Highlight of the Ethnologisches Museum: Lienzo Seler II Has Arrived at the Humboldt Forum

News from 02/10/2022

Of the objects that are now on permanent display at the Humboldt Forum, one of the most impressive is the cotton cloth known as Lienzo Seler II (Coixtlahuaca II).

Museum display with a huge textile object
© SPK/Stefan Müchler

Of the objects that are now on permanent display at the Humboldt Forum, one of the most impressive is the cotton cloth known as Lienzo Seler II (Coixtlahuaca II). It was created in the sixteenth century in what is now Mexico and eventually became part of the collection at the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin). For nearly fifty years, it hung untouched in a glass display cabinet in Berlin-Dahlem. Now, after extensive restoration, it has been moved to the Humboldt Forum and placed in a new, specially constructed display case.

The 383 cm by 442 cm (16 m²) cotton cloth was created in the Coixtlahuaca Valley (Oaxaca, Mexico) by Mixtec and Chocho authors in order to document the origins of their rulers and the founding of their settlements in the multi-ethnic valley. Using a form of pre-Columbian pictographic writing, they recorded events that span a period of more than five hundred years, including part of the early Spanish colonial era, and which illustrate their claim to power, land and privileges. The cloth document is named after the collector Eduard Seler, who brought it to Berlin in the year 1897. In 2017, a number of detailed color reproductions of the lienzo were published for the first time, along with extensive interpretations provided by ten international experts according to the latest research.

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