The Matrícula de Tributos (Tribute roll) consists of 16 sheets (folios) of paper (32 pages) made from the bark of the amate tree. Although some of the early folios are heavily damaged, whole sheets measure 29 × 42 centimeters. These pieces of amatl paper were originally painted on only one side, and probably date to before the conquest of Tenochtitlán. Sometime in the colonial period, however, these separate one-sided sheets were glued together. This created the document which exists today, in which each folio has images on the front and the back.

The Matrícula records the geographical extent of the Aztec tribute empire. The first pages show fortified frontier garrisons. The remaining pages’“the majority of the document’“focus on different tribute provinces. Their images depict the place signs of towns from which the Aztecs demanded tribute, and list the tribute items (feathers, warrior costumes, jaguar skins) that were supposedly sent every 80 days to Tenochtitlán.

In addition to the original pictorial glyphs, the Matrícula is also covered with later alphabetic captions. Some, added in the sixteenth century, are in Nahuatl. Others, added in the eighteenth century, are in Spanish. The Matrícula de Tributos is currently in the National Library of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Generally speaking, the reading order of each of the Matrícula’s folios begins in the lower left-hand corner and then moves up the page. The painted signs show towns (through drawings of hills, rivers, temples, trees), different kinds of tribute (warrior costumes, bundles of feathers, jars of honey), and human faces (representing frontier governors, long-dead kings, and human captives). Small differences in the details of these drawings reveal that the images of the Matrícula were painted by a number of different scribes—as many as six, according to Juan José Batalla Rosado. In addition to these painted images, the Matrícula’s folios contain alphabetic notes. These “glosses” or brief summaries are written in both Spanish and Nahuatl. They were added after the arrival of the Europeans, and explain the painted images. It seems that the Nahuatl glosses were written first, and the Spanish glosses are based on a translation of these comments (and not on a careful observation of the painted images themselves).