PhD, Social Anthropology, University College London. Anthropologist working with the K'iche' Maya. Teacher of Aztec literature at UNAM. Aztec epigraphist.
Yesterday, a team of specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, led by the historians Baltazar Brito Guadarrama and María Castañeda de la Paz, the philologist Michel Oudijk, and the Nahuatl specialist Rafael Tena, presented to the public the discovery of three new Aztec codices, collectively known as the Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco, formerly a part of the Culhuacan polity of Central Mexico, and nowadays located within the Iztapalapa borough in Mexico City. This is one of the most exciting and spectacular discoveries regarding codical sources in recent years, and is no doubt closely related to the topic of this blog. The discovery has been already covered by the Mexican press and explained in detail in yesterday’s presentation at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which can be seen in Youtube. However, an English summary will be presented for the readers of this blog.
The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa, and it is now stored at the library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. It comprises three codices. The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco, as well as lists of toponyms to be found within Culhuacan, Tetepilco, Tepanohuayan, Cohuatlinchan, Xaltocan and Azcapotzalco. The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, is unique, as Oudijk remarks, since it is a pictographic inventory of the church of San Andrés Tetepilco, comprising two pages. Sadly, it is very damaged.
Finally, the third document, now baptised as the Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history in the vein of the Boturini and the Aubin codices, comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603. It seems to belong to the same family as the Boturini, the Aubin, the Ms. 40 and the Ms. 85 of Paris, that is to say, some of the main codices dealing with Aztec imperial history, and Brito considers it as a sort of bridge between the Boturini and the Aubin, since its pictographic style is considerably close to the early colonial one of the former, rather than the late colonial one of the latter. It comprises 20 rectangular pages of amate paper, and contains new and striking iconography, including a spectacular depiction of Hernán Cortés as a Roman soldier. In the Aztec side of things, new iconography of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina during his conquest of Tetepilco is presented (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco: a) Map of the Founding of San Andrés Tetepilco; b) Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco; c) Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco
Of course, new and very interesting examples of Aztec writing are contained throughout all these documents, including old and new toponyms, spellings of Western and Aztec names, and even some information that confirms that some glyphs formerly considered as hapax, as the chi syllabogram in the spelling of the name Motelchiuhtzin in Codex Telleriano-Remensis 43r, discussed in another post of this blog, were not anomalous but possibly conventional. Besides logosyllabic spellings, the presence of pictographs with alphabetic glosses in Nahuatl will be of great help to ascertain the functioning of this still controversial part of the Aztec communication system.
In any case, the author of this blog remains expectant of the future digital and physical publication of the Codices by Baltazar Brito’s team of experts, promised yesterday, and congratulate them for their breakthrough discovery. Cheers for Aztec writing and its everlasting cultural legacy!
Codex Osuna, a picto-glyphic and alphabetic colonial document in Nahuatl and Spanish (Cortés Alonso 1976), is a miscellany of documents which form part of “an inquiry into the conduct of Indian and Spanish governments by the visitador Valderrama in 1565″ (Glass 1975, 178), in which the grievances against both the indigenous government of Tenochtitlan and colonial Spanish functionaries are vividly portrayed. In particular, documents II and III, comprising folios 14 to 25 of the Codex, present a series of inquiries regarding the excessive number of personal services and forage demanded by a number of Spanish functionaries: the viceroy Luis de Velasco, the oidores (Audiencia judges) Dr Ceynos, Dr Bravo, Dr Zorita, Dr Orozco, Dr Puga, Dr Villalobos, Dr Villanueva, and a prosecutor, Maldonado. The aforementioned personages are not only portrayed iconographically, but their names are also written in Nahuatl logosyllabic glyphs. Some are rather easy to understand, while others still elude a convincing reading (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Spanish functionaries in Codex Osuna f. 15-19. a) TLATO-ix-e, Tlatoani visorrey, “Ruler, vicerroy” <gloss: donluys dVelasco.visorrey.>; b) tzapin, Zayn(os), Zaynos <gloss: doctor Çeynos.>; c) tol-i, (To)tol (O)i(dor), Doctor Oidor, “Doctor, judge of the Audiencia” <gloss: doctor brauo.>; d) zol, Zor(ita), Zorita <gloss: doctor Çorita>; e) ci-co, (Horo)zco, Horozco <gloss: doctor Horozco>, f) PURGA, Puga <gloss: doctor Puga.>; g) a-lo, Villalobos <gloss: doctor Villalouos>; h) ehua-a, (Villanu)eva, Villanueva <gloss: doctor Villanueva>; i) <gloss: el fiscal maldonado>, “The Fiscal Maldonado”.
