The Huehuehtlahtolli Bancroft Manuscript

The Missing Pages

Resumen

In 1943, in the very first volume of Tlalocan (pp. 31-53, 81-107), Angel María Garibay published a transcription and translation of an interesting set of Nahuatl dialogues preserved in Berkeley's Bancroft Library. While Garibay placed the document in the context of the genre of huehuehtlahtolli or ancestral wisdom, he correctly emphasized its nature as a sample of polite speech on common occasions, in effect a set of colonial-period Nahuatl language lessons.