Codex Fejérváry-Mayer (Tezcatlipoca)
See description here
Interesting history!
Always reblog Mesoamerican comics. And it’s got Tezcatlipoca in it! You’ll also notice, at the top of page six, a creature eating a foot… I wonder if that’s Tezcatlipoca’s foot being used as bait for the Witz Monster. It’s hard to tell, these things are hard to read.
An illustrated manuscript of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan attending the marriage procession of his eldest son Dara Shikoh. Mughal-Era fireworks were utilized to brighten the night throughout the wedding ceremony (c.1740).
Ear spools
ca. A.D. 1500
Late Postclassic
Eastern Nahua
Obsidian, rock crystal, jade, and gold
h. 1.8 cm., diam. 3.7 cm. (11/16 x 1 7/16 in.)
Place made: Mexico / / Central Mexico
Gallery note: These amazing ornaments were fashioned by producing a pair of obsidian spools and then fitting them with polished quartz crystal cores drilled to hold two small jade rods with golden pins. Ear piercing and adornment is one of the oldest forms of human body modification and the reasons for its practice are as diverse as the cultures that practiced it, from simple personal expression to the need to display accomplishments gained through rights of passage, merit, or royal distinction. Objects of precious stone and metal like this stunning example were reserved exclusively for the paramount elite in most Mesoamerican societies. Royal children had their ears pierced in infancy and a peg was inserted to begin the process of expanding the ear lobe. As individuals proceeded through life, ear “spools” of greater size and quality were inserted. The preference for the unusual “spool” shape was that it allowed the wearer to open the lobe and slip it around the narrower middle to secure it in place. The owner of this pair must have been very rich lord or lady to be able to afford jewels made of quartz not to mention obsidian, jade, and gold of this quality. While rock crystal is common, it is hard to find pieces of suitable size and clarity. Cutting and shaping can be incredibly difficult and it must have taken the craftsperson that made these many weeks to produce.
Imagine the amount of work and level of craftmanship involved in turning stone into such modern-looking objects. Using only stone tools!
Stone age. BAH! Stone age indeed.
Math and Science Week!
aseantoo submitted to medievalpoc:
Dresden Codex
Chichén Itzá, Mexico (c. 1000s-1100s)
[x]
El Caracol Observatory
Chichén Itzá, Mexico (c. 906)
[x]
Can we just take a moment to remember how advanced the astronomy of the Maya civilization was?
How they were able to predict eclipses and the motions of Venus and the Moon?
How they invented the concept of zero, independently from the Indians?
How their calendar measured the length of the solar cycle more accurately than the Gregorian calendar?
Raised by Raptors is an epic, fantasy-adventure, graphic novel written by Oliver Sykes and Illustrated by Ben Ashton-Bell. The story is set in fictional Mexico, where humans and dinosaurs co-exist during the Golden Age of the Mayan Civilization.
The series focuses on the journey of a young Mesoamerican who is forced to flee her city after accusations of treason. Narrowly escaping a religious sacrifice and therefore becoming a fugitive, she finds herself inadvertently saving a pack of Velociraptors, who in return take her under their wing and raise her as their own.
8-0
Okay I need this book right now.
Oh look. An excuse to repost my comic about the origin of chop suey, which, while invented by Chinese (or possibly Chinese American) cooks, was invented in the US for Western tastes. There are, apparently, several conflicting versions of the origin of chop suey. All that can be said for sure is that soon after ambassador Li Hongzhang made his official visit to the United States, “chop suey” restaurants started popping up everywhere.
I must confess, since hearing this tale for the first time, I’ve taken to distinguishing between “chop suey” restaurants and Chinese restaurants in conversation. It seems like a more descriptive term in some cases.
Hey guys. Can we talk about accordion books? Specifically, can we talk about MY accordion book?
When I first printed Lords of Death and Life, my graphic novel set in ancient Mexico, I was feeling particularly ambitious (hey, I’d just finished drawing a 60-page full-colour comic). I decided that the only right way to print it would be as an accordion book- the type of book the Mayans, Aztecs, and Mixteca were famous for making. It turned out to be a pretty exciting format. You can flip pages one-handed, you can read it like a regular book or spread it out and turn it into wall art, the pages are printed on both sides so you flip the book over halfway through, it’s pretty great. It also turned out to be kind of insane to mass-produce. I only ever ended up making about a hundred copies. I took them to conventions and sold them, but, each one was hand-assembled, and most of the money I made went into buying ink cartridges for my laser printer.
When it came time to print Lords of Death and Life on a larger scale, I did some research into whether it was possible to print thousands of accordion books. It was not. Not without a hand-assembly component, at any rate. I wasn’t about to hire factory-workers in Vietnam to glue book pages together for me. Much better to pay factory workers in China to assemble conventional format books using big machines.
So that’s what I did. I’m really happy with the way the final square-bound graphic novel turned out, and I sure don’t miss the hours and hours spent printing pages myself and sticking them together with archival tape.
But, the accordion book is very nice too, and I have three copies left that I’m willing to part with.
Or rather, I HAD three copies, but one of them just sold yesterday through the Kickstarter I’m running to pay to print my next (totally conventionally bound) graphic novel.
There are two left. Get them while you can.
We digitized, annotated and created a custom web display for this incredibly detailed 16th century indigenous map of Mexico. Explore it here.
Ooohhhh myyyyy gooodness. Look at this! This is amazing!
I have never seen a Mesoamerican map before. I wasn’t sure they MADE maps. And even though this map was made post-contact and at a Spanish request, so much of the way it’s made is so alien to any European map that clearly the mapmaker was working from a tradition of mapmaking that has deep pre-contact roots. Even if there are no extant examples of pre-contact maps, this is proof that they existed.
The minute I saw this, I recognized the Nahuatl (Aztec) pictograms used to mark locations on the map. These are words disguised as pictures. When this map reached its intended audience in Spain, I’m sure those pictograms were promptly misinterpreted as weird pictures only. But make no mistake, this map is written in two languages.
It is critical to clarify the media stories about “birth tourism” and “anchor babies” that are based on a study by former Harper-era immigration official Andrew Griffith.
First, the study and media describe a significant rise in “birth tourism” based on hospital coding of patients as “other country resident self-pay.”
But this number includes international students, temporary foreign workers without full access to health care, undocumented people, and non-resident Canadians.
That is to say, it includes people who are in fact residents, not “tourists” simply visiting Canada for a short period. They work and live here full-time but are denied permanent residency.
Second, much of the media coverage suggests that giving birth in Canada gives parents privileged access to permanent residency and citizenship.
This is absurdly false. While being born in Canada does give a child access to citizenship, few parents get any immigration benefits.
If the family is undocumented and apprehended, the children are kept in immigration prison (it’s not just the U.S. that jails immigrant children) and even deported in some cases.
As can be seen from the case of Deepan Budlakoti — who was born in Ottawa but whose citizenship was challenged by the government decades later — not all children born in Canada get citizenship either.
The media by and large has missed the most significant conclusions to be made from the study. Canada’s immigration system is largely impermanent, as over 70% of permits issued each year are temporary. And these families are largely unable to access Canada’s universal health care.
Page 105 of Phobos and Deimos. The rest is here.