Of course, all these glyphs deserve commentary. The glyph for visorrey or viceroy is common, but here it is complemented by the Nahuatl translation of the term, which is none other than tlatoani (Valle 2006: 114); Ceynos is, perhaps, still a mystery: the sign, formed by what seem to be a couple of crossed spines (huitztli), is rather similar to the logogram TZAPIN, Tzapin, “Piercer”, found in Matrícula de Huexotzinco 498r, which comes from tzapinia, “to prick, to pierce”, and in this case stands for the initial syllables of Zaynos, a variant spelling of the name in Spanish. Doctor Bravo still eludes a convincing reading: the rendering of the title doctor as to-tol or other variant is well attested in colonial documents (cfr. Valle 2006: 114), but the next glyph, which is the syllabogram i, bears no phonetic resemblance to the Spanish name Bravo. However, similar sequences formed by a “lip+water” element (which are inspired by the verb i, “to drink”) are constantly correlated to the title oidor in Codex Tlatelolco, as it happens with the name of oidor Francisco de Herrera, seemingly rendered o-i-el in page 7 (cfr. Valle 1994: 75); in the case of Dr Bravo in Codex Osuna, this breaks with the rest of the glyphs, which render the surname of the personages depicted rather than their titles, but since many of them are also doctores and oidores, and this is the only personage whom corresponding glyphs depict a title of his rather than his surname, an exception is most probably the case here. Puga, a name also spelled Purga (meaning “purge” in Spanish, a medical term) seems to be represented by a European influenced logogram, a topic that has been analysed in detail by Juan José Batalla Rosado (2015), and which is simply read PURGA. Finally, Maldonado, who is to be found in folios 19 and 25, is perhaps the most difficult of all: the sign, which visually resembles a crutch, seemingly has no counterpart in the extant corpus of Aztec writing. However, as I will show in this note, there is an iconographic parallel to this sign, a parallel that doesn’t have an easy reading, and instead forces us to “think outside of the box” in order to propose a plausible reading.
The “crutch” sign that denotes Maldonado’s name can actually be found in a rather different context: Codex Telleriano Remensis, 41v (Figure 2). The contraption has the same iconography: it resembles an open wooden peg or a gripper with a red oval in one of its extremes. But what is it? Luckily, the episode depicted, associated to the year 13 House or 1505, is well understood thanks to its accompanying Spanish gloss: It is a famine that lasted two years, the second of which is none other than the dreaded year 1 Rabbit, famous for famines, to the point that there was a specific verbal expression, necetochhuilia, “to become like the year 1 Rabbit”, to denote the much-feared effects of such date, which were recurrent and cyclical, since similar famines always happened in years in the same sign, such as 1454, where the famine is depicted by the accompanying illness that it caused in Telleriano Remensis 32r. In the case of the famine of 1505, the gloss clarifies: “Year of 13 Houses (sic) and 1505: There was a great famine in the province of Mexico, they went for bread to the province of Panuco” (Quiñones Keber 1995, 174). Correspondingly, we see a man with his travelling staff, porting a bundle on a carrying frame on his back. But… what is the “crutch” sign that is associated to the bundle itself?
Figure 2. The “crutch” sign: a) The famine of the year 13 House (1505). Codex Telleriano Remensis, 41v; b) A comparison between the Maldonado glyph and the element atop the traveller’s bundle in Telleriano-Remensis.
The explanation is to be found in parallel depictions of the same event in other documents. In Codex Chimalpopoca, it is clarified: In ipan inin xihuitl in netotonacahuiloc, ompa ontlaolmamaloya in Totonacapan inic cenca mayanaloya, “Also in that year, they became Totonacs, because they carried shelled corn from Totonacapan because there a was great famine” (Tena 2011: 204). Effectively, the first verbal expression used is netotonacahuiloa, “to become a Totonac”; this expression is glossed by the lexicographer Wimmer as “evoking the Mexicans who sold themselves to the Totonac to survive famine” (Wimmer 2004). Effectively, at that time people only had themselves to give in exchange for corn: they sold themselves into slavery to the Totonac, who had corn in abundance. Most curiously, this behaviour was cyclical! In Codex Aubin 35r, the great famine of 1453 (Year 1 Rabbit) is depicted by people who carry wooden collars (tlacotl or cuauhcozcatl) in order to sell themselves as slaves. The crude depiction of the Aubin is a less detailed variant of a more detailed iconography: the cuauhcozcatl usually consisted in a wooden collar, often covered with cloth, traversed by a long stick or wooden cinch. The Telleriano Remensis resembles an iconographic usage in Mesoamerican codices, in which the merchandise sold by the pochteca is depicted atop their Cacaxtli, as it famously happens in Codex Borgia 55, as Eric Thompson established (1966). Thus, the “crutch” element found in both Telleriano Remensis and Osuna is actually a tlacotl, a slave collar. However, having achieved this iconographic identification, we are still in a dilemma, because the tlacotl sign in Nahuatl writing usually has the reading value of TLACO(TL), tlacotl, “wooden collar”, but can also be used to denote the word tlaco, “half, that in the middle”, as found in Matrícula de Huexotzinco 576v (Figure 3).
Figure 3. a) People selling themselves as slaves in the great famine of the year 1 Rabbit or 1453 (Codex Aubin 35r); b) Feather merchant (Codex Borgia 55); c) The name “Pedro Tlaco”: TLACO, tlaco, “middle brother”, Matrícula de Huexotzinco 576v <gloss: pe°. tlaco>.
