Eight Deer Jaguar Claw unites the Mixtec kingdoms

The Mixtec kingdoms of Oaxaca recorded the genealogies, marriages and wars of their rulers in painted screenfold books, and three of them — the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, the Codex Bodley and the Codex Colombino-Becker — tell the story of Lord Eight Deer, named after the day of his birth. The dates are reconstructions: Mixtec year names repeat every 52 years, and following Alfonso Caso, scholars have counted back through these cycles along the genealogies of Eight Deer's descendants, anchored in colonial documents such as a church inscription at Cuilapan that pairs AD 1555 with the Mixtec year 10 Reed. By this count Eight Deer was born in the year 12 Reed, 1063, the son of Five Alligator, a priest of Tilantongo.

After consulting the oracle of Lady Nine Grass at Chalcatongo, Eight Deer led a group of Mixtecs to the Pacific coast, until then held mainly by the Chatino, and founded Tututepec around 1083; from there he began a series of conquests. In the year 7 House (1097) he met Four Jaguar, a lord of the Toltec tradition, who awarded him the turquoise nose ornament of a tecuhtli, a sign of royal rank; with his help Eight Deer took Tilantongo, which became his capital. Four Jaguar's city, the ‘Place of Reeds’ (Tollan), was long identified with Tula, but recent interpretations favour Cholula. In the year 11 House (1101) Eight Deer attacked the rival kingdom of the Red and White Bundle and killed its lord Eleven Wind and his wife, Lady Six Monkey of Jaltepec; he put to death most of the heirs of the rival line, sparing only the young Four Wind, and took several wives from the leading royal houses, among them Eleven Wind's daughter Thirteen Serpent.

According to the Codex Zouche-Nuttall Eight Deer and his allies conquered 94 places, and he became the only Mixtec ruler to hold the chief centres of all three regions — Tilantongo in the Mixteca Alta, Teozacoalco in the Mixteca Baja and Tututepec on the coast. His end is told in two ways: by one reading, Four Wind led an alliance against him in 1115 and had him captured and sacrificed; according to the scholar John Pohl, Four Wind, whom Eight Deer had raised, had him killed during a hunt. Four Wind then married two of Eight Deer's daughters and took over his coastal realm, while his sons inherited Tilantongo and Teozacoalco. Eight Deer became a legendary hero, and in the codices his life story at times merges with myth.