This article, written by Emily Umberger, presented at the British Museum and published in ARARA, the online publication of the University of Wessex, looks at the Codex Durán.

Extract:
"The Codex Durán was named for its creator, the Dominican Friar Diego Durán, who, in addition to translating the lost native history into Spanish, included with it two other treatises on the calendar and ritual--apparently of his own creation--and employed several unnamed native artists to illustrate the entire work (Couch 1987). 2 In the historical section, Durán, like the native author before him, presented Tenochtitlan's rulers as comparable to European kings and emperors and left out the symbolic components of pre-Conquest historiography--the metaphors and allegorical narratives that had structured the choreography of events as well as their reporting.3 Remnants of these elements survive in both text and illustrations, usually rendered literally, but still serving as clues to the symbolic thought activated on particular occasions. . .

. . .Returning to the Codex Durán, it should be obvious by now that the authors of this colonial view of Aztec history removed as much as possible the Aztec allegorical underpinnings from their accounts of the events. They relegated the allegories to an early, distant period and history to a later, recent period--the effect being a separation of myth from the type of history that was acceptable to their Westernized readers.20 In actuality, myth and history were merged in complex ways throughout both early and late parts of Aztec accounts of the past. Despite the distortions of the colonial sources, the narrative course and details of the historical events would not make sense to us without them. Still, the data of such accounts and archaeological remains must be reintegrated for a more enlightened understanding. We need to put the mythic, allegorical, and metaphorical elements back into the historical accounts, and the historical elements back into our understanding of the archaeological remains, even those without obvious historical references. In addition, when considering colonial texts like the Codex Durán and illustrations like those by Artist A, we must consider the number of parties involved in their creation and the consequent confusions and inconsistencies. . ."

Aztec Kings and the Codex Durán: The Metaphorical Underpinnings of Rulership1