El Códice de Azcatitlan

The last time this manuscript was in Mexico was 1840, and it has belonged to the Bibliothèque nationale de France since 1898. Across 20 folios, a painter in the late-16th-century Valley of Mexico told Mexica history from the departure from Aztlan to the founding of Tenochtitlan, its rulers and the arrival of the Spanish, mixing pictographs with European writing.

You find it in the temporary exhibitions room, inside a show of six sections running from pre-Hispanic picture-writing through colonial codices to current research. Around it sit 25 archaeological and ethnographic pieces and facsimiles of other codices, the Mendoza and the Boturini among them. The original Boturini is in Paris right now, lent in exchange, so the copy here stands in for a manuscript that is standing in for this one.

Entry is free, according to the Foreign Ministry and the Mexican press, and the loan ends on 6 December. It is one manuscript and its context, so pair it with the Sun Stone in the Sala Mexica.