Thus, the problem remains: the reading value usually associated with this sign doesn’t make sense, sounding nowhere close to the name Maldonado or to the Spanish title fiscal (“prosecutor”), another possibility. Thus, we found ourselves in an impasse. At this point of the riddle, it is perhaps useful to start “thinking outside the box”, in terms of the theory of Nahuatl writing that I have advanced elsewhere (Zamora 2022). The usual logographic value of TLACO(TL) is indeed unrelated to the name depicted in Osuna, as is the synonymous expression cuauhcozcatl; however, there is another word that phonetically fits perfectly to solve the problem, and which is associated to the episode depicted in Telleriano-Remensis in other Aztec historical accounts. Indeed, the “keyword” that summarises accounts of famine in either pictographic or purely alphabetic Aztec colonial texts is mayanalo, “one is hungry, everyone is hungry, there is famine”, the impersonal form of mayana “to be hungry” (Karttunen, 1983: 141). It appears in past perfect in Aubin (mayanaloc, “there was hunger”) and imperfect in Codex Chimalpopoca (mayanaloya “there was hunger” (Codex Chimalpopoca), but the root is a perfect phonetic fit for the Spanish name: mayanalo=Maldonado. Thus, this glyph is the equivalent, in Nahuatl writing, of how, for example, the Spaniards transcribed Huitzilopochtli as “Huichilobos” or Cuitlahuac as “Cuedlavaca” (Figure 4). Since this is a phonetic approximation, rather than an exact logographic rendering (unlike Purga, for example), I shall transcribe it as a complex syllabogram, rather than as a logogram, as recently proposed by Gordon Whittaker (2022), but those otherwise inclined can read it as a logogram MAYANA.
Figure 4. mayanalo, Maldonado, <gloss: el fiscal maldonado>, “The Fiscal Maldonado”, Codex Osuna 19.
Of course, this sign is exceptional, since its reading value, in this particular context, is borrowed from the value that it has in a more pictographic context, rather than from the value that it has in the usual logographic system. If the proposal is correct, it would show that we need to start seriously considering the verbal messages behind what has been vaguely termed as “iconography” in Aztec codices, in order to further our understanding of elements in the system that have not been read in a plausible way until now, perhaps owing to the limits of our particular scope.
Addendum
Marc Thouvenot has brought to my attention a glyph that appears in Matricula de Huexotzinco 606v and 904v, depicting the very curious name Diego Amatlacuilol, the Nahuatl part meaning “scribe” (Figure 5). The glyph is formed by a piece of paper with scribblings on it, held by the “gripper” element discussed above. While thinking about the proposal of this article, I actually considered it as a very close iconographic counterpart but found no phonetic relationship to the Maldonado name. However, there is something important to add, which Thouvenot remarked to me: the usual phonetic value of the “gripper element” (sans the slave collar) seems to be a phonetic complement cui, from the root CUI, “To take something or someone” (Karttunen 1982, 71). This doesn’t coincide with Maldonado’s name, but it does coincide with the idea of taking a slave or a captive, which could probably reinforce the idea that the Maldonado glyph, a really interesting hapax, is related to captivity or slavery.
Figure 5. The name Diego Amatlacuilol: AMA-TLACUILOL-cui, Amatlacuilol, “scribe”, <gloss: di. amatlacuilol>, Matricula de Huexotzinco 904v.
References
Batalla Rosado, Juan José. 2015. “Análisis de elementos gráficos de contenido occidental en los glifos de los códices coloniales del centro de México el caso de los antropónimos castellanos.” Revista española de antropología americana, 45, 1: 193-209.
Cortés Alonso, Vicenta, ed. 1976. Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes y regidores de México, “Códice Osuna”, Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia.
Glass, John B. 1975. “A survey of Native Middle American Manuscripts”, in Handbook of Middle American Indians. ed. Howard F. Cline, Texas. University of Texas Press.
Karttunen, Frances. 1982. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Quiñones Keber, Eloise, ed. 1995. Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, divination, and history in a pictorial aztec manuscript, Austin, University of Texas Press.
Tena, Rafael. 2011. Anales de Cuauhtitlan. Mexico: CONACULTA.
Thompson, J. Eric S. 1966. “Merchant gods of middle America”, in Suma Antropológica en Homenaje a Roberto J. Weitlaner, ed. Antonio Pompa y Pompa, Mexico: INAH, 159-172.
Valle, Perla. 1994. Códice de Tlatelolco. Mexico: INAI.
Valle, Perla, 2006. “Glifos de cargos, títulos y oficios en códices nahuas del siglo XVI.” Desacatos, 22: 109-118.
One of the obscurest and most interesting collection of glyphs within the Nahuatl hieroglyphic corpus is the one present in the 21st chapter of Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, named “Here is told how those of Amantlan, the ornamenters, performed their task” (Sahagún 1959: 93–97), glyphs which, along with images, seem to describe in detail the process of feather working by the celebrated amantecah, the Aztec feather workers. The decipherment of these glyphs has been initiated by Frances Berdan (2015); in this article, published in the journal MIRADAS – Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula, the art historian Sanja Savkic Sebek and I present our readings for the whole section. In general, these glyphs seem to suggest that images and logosyllabic writing worked in tandem to transmit messages that sometimes coincide with the alphabetic Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex; however, sometimes these messages seem to slightly diverge, conforming an independent text. In any case, the analysis seems to confirm the fact that Nahuatl writing cannot be wholly understood without its icono-textual context, in contrast with the idea that iconography and writing were wholly separate in the “graphic communication system” (Mikulska 2015) that was the Aztec tlacuilolli.
