Return to Aztlan: A glyph reconsidered

One of the most enduring enigmas in Aztec epigraphy is the reading of a glyph that figures at the very first folio of the Codex Boturini, within the famous scene that depicts the departure of the Aztec from their homeland, Aztlan (Figure 1). This glyph, standing atop a temple in the midst of the island where Aztlan was thought to be, reappears in a depiction of the same scene at Codex Azcatitlan 2r, and seems to be formed by a reed (acatl) or arrow (mitl) sign with a water (atl) sign; thus, it has been dubbed as the ‘reed-water sign’ (Herren Rajagoplan 2019: 29). A third version of this departure scene appears at Codex Mexicanus 18, where an arguably equivalent version of this glyphic compound is formed by a reed sign, a teeth (tlantli) sign, and a water sign.

Given the content of this scene and its parallels in Codex Aubin 3r, it has been natural to consider this glyph as the place name for Aztlan, as Eduard Seler originally proposed it (1960: 31). However, Seler’s analysis of the glyph as a water sign atl (today read as the syllabogram a) plus a depiction of a white reed or aztapilli, is problematic, given the fact that this particular rendering of a reed never reappears associated to the reading aztapilli in the extant Aztec hieroglyphic corpus. The first scholar to suggest that this glyph was not an Aztlan glyph, proposing an alternative explanation, was Robert Barlow, in his facsimile edition of the Codex Azcatitlan. According to Barlow, the glyph would better be read as the name of Amimitl, a Chichimec god of hunting and fishing (1948: 38), thus making this glyph read as a-mi, Ami(mitl), if we were to render Barlow’s reading according to current conventions (cfr. Lacadena and Kettunen 2014).

Barlow’s explanation has been recently upheld by scholars such as María Castañeda de la Paz (2007: 187), and is plausible indeed. However, the main difficulty in Barlow’s interpretation arises from the fact that the glyph reappears in folios 3 and 4, associated with a human character, rather than a god (Figure 2). When compared with alphabetic versions of these episodes, such as those present in Codex Aubin, folio 3 of Codex Boturini seems to deal with the separation of the Aztec from the rest of the calpulli that accompanied them (Huexontzica, Chalca, Xochimilca, Cuitlahuaca, Malinalca, Chichimeca, Tecpaneca and Matlatzinca), an episode which ocurred after the ominous fall of a sacred tree (cfr. Tena 2017: 37), while folio 4 seems to deal with how the Aztec ceased to use their original ethnonym after sacrificing the mimixcoa: Xiuhneltzin, Mimichtzin and his sister (cfr. Tena 2017: 37). Furthermore, the god Amimitl plays no role in the Mexica pilgrimage in any of the extant alphabetic versions; instead, Tezozomoc says that it actually was the temple of Huitzilopochtli which was located at Aztlan (2003: 53). An alternative explanation has been offered for this: the priest depicted in the Boturini is also called Amimitl, he was a prominent leader of the Aztec pilgrimage, and his name has been ommited from alphabetic renderings of this story (cfr. Castañeda de la Paz 2005: 18). Not all scholars agree with the existance of a priest called Amimitl, nor with the relevance of the god Amimitl at Aztlan; for example, the recent study on the Boturini, Aubin and Azcatitlan codices by Angela Herren Rajagoplan upholds Seler’s original reading (2019: 17). Another argument against the a-mi reading is the parallel with the Mexicanus version: there, the ‘reed-teeth-water’ glyph obviously refers to a place rather than a god, since people seem to be ‘coming out’ of a human face placed above the sign, perhaps a personified cave or mountain, making the ’emergence’ narrative more explicit.

Is there a way to surmouth this difficulty? I think there is one, although it involves a proposal that is still incipient in Aztec epigraphy. In 2009, Gordon Whittaker presented a now famous analysis of an equally conflictive glyph: that of Chipiltepec, which occurs in Codex Tepetlaoztoc f. 5r (Figure 3). The curious thing about this glyph is that it is formed by the apparent sequence chi-HUIPIL-te-TEPE, but is glossed as Chipiltepec in the document. Whittaker suggested that in this case the huipilli sign is not to be read as the logogram HUIPIL, huipil, ‘blouse, shirt’, but instead as the syllabic sequence pil. Thus, the reading would be chi-pil-te-TEPE ( Whittaker 2009: 63); effectively, this reading implies omitting the first part of the huipilli sign from the reading.

