Historic Map : Gemelli Map of The Aztec Migration from Aztlan to Chapultapec, 1704, Vintage Wall Art

This unusual 1704 map, drawn by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, is the first published representation of the legendary Aztec migration from Aztlan, a mysterious paradise somewhere to the northwest of Mexico, to Chapultepec Hill, currently Mexico City.

• This map, supposedly a rendering copied from indigenous sources traces the pilgrimage conceptually and, though hard to follow as a map, embraces both cartographic and spiritual elements. The various stations on the map are labeled in both Nahuatl and loose English translation. Aztlan appears here in the upper right corner as a lake in which sits a mountain and a palm tree. The progression meanders along many paths and digressions to finally arrive upper right quadrant where we see a hill upon which rests a gigantic Grasshopper - Chapultepec.
• According to legend on exactly May 24, 1065 CE, the Mexica (Aztec) began an epic migration from their ancestral homeland, Aztlan, which translated means “Place of Reeds” or “Place of Egrets”, to the shores of Lake Texcoco, in Mexico’s Central Mesa. There they founded the city of Tenochtitlan which in time spawned the vast Aztec Empire famously encountered by Hernan Cortez several hundred years later. The migration, which seems to have lasted some 250 years, is comparable in scope to the biblical wanderings of the Israelites recorded in Exodus.

Nonetheless, an attempt to reconcile the early points on the pilgrimage was made by no less than the renowned naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt was a great believer in indigenous cartographic knowledge and incorporated it into his many important maps – often with significant success. This map was published in the English edition of Gemelli’s A Voyage Round the World . Neither this map nor Gemelli’s important reproduction of the Aztec calendar appeared in the earlier Italian edition of his work.