Berdan, Frances. 2015. “Amantecayotl Glyphs in the Florentine Codex.” In Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, eds. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, 322–329. Munich: Hirmer.
Mikulska, Katarzyna. 2015. Tejiendo destinos. Un acercamiento al sistema de comunicación gráfica en los códices adivinatorios, Zinacantepec, México, El Colegio Mexiquense A. C.
Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. 1959. Florentine Codex: The General History of the Things of New Spain. Book 9: The Merchants, trans. Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, University of Utah.
Zamora Corona, Alonso, and Sanja Savkic Sebek. 2023. “Amantecayotl Glyphs Revisited: Writing and Featherworking in the Florentine Codex.” MIRADAS – Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula, Special issue Decolonial Theory, Transculturation, and Latin American Positions – Entangling Art Histories, edited by Miriam Oesterreich and Franziska Koch, 7: 29-54. doi.org/10.11588/mira.2023.1.94236.
The discussion regarding the definition of writing, and of what Mesoamerican systems can teach us about writing in general, is fascinating, difficult, and somewhat pricklish. Ever since Ignace Gelb commited the double mistake of relegating both Aztec and Maya writing to the category of “limited systems” or “precursors of writing” (1963 [1952]: 51-59), scholars have extensively discussed on the nature of Mesoamerican writing systems, disagreeing more often than not [1]. While the field of Maya epigraphy has tended towards convergence and a state of consensus regarding the fundamentals [2], non-Maya writing systems have been the centre of a heated debate that will previsible continue unabated in the coming years [3].
The article that I link in this entry certainly won’t solve the issue and is, in many ways, nothing essentially new (despite the presence of a couple of new analyses), but I felt compelled to write it after I realised that, in a way, it is possible to theoretically reconcile both of the major perspectives in the debate (which could be vaguely named “semasiography” and “grammatology”) if different theoretical referents are used, specially non-traditional linguistics. However, in the end, I am conscious that the most important thing is not the theoretical underpinnings (theory evolves, comes and goes), but concrete issues. Thus, this article was written as a bit of a prologue to further contributions. I hope readers enjoy it, despite its faults.
[1] Some milestones are: Thompson 1950, Prem and Riese 1983, Justeson and Campbell 1984, Galarza 1996, Davletshin 2002, Lacadena 2008, Thouvenot 2010, Velásquez García 2010, Boone 2011, Whittaker 2011, Mikulska 2015, 2019, Zender 2017.
[2] See Houston, Stuart and Chinchilla 2001 for an anthology on the history of Maya decipherment.
[3] See Mikulska and Offner 2019, Davletshin 2021, Whittaker 2021 for recent, contrasting points of view.
References
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 2011. “The Cultural Category of Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies.” In Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton, 379–390. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Davletshin, Albert. 2003. Paleography of the Ancient Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, PhD dissertation, Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, Knorozov Center of Mesoamerican Studies (in Russian).
Davletshin, Alberto. 2021. “Descripción funcional de la escritura jeroglífica náhuatl y una lista de términos técnicos para el análisis de sus deletreos” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 62: 43-91.
Galarza, Joaquín. 1996. Tlacuiloa, escribir pintando. Algunas reflexiones sobre la escritura azteca. Glosario de términos. Mexico: Editorial Tava.
Gelb, Ignace Jay. 1963. A Study of Writing, 2nd edition. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
Houston, Stephen, Oswaldo Fernando Chinchilla Mazariegos, and David Stuart, eds. 2001. The decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing, Norman, OK: Oklahoma Press.
Lacadena, Alfonso. 2008. “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing.” The PARI Journal, 8 (4): 1-22.
Mikulska, Katarzyna. 2015. Tejiendo destinos. Un acercamiento al sistema de comunicación gráfica en los códices adivinatorios. Zinacantepec: El Colegio Mexiquense A. C.
Mikulska, Katarzyna, and Offner, Jerome A. 2019. Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems: A Theoretical Approach. Boulder, CO: Colorado University Press.
Prem, Hanns J., and Berthold Riese. 1983. “Autochtonous American Writing Systems: The Aztec and Maya Examples.” In Writing in Focus, ed. Florian Coulmas and Konrad Ehlich, 167–186. Berlin: Mouton.
Thompson, Eric Sidney. 1950. Maya hieroglyphic writing: an introduction. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Velásquez García, Erik, 2010. “Imagen y escritura en Mesoamérica”, en Ma. Teresa Uriarte (coord.), De la Antigua California al Desierto de Atacama, México, UNAM, pp. 59-84.
Whittaker, Gordon. 2009. “The Principles of Nahuatl Writing.” Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 16: 47–81.
Whittaker, Gordon. 2021. Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Abstract: In this entry, I discuss most of the written variants of the name of the seventh Aztec emperor, Tizoc, which has puzzled specialists for at least a century both in account of its etymology and its glyphic forms. I propose that most instances of this name are examples of the phenomenon of phonetic alteration in spelling, which is different from phonetic alteration in the spoken language, and is a feature of other writing systems, specifically of Sumerian (cfr. Viano 2015). Besides offering readings for most of the variants of this name, I propose that the lone variant te-zo, Tezo(c), found in Codex Telleriano Remensis 38v and 39r, could indicate that the name’s original form was Tezoc, ‘bleeder’.