Whittaker’s suggestions have been subject to a strong debate and met some reservations. Mainly the problem is how to properly conceptualize this non-initial phonetic derivation in Aztec writing and, also, finding more examples to substantiate it. At a recent presentation (2021), Whittaker has proposed to call this mechanism ‘hysterophonic derivation’, or phonetic derivation from the middle/final rather than the initial part of the word; this would be (if I am not misunderstanding) more or less the opposite of the process denoted by the word acrophony. Whittaker’s book on Aztec writing is forthcoming next month, so I hope that more on this writing resource will be found there. To this nowadays famous example I could add that perhaps it is not impossible to find examples of non-initial motivation in Aztec signs. A possible instance of a similar phenomenon is the syllabogram yo (Davletshin 2013, in Lacadena and Kettunen 2014: 12), which seems to derive graphically from the coyolli (‘bell’) sign, ommiting the initial syllable from the reading.

But what about Aztlan, the subject of this blog entry? What I think is that Aztlan could be yet another case of this yet not completely understood derivation mechanism. Some years ago, the philologist Patrick Johansson noticed that the ‘reed-water’ glyph at Codex Boturini was rather similar to the place glyph of Piaztlan, ‘place of long squashes’, derived from piaztli, a word which also meant a cane straw for drinking, at Codex Mendoza f. 15v, although he only offered this iconographic identification as a possibility, considering phonetic assimilation as the plausible explanation (2016: 130). I consider that Johansson’s iconographic identification is correct. Indeed, besides adding new historical characters and temples to the Aztlan story, the problem with the mi reading in this context is that sign lacks its characteristic arrowtip; when missing it, this sign is usually read as TLACOCH, ‘spear, dart’. Instead, the Aztlan glyph seems to be closer to the depiction of a drinking straw at the Mendoza, as well as other depictions of drinking straws in Mixteca-Puebla art, such as that found in Codex Borgia lam. 45, where the glyph is associated to the ritual drinking of pulque (Figure 4). These straws are depicted as dried reeds adorned with feathers, joined to water or pulque.

But what about the actual reading of the ‘water-reed’ glyph? If we were to follow Whittaker’s suggestion regarding the non-initial motivation of certain phonetic readings in Aztec writing, then the logogram PIAZ, piaz(tli), ‘long squash, drinking straw’, represented as a reed in both Aztec and Mixtec iconography, would be subject to non-initial phonetic derivation here, and yield the reading value az, thus obtaining the full reading az, Az(tlan), ‘Aztlan’. This proposal would make sense in all the contexts on which this sign appears, given that it seems to work both as a place name in folio 1, and as an ethnonym in folios 3 and 4. For example, another clue to understand this sign as both a place name and an ethnonym comes from the textual parallel of folio 4 of Codex Boturini with the alphabetic account found in Codex Aubin; the text of the latter states that, after the sacrifice of the mimixcoa, the Aztec stopped using this ethnonym and started calling themselves Mexica. Thus, the PIAZ/az glyph dissapears from the pictorial account of the Boturini just at the same point as the name Aztec does from the alphabetic accounts of the Mexica pilgrimage. The reading could also fit with the variant that appears at the Codex Mexicanus (Figure 4), if we conceive the tla glyph as infixed in this compound; the ‘drinking straw’ sign would be iconographically represented by the depiction of a complete reed plant atop water, an iconographic ambiguity present in other instances of the ACA, aca(tl) ‘reed’ sign, which varies between a depiction of a dried, cut cane adorned with feathers, and the plant itself, still green (cfr. Lacadena and Kettunen 2014: 31), and which could be extended to the PIAZ/az sign.

As it is well known, Aztlan doesn’t have an agreed etymology, presenting up to five different proposals in the sources alone (cfr. Navarrete Linares 2011: 104-106). A colleague, Gabriel Kruell, recently suggested to me that this would be because Aztlan could be a Nahuatl rendering of a non-Nahuatl word; for example, Ixtlilxochitl mentions that Nahuatl was not the original language of the Aztlaneca or inhabitants of Aztlan (1891: 106). If this is the case, perhaps this could explain that the written form of this name would be hesitant to use a better-known glyph, like the glyph AZTA, azta(tl), ‘heron’, to convey the az syllabic sequence.

