1063–1115
Mixtec ruler whose deeds fill the surviving painted codices.
Eight Deer Jaguar Claw — his name a date and a sign in the Mixtec calendar — ruled in the Mixteca highlands of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, from 1063 to 1115. His is one of the very few lives from ancient Mesoamerica recorded in such detail, for it is written across the painted deerskin codices that survived the conquest.
By those codices he was the only Mixtec lord ever to unite the three regions of the Mixteca — the highlands, the lowlands, and the coast — a warrior-king who by their count took ninety-four towns.
He forged his power through alliance as much as war, binding kingdoms to him through recorded marriages and receiving from the Toltec lord of Cholula the turquoise nose-ornament that marked the highest royal authority.
His reign ended in 1115. That we can still read his deeds, nine centuries on, is itself a kind of permanence — the memory his own people set down and kept. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.
Kept with honor.
References
Biography drawn from the public historical record, verifiable against the sources above.
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Submitted by the Honored Ancestors Editorial Committee.
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