The name of the seventh tlatoani or ruler of Tenochtitlan, Tizoc, has the rare privilege of being puzzling both to grammarians and epigraphists. Considered in general a weak ruler in account of his poor military record, short reign, and probable murder (Hassig 1988: 198-199), Tizoc’s greatest accomplishment was initiating the final expansion of the great temple of Tenochtitlan, depicted in many pictographic sources and acknowledged as the most relevant event of his reign (cfr. Sahagun 1997: 187). However, besides his unfortunate reign, Tizoc (reverential Tizocicatzin) remains a mystery for the posterity, for reasons that the Aztec didn’t suspect: his own name.
As mentioned, the name Tizoc is an etymological enigma. No real consensus on its origin exists, given the fact that the name as such is nonsensical in Nahuatl (Whittaker 2021: 149); the most accepted, but still doubted, proposal is that of Cecilio Robelo (1909: 356-360) who proposes that the speculative etymology offered by Torquemada and Clavijero, ‘the pierced one’, makes no grammatical sense, and offers ‘the bled one’ in substitution, discarding also the form tezoc, ‘bleeder’. Robelo’s disquisition is interesting, because it is not only etymological, but also epigraphic, and as such it reflects the prejudices of the time on Aztec writing. He suggests that the usual form of this emperor’s name, a leg with little dots, is not phonetic but ‘ideographic’ (mostly a synonym for ‘logographic’ in his terminology), and is a reference to the act of self-bleeding, an interesting problem in itself to which I will return later.
A recent solution to both the written and the etymological dilemma has been advanced by Gordon Whittaker in his recent book on Aztec writing (2021: 149-151). He proposes that the name itself comes from a contraction of the phrase teezzo acic, which would mean “He has arrived well born”, thus the reverential form is rather important to understand the origin of the name. Whittaker’s reading gives the ‘leg’ sign the logographic value ACI(C), and states that the dotted pattern stands for a CVC syllabogram tiz, from tizatl, ‘chalk’. Thus, most of the time the reading would be tiz-ACIC with one important exception, the version of Primeros Memoriales, where the name has an earplug that Whittaker reads as a sign of nobility and thus as a logogram TEEZZO, ‘well born, son of nobles’, or perhaps as tiz-zo-AZIC if the plug element is taken as zo. While the proposed etymology is certainly beautiful and the reading value ACI(C) for the foot glyph is attested in Matrícula de Huexotzinco, usually accompanied by a footstep which would be HUAL, hual, “back” (Thouvenot 2019a), which gives support to Whittaker’s proposal (Figure 1), I would like to offer my own reading of most of the variants of the Tizoc glyph, as well as an alternative explanation of its form.
Figure 1. a) Some of Whittaker’s analyses of the name Tizocic (2021: 149); b) HUAL-ACIC, Hualacic, “He is returned” (Codex Vergara 826r and 642r).
While Robelo thought that the name was ‘ideographic’ and contained no phoneticism, the fact is that Tizoc is perhaps one of the most fascinating examples of the dilemmas surrounding phoneticism in Aztec writing. What I propose here is that the eccentric spelling of his name is the result of a feature of some writing systems: phonetic alterations, which belongs to the more general phenomenon of unortographic or ‘unexpected’ spellings.
What is unortographic writing? Simply put, “the concept of unortographic writing serves to explain deviation from expected writings” (Gonçalves 2015: 45). This phenomenon is tied to phoneticism, and in the case of Sumerian it reflects the substitution of logograms with phonograms, as well as the reception of Sumerian writing in peripheral centres, although it is also present in the central areas (Viano 2016: 141). Unortographic or irregular spellings can arise through many mechanisms: assimilation, metathesis, ‘ear-spellings’, and the case that interests us phonetic alterations, which “are not understood as phonetic changes similar to those produced in spoken languages, but as changes in the use of the syllabary” (Viano 2016: 186). As Viano explains, these shifts are not phonetic per se[1]. The extensive Sumerian corpus has allowed researchers to systematically classify and study these alterations[2]. Of course, in the case of a corpus much less studied, and belonging to a very distant space and time, such as the Aztec one, the question becomes more complicated, and the work is incipient.
Returning to Tizoc and its many written forms, we can see that in the majority of the cases, the syllabogram xo, with the shape of a foot, is used with the reading value zo, a simple, unortographic shift of the kind z > x in the use of the syllabary. This shift can also have other explanations: colonial examples show that the Aztec heard the Spanish s as their x, and wrote it accordingly, as in the use of the logogram XAN for santo (cfr. Galarza 1988: 23-49), but this explanation only works properly in the transcription of foreign names, and the spelling of Tizoc has actual pre-Hispanic examples, such as those found in monumental sculpture (see below); another explanation would be progressive phonetic assimilation of the xo to its succeeding zo, although in writing this phenomenon usually creates wrong rather than right readings (Viano 2016: 220-221). In any case, I will start this exposition with the easiest examples. The most well-known glyphic forms of the name Tizoc are characterized by the CVC syllabogram tiz (formed by truncating the logogram TIZA, as Whittaker already noted), followed by zo. Thus, the clearest forms of the name comes from Codex Azcatitlan 20, and Codex Cozcatzin 20r. The forms found in Codex Tovar 111r and Codex Aubin 37v, zo-xo, are the first examples of the phonetic alteration z > x proposed here, and are iconographically unambiguous (Figure 2).
Figure 2. a and b) tiz-zo, Tizo(c), Tizoc (Codex Azcatitlan 20, Codex Cozcatzin 20r); c and d) zo-xo, (Ti)zo(c), Tizoc (Codex Tovar 111r, Codex Aubin 37v).
The next form, found in the Florentine Codex, presents a ball of chalk (tizatl), pierced by a wooden stylus, with a hanging third element which appears in Codex Mexicanus 64 as a visual variant of the ‘nose-plug’ syllabogram zo; it could also denote a nacochtli (ear plug) rather than a nose-plug given its vertical arrangement and its visual affinity with the earplugs of Chantico in Codex Telleriano Remensis. Nonetheless, the reading value is the same (Figure 3).
Figure 3. a) tiz-zo-zo, Tizo(c), Tizoc (Florentine Codex 2, 2r), b) TECU-zo-ILHUICA-MINA, (Mo)tecuzo(ma) Ilhuicamina, ‘He is angry like a lord, he shoots the heavens’; notice that the royal diadem of the tlatoani is part of the reading (Codex Mexicanus 64); c) Chantico’s earplugs (Codex Telleriano Remensis 41v).
An interesting problem arises with the most well-known form, which we could nickname ‘dotted leg’. We have seen that both Robelo and Whittaker have opposing views, the first stating that the dots are piercing signs, and the other stating that the dots are chalk. In fact, strictly speaking, both can be true. The ‘chalk’ (tizatl) element can be both denoted by a ball of chalk or by a dotted pattern, as numerous examples in Codex Mendoza (cfr. Wood 2020) makes clear. However, less known but visually identic is a variant of zo found in the profession caczoc, ‘sandal maker’ in the Matricula de Huexotzinco, which shows a sandal (cactli) or a corn husk (zoctli) marked with small piercings all over, already classified by Marc Thouvenot (2019b). I have followed Whittaker in reading tiz-xo, but the reading zo-xo is probable too (Figure 4).
Figure 4. a) tiz-xo, Tizo(c), Tizoc, or perhaps zo-xo (Codex Mendoza 12r); b and c) tiz-xo-zo Tizo(c), Tizoc (Primeros Memoriales 51v; Codex Ramírez, plate 13); c) CAC-zo, caczo(c), caczoc ‘sandal maker’ (Matrícula de Huexotzinco 831v); d) zo-ZOC, (cac)zoc, caczoc ‘sandal maker’ (Matrícula de Huexotzinco 826r)
Next is the ‘striped foot’ variant, the one found in Pre-Hispanic monumental sculpture, in the Codex Mexicanus 17 & 71, and the Tira de Tepechpan. There is a visual ambiguity in the sculptural forms. The one at the dedication stone of Tenochtitlan seems to have a striped pattern on it according to most artistic renderings; the Tizoc’s stone one is too eroded at its surface to state whether the foot sign was further incised with dots or stripes, but it is probable, and thus I will group it the other, tentatively. Now, what could be the reading value of this striped element? Luckily for us, Primeros Memoriales, that veritable encyclopaedia of Aztec iconography, comes to our aid. In folio 264v, in the description of the array of Amimitl, god of hunters, we learn that the pattern of thin black stripes in his leg is described with the sentence motizahuahuanticac, ‘he is painted with stripes of chalk’ (Sahagún 1997: 107). Hence, the vertical striped pattern here is actually another variant of the logogram TIZA, and its derivative CVC syllabogram tiz. Finally, the variant of the Mexicanus needs a little commentary: it presents a variant of zo which seems to be motivated by bundles of piercing spines such as those portrayed in Codex Mendoza 62r, which seem to get poorer in detail with each iteration (Figure 5).
Figure 5. a and b) tiz-xo, Tizo(c), Tizoc (Dedication Stone of the Great Temple); c) tiz-xo-zo, Tizo(c), Tizoc, Codex Mexicanus 17; d) The hunting god Amimitl (Primeros Memoriales 264v); e) Novice priest carrying piercing spines (Codex Mendoza 62r); f and g) tiz-xo-tiz-zo,Tizo(c), Tizoc (Codex Mexicanus 71); h) tiz-xo, Tizo(c), Tizoc, (Tira de Tepechpan 12).
