Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48)

February 1837: in a cell of the Sheriff's Prison in Dublin, Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough, drew his last breath before passing away from typhoid fever. He had been incarcerated for only a few days before contracting the infection that would kill him; the cause of his imprisonment, by all accounts, was unpaid debts to a disgruntled paper merchant. Lord Kingsborough had apparently been unable to cover the cost of publishing Antiquities of Mexico (1831-48), the sprawling magnum opus to which he devoted nearly two decades of his life. (According to Sylvia D. Whitmore’s biography of Kingsborough, he owed some £40,000, at a time when £500 constituted a comfortable annual budget for an entire family.) Like his debt, the scale of Kingsborough’s project was enormous — nine volumes (with a tenth planned but never completed), collectively weighing in at nearly 30 kg and featuring lush color facsimiles of Mexican pictorial manuscripts. The series of books, whose content ran the gamut — from Mayan astrological tables and Mixtec genealogies, to agricultural records and religious rites — faithfully reproduced virtually all pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican books in European collections at the time.

To aid him in this monumental undertaking, Kingsborough enlisted the help of Agostino Aglio, a skilled Italian artist who painstakingly traced each panel and subsequently hand-painted a number of the finished lithographs. As a result of this work, the images published in Kingsborough’s book are often the clearest we have: Antiquities of Mexico includes a facsimile of the Mayan Dresden Codex, which had noticeably decayed since Aglio’s visit even before the firebombing of its namesake city caused severe water damage to the book (though it was miraculously saved from the blaze).

Almost two centuries on, Aglio’s lithographs continue to be referenced and admired — not least because of the rarity of the books whose content they reproduce. The Spanish conquest of Mexico included the deliberate extirpation of Indigenous religious and cultural expressions: an illustration from Diego Muñoz Camargo’s sixteenth-century Historia de Tlaxcala shows Nahua gods themselves consumed by flames as they emanate from a stack of books and priestly vestments being burned by Spanish friars in a kind of inanimate auto-da-fé. As a result of these large-scale book-burning campaigns, only twenty or so pre-Hispanic manuscripts (usually erroneously called codices) have survived from the vast territory comprising what is now Mexico. Even those books produced in the aftermath of the fall of Tenochtitlan in an attempt to record pre-invasion society while it was still in living memory reflect the unimaginable loss they are attempting, in some measure, to obviate. For instance, the Aztec Codex Telleriano-Remensis (sixteenth century), reproduced in Antiquities of Mexico, collapses into a series of unfinished sketches and hasty notes in its final pages, and the text itself is left unfinished. During a time of such momentous upheaval and mass death, write Felipe Ledesma-Núñez and May Wang, disruptions to literary production were to be expected “as the artists and authors died, resource supply lines were broken, and the surviving were too sick or hungry to continue working.”

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Those books that escaped the Fransiscans’ bonfires were generally sent to Europe as spoils of war, where they made their way into far-flung private collections across the continent. Consider the serpentine route of the Codex Mendoza, a sixteenth-century account of Aztec life and history: the richly illustrated manuscript was shipped from Mexico to Spain by conquistadors, where it was waylaid en route by French pirates and landed in the hands of André Thevet, cosmographer to the Valois court, before eventually making its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. By the time Kingsborough published a color facsimile of the Codex Mendoza as the opening to Antiquities, however, it had long since lapsed into undeserved obscurity.

Part of Kingsborough’s mission, then, was not merely to raise awareness of these texts, but to ensure that the prospective student of Mexican pictorial manuscripts could view the Codex Añute (1556) and the Codex Borgia (late fifteenth to early sixteenth century) in one sitting, without needing to trek from England all the way to the Vatican. But Kingsborough had another, much stranger motive for his project as well: propounding his theory that the peoples of Mexico were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. In an essay entitled “Arguments to Show That the Jews in the Early Ages Colonized America”, published in volume VI, Kingsborough marshals an array of supposed cultural commonalities as “evidence” for this idea — the use of human sacrifices, dietary taboos around consuming blood, a particular horror for leprosy, and the alleged similarity between a set of glyphs found at Palenque and Hebrew letters. As Whitmore rather scathingly puts it, the Antiquities’ author, despite making the study of Mexico’s wide-ranging artistic achievements his life’s work, “did not give any consideration to the possibility that the ancient Mexicans had the natural ability to develop their own knowledge and skills.”

Text by Erica X Eisen

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	Source	Internet Archive / Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

	Underlying Work Rights	PD Worldwide
	Digital Copy Rights	No Additional Rights Labelled “Not in Copyright” by source We offer this info as guidance only
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Facsimile of the Codex Mendoza held by the Bodleian Library (MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1), ca. 1541–1650, from the first volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS Mexicain 385), mid 16th century, from the first volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Bodley held by the Bodleian Library (MS Mex. d. 1), ca. before 1521, from the first volume of Antiquities of Mexico

Facsimile of the Selden Roll held by the Bodleian Library (MS. Arch. Selden. A. 72 (3)), ca. 1556, from the first volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Ríos held by the Vatican (Codex Vaticanus A 3738), ca. after 1566, from the second volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Laud — also known as the Codex Mictlan or Book of Death — held by the Bodleian Library (MS. Laud Misc. 678), ca. 15th century, from the second volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Vindobonensis held by the Austrian National Library (Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1), ca. late 15th or early 16th century, from the second volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Azoyú 2 held by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Codex Azoyú 2 Reverso), painted in Tlapa ca. 1565, from the second volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Borgia held by the Vatican (Borg.mess.1), ca. 16th century, from the third volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Dresden Codex held by the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (Codex Dresdensis, S. 57 (Ausschnitt)), ca. 1200–1250, from the third volume of Antiquities of Mexico.

Facsimile of the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer held by the World Museum Liverpool (M12014), ca. before 1521, from the third volume of Antiquities of Mexico.