Reconstitution Et Analyse D'une Source Perdue Fondamentale Sur La Civilisation Azteque, D'apres L'Historia De Las Indias De Nueva Espana De D. Duran (1581) Et La Cronica Mexicana De F.A. Tezozomoc (Ca. 1598).  It is published by Archaeopress and is available through their US distributor at this address:   http://www.oxbowbooks.com/results.cfm/q/peperstraete/qt/All/ST/QS/StartRow/1
Upon finishing the book, the reader will understand as never before the limitations on the accuracy of this Tenochcan source and its two dependent sources, Duran and Tezozomoc, but, because of the author’s discerning, patient and perspicacious approach, the reader will also be part of a process of unlocking and understanding much additional information within these sources.  

Jerry Offner
ixtlil at earthlink.net
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