The two variants found in Codex Duran are perhaps the most problematic (Figure 6). The first variant presents a darkened leg being pierced. Usually, this is the logogram TLIL, ‘dark’, but in this case, this logogram is read it seems, quite exceptionally, as a syllabogram ti. Indeed, this form may be related to the equally rare spelling of the name Tlalticpac, (‘On the Earth’) found in Codex Vergara 20r. Note that the ‘ink’ element (tlilli, logogram TLIL) above the logogram TLAL, tlalli, ‘earth’, an arrangement which is read (T)ICPAC, as Whittaker has shown in his analysis of the glyphs for Oztoticpac in Codex Mendoza 10v (2021: 108), and the pa syllabogram derived from the logogram PAPA, from papatli, ‘hair’. An alternative explanation of this hapax form is a scribal error in the rendering of the striped pattern tiz. The next one is equally perplexing, and is another hapax. It presents a leg with some bells (coyolli) being pierced. The second element could be the logogram COYOL, coyolli, bell, although the most likely explanation is that in this case the sign is iconographic and does not have any reading. If this element were not to be ignored, my best guess here is that some metathesis is present, transforming the first syllable co- into oc (as OL becomes lo in the Spanish name “Alonso”, cfr. Davletshin 2021: 63) but of course this is uncertain for the moment, as no other examples of this reading for the glyph could be found in the corpus. I advance the two explanations for these strange forms, but the reader can decide for the more conventional solutions.
Finally, a comment is needed on what is perhaps the most mysterious variant of them all, not on epigraphic but on actual phonetic grounds. It occurs twice in Codex Telleriano Remensis. This variant simply spells the name Tizoc as Tezoc, ‘bleeder’, by substituting the ball of chalk with a stone, syllabogram te. Of course, since this reading is only to be found in this document, there is a number of plausible explanations. One would be a change of the type e > i, which could be explained by assuming that the scribe simply wrote a ‘by ear’ spelling, or committed a mistake: spellings which confuse i and e are found in alphabetic sources (Tezcatlipoca/Tezcatlepoca, Cuauhtliquetzqui/Cuauhtlequetzqui, Cuitlahuac/Cuetlahuac). The other possibility is that the original form of the name was actually Tezoc, and Tizoc is the result of a vowel shift only affecting the ‘name’ variant of the word, while the noun itself remained unaffected. This would imply that the Telleriano spelling is ultra-correct or archaic, but the main difficulty is that this codex is, of course, later than the Pre-Hispanic examples found in monumental sculpture, which favour tiz-xo, thus, this suggestion must remain hypothetical (Figure 7).
Whatever the truth behind the name of Tizoc is, this short note can give us an idea of the multiple headaches that the glyphic spelling of a name with an obscure, unsolved etymology can create for Nahuatl epigraphists. The mechanism proposed here, that of phonetic alteration, can also be useful to conceptualize changes such as tzi > xi in the name me-tzi, Mexi, Mexi, in Codex Mendoza 2r, for this name is never written in the alphabetic sources as Metzin (‘little maguey’), but as Mexi or Meci, of uncertain etymology (Guerra Hernández 2021). In any case, and whatever explanation is the most satisfying for the reader, I do concur with Whittaker that the study of both Nahuatl grammar and Nahuatl writing is constantly improving thanks to the efforts of generations of scholars, and perhaps in the future we will have better explanations for the traditional conundrums of the language and its writing system, which have busied the minds of researchers for more than a century.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Gabriel Kruell and Marc Thouvenot for their comments on my ideas. All the faults of this note are mine alone.
References
Davletshin, Alberto. 2021. “Descripción funcional de la escritura jeroglífica náhuatl y una lista de términos técnicos para el análisis de sus deletreos” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 62: 43-91.
Galarza, Joaquín. 1988. Estudios de escritura indígena tradicional azteca-náhuatl. Mexico: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos
Gonçalves, Carlos. 2015. Mathematical Tablets from Tell Harmal. Cham: Springer.
Guerra Hernández, Lino. 2021. Los fundadores de Tenochtitlan: Sus principales personajes. Mexico: Ce-Acatl.
Hassig, Ross. 1988. Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Robelo, Cecilio. 1909. Nombres de los reyes de México: Estudio etimológico. Mexico: Imprenta y Fototipia de la Secretaría de Fomento.
Viano, Maurizio. 2015. “Unorthographic Writings”. In The Reception of Sumerian Literature in the Western Periphery, 141-228. Venice: Ca’ Foscari.
Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. 1997. Primeros Memoriales. Trans. Thelma Sullivan. Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press.
Thouvenot, Marc. 2019a. “Hualacic” in CEN, Compendio Enciclopédico Náhuatl, [https://cen.sup-infor.com/]
Whittaker, Gordon. 2021. Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wood, Stephanie, ed. 2020. “Tizatl”, in Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, Wired Humanities Projects, University of Oregon [https://aztecglyphs.uoregon.edu/]
[1] “For example, when the sign KI is used to write gi4, it is read here as ki rather than gi5 because the purpose of the analysis is to show that a sign with an original voiceless consonant was used to write a logogram with a voiced sound. Therefore the shift g > k is evaluated only in terms of the syllabary, without regard to the actual pronunciation of the sign KI, whether /ki/ or /gi/” (2016: 186).
[2] See an extensive list of these phonetic alterations in Sumerian writing compiled by Viano (2015: 186-196).
Abstract: In 2018, Lori Boornazian Diel identified and analysed a Nahuatl hieroglyphic version of the Catholic Articles of Faith in Codex Mexicanus 52-54. This entry proposes a detailed re-analysis of this sequence, which is unique in the corpus of Aztec writing in the sense that it transcribes full sentences in a purely logosyllabic fashion, and could even contain an exceptional native phonetic sign working in a similar way to those of our alphabet. In any case, these glyphs shed an unusual light in the richness and variety of scribal procedures used in Aztec writing.