Of course, the main problem with this proposal is the need to further our understanding of these apparent non-initially motivated signs in Aztec writing, as well as other similarly anomalous signs. Unlike regular syllabograms, these examples seem to be mostly hapax in nature, and in the case of pil seem to admit a rather uncommon CVC structure. Furthermore, unlike yo, examples like az or pil don’t seem to be that relevant for the currently accepted syllabic grid, which is composed by signs that appear as syllabograms in a systemic, predictable fashion (cfr. Kettunen and Lacadena 2014); perhaps, then, if they become accepted, these anomalous readings could be integrated into the entry for their respective ‘parent’ logograms rather than into the ‘main’ syllabic grid. In any case, given the lack of agreement on how to analyse these glyphs or whether to accept these exceptional cases of non-initial derivation, I propose this reading as a tentative suggestion rather than as a fact, but I find it to be the most satisfying interpretation for me at the moment, since it doesn’t incorporate any new elements to the known historical narrative, and instead just ammends a bit our understanding of how this particular sign was read in this context.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Dr Gabriel Kenrick Kruell for his comments on this idea, and for his encouragement on disseminating it. All opinions stated here are mine alone.

Addendum

Having finally read Whittaker’s recent (and important) book on Aztec writing (2021), it is perhaps surprising that this fascinating glyph is merely mentioned in passing there, but the implicit analysis is the same (not surprising, of course, given that my analysis was inspired by Whittaker’s work in the first place): “A histerophonic value (is) a phonetic value derived, not acrophonically from the initial section of a word base or logogram, but hysterophonically from its final section. Examples of this of Aztec date are pil from HUIPIL(LI), “blouse”, az from PIAZ(TLI), “water pipe”, and hua₃ from IZHUA(TL), “leaf” (Whittaker 2021: 190). I believe that the fact that in three different occasions, which is Johansson (2016), this note from 2021, and Whittaker’s book, published a month after (2021), the same explanation has been given to this sign, makes the case for it being the correct interpretation rather strong. Finally, I must say that, personally, I do not claim any precedence on this analysis, since the first to identify correctly the iconography of the glyph was, to my notice, Patrick Johansson, and Gordon Whittaker’s explanation of the mechanism behind it takes precedence over this note; however, given the importance of this glyph for the history of the people who are still known as Aztecs in the majority of languages of the world, I felt it was necessary to develop the argument in extenso.

References

Barlow, Robert H. 1949. “El Códice Azcatitlan”. Journal de la Société des Americanistes 38: 101-135. Facsimile edition, Paris.

Castañeda De La Paz, María. 2010. “El Códice X o los anales del grupo de la Tira de la Peregrinación. Evolución pictográfica y problemas en su análisis interpretativo”, Journal de la Société des américanistes 91(1): 7-40.

Castañeda de la Paz, María. 2007. “«La Tira de la peregrinación y la ascendencia chichimeca de los tenochca.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 38: 183-212.

Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de Alva. 1891. “Las naciones que hubo en la Nueva España y hasta hoy en día, y las lenguas que usa cada nación” In Obras Históricas, Tomo 1: Relaciones, ed. Alfredo Chavero, 106-109. Mexico: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento.

Johansson, Patrick. 2016. “La imagen de Aztlan en el “Códice Boturini.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 51: 111-172.

Lacadena, Alfonso, and Harri Kettunen, 2014. Sistemas de escritura mesoamericanos: Escritura náhuatl. Manual for the Workshop organised at the University of Helsinki, March 17-April 2.

Navarrete, Federico. 2011. Los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del valle de México: Los altépetl y sus historias. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas.

Seler, Eduard. 1960. Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Amerikanischen Sprach- und Altertumskund, vol 2. Graz: Akademisehe Druek- u. Verlag-sanstalt.

Rajagopalan, Angela Herren. 2019. Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Tena, Rafael. Códice Aubin. Edición facsimilar, vol. 2. México: Secretaría de Cultura / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Tezozomoc, Hernando de Alvarado. 2003. Crónica Méxicana. Madrid: Promolibro.

Whittaker, Gordon. 2009. “The Principles of Nahuatl Writing.” Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 16: 47‐81.

Whittaker, Gordon. 2021. “The Controversial Relationship between Aztec Iconography and Writing.” Presentation at the INSCRIBE Workshop, Production of Images and Language Notation, Zoom, 12-15 January.

Whittaker, Gordon. 2021. Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A guide to Nahuatl writing, Berkeley: University of California Press.