The earliest recorded date found on a Mixtec codex is A.D. 692. These codices relate the forming of the early years of the eighth century into a military city state. Metallurgy was beginning in the Valley of Mexico near A.D. 1000. Mixtecs were known throughout the region for their jewelry and artistic skills. It is generally accepted that these surviving Mixtec codices were made in the late pre-conquest days for Mixtec nobility.
Mixtec codices contain birth records, marriages, and death records.
The Mixtec were such good artists that the Mexica were known to use Mixtec craftsmen to draw their own codices. Mr. Becker of Darmstadt, bought and donated the codex to the Museum of Natural Science in Vienna. Also called the Manuscript of the Carique. In it's history the codex passed into the hands briefly of Pascual Almazan, a Mexican attorney, defending an unknown Indian who originally owned the codex. Educated at Cambridge.