A compendium of calendrical, historical, medical and religious texts produced during the XVIIth century, the Codex Mexicanus is a formidable monument to the survival and acculturation of Aztec writing in the second century of colonial domination. Its pages still hide many mysteries, but the majority of them have been successively solved by the work of scholars such as Ernest Mengin (1952), Lori Boornazian Diel (2018), as well as María Castañeda de la Paz and Michel Oudijk (2019), in their respective in-depth analyses and editions. One of such mysteries was until recently, the identification of a section in pages 52-54 which seemed to depict a Christian text (Figure 1). It was only fairly recently that this section was identified as being a Nahuatl hieroglyphic version of the Articles of Faith, a notable insight which was the result of the collaboration between Diel, Elizabeth Boone and Louise Burkhart (Diel 2018: 176).
Figure 1. Codex Mexicanus 52-55. The hieroglyphic version of the Catholic Articles of Faith runs along the upper part of pages 52-54, right above the blue-coloured square grid with year glyphs (Source: gallica.bnf.fr Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de Manuscrits, Mexicain 23-34).
However, despite the fact that this identification is to be considered as certain without any reservations, a new analysis of each of the signs in this pictorial segment can still yield some surprises. Certainly, this work has been started by Diel, who in her own analysis (2018: 167-169) proposed convincing readings for most of these signs, and it has been partially continued by Gordon Whittaker in his recent book on Aztec writing (2021: 92). However, some finer details and surprising new signs can still be obtained when working from the recent advances brought in our understanding of Nahuatl writing (Lacadena 2008, Whittaker 2021). In general, these glyphs seem to confirm Whittaker’s assertions that a more flexible way to conceptualise the often productive and surprising scribal resources of Aztec writing is needed. First, I will present the reader with each of the halves of this new proposed analysis (Figures 2 and 3), and then, I will comment on the readings that were not already figured out in previous works in detail.
Figure 2. Part 1 of the Articles of Faith, Codex Mexicanus 52-53. nel-to-o-tzin-to-te-IYO-DIOS-te-14-7-te-ch(i)-po-to-te-IYO-DIOS-te-TA, (In i)nelto(ca)tzin tote(cu)iyo Dios Te(otl, ca) matlactetl onnahui. (In) chicontetl (i)tech(tzinco) po(hui) tote(cu)iyo Dios Te(otl te)ta(tzin), “Here are his believed things, Our Lord, God, There are 14. Seven to him pertain, Our Lord, God, the Father.”Figure 3. Part 2 of the Articles of Faith, Codex Mexicanus 53-54. IHU(I)-a-oc-7-te-chi-po-to-te-JESU-CRISTO–OQUICH-1-nel-to-o-ca-e-hua-tzi-to-te-JESU-CRISTO-to-pa, Ihua(n) oc chicon(tetl i)tech(tzinco) po(hui in) tote(cuiyo) Jesu Christo(inic) oquich(tli.Inic) cen(tetl i)nelto(ca) ca (y)ehuatzin (in) tote(cuiyo) Jesu Christo. Topam(pa)…, ‘And the other seven to Him pertain, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, as a man. First Believed thing: It is he, Our Lord Jesus Christ, for our sake…
Commentary
nel: The iconography of this hapax glyph (cfr. Davletshin 2021: 80) depicts some beans and maize kernels mixed together. Diel read it as cin-e and considered a phonetic approximation to inel (2018: 148). The actual reading of the sign comes from the root NELOA, “to get mixed, to stir up something, to make a mess of something” (Karttunen 1992: 164). The word suffers here a strongly irregular acrophonic process and yields, without any regard to the syllabic structure of the word of origin, the irregular syllabogram nel. This sign will reappear later in the prayer, where its occurrence right after a sign reading 1, ce, ‘one’ discards any possibility of the maize kernel being the syllabogram ce. A more common variant of this sign (b), depicting a beater (aneloloni) exists in Matrícula de Huexotzinco 623r, where a stirring tool gives the name oc-nel, Aocnel; in other version in folio 560v (c), the beater complements the logogram XIUH to read XIUH-nel, Xiuhnel (Thouvenot 2012).
IYO: Identified by Diel as cuica, ‘to sing’, this breath scroll could stand for the unattested root IYO-TL, hypothesized by Karttunen to be implied by the better-known form IHIYO-TL, ‘breath, respiration’, itself a product of reduplication (1992: 98). It forms the final section of the word totecuiyo, ‘our lord’, a title that was both applied to the Christian god as well as to Tezcatlipoca in poetic texts such as Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España (Bierhorst 2009: 7)
DIOS-te: The banner saying the Spanish word Dios was taken into account in Diel’s analysis, but the stone (tetl) glyph was considered a mere marker with no phonetic value (2018: 168). This is actually a bilingual glyph, a phenomenon that can be found in Codex Cuaxicala, also known as Codex Xicotepec (Stresser-Pean 1995: 85). It states the word God in two languages: Spanish (Dios), and Nahuatl (Teