Anales de Tula Facsimile Edition

The Anales de Tula is a sixteenth-century Indigenous pictorial chronicle that preserves the historical memory of Tollan-Xicocotitlan, present-day Tula in Hidalgo, and its wider connections across central Mexico. Also known as the Anales de Tezontepec or Anales Aztecas, it combines traditional glyphic notation with alphabetic glosses in Nahuatl and Spanish, revealing a culture of recordkeeping transformed—but not erased—after the Spanish invasion.

History Unfolding Through Time

Painted on a long strip of amate paper, the manuscript records events from 12 Calli (1361) to 3 Calli (1521). A continuous sequence of boxed year signs organizes the narrative from left to right. These calendrical markers divide the surface into upper and lower registers, where rulers, conquests, deaths, successions, temple building, economic crises, and unusual natural phenomena appear as episodes in an extended historical continuum.

Pictorial Signs and Political Memory

The manuscript communicates through an economical but expressive visual language. Lords are linked by graphic lines of succession; crowns signal periods of rule, while figures wrapped in tied burial cloths announce death. The chronicle reaches beyond Tula to register events involving Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, Tlatelolco, Chalco, Azcapotzalco, and other regional powers.

The Conquest Entering the Chronicle

Its final section gives striking form to the upheavals of the early sixteenth century. Mounted Spaniards mark the arrival of the “men of Castile” in 1519, followed by dynastic deaths and the defeat of the Mexica in 1521. The Anales de Tula thus stands at the threshold between worlds: an Indigenous history expressed through ancestral signs, yet adapted to the political and linguistic realities of colonial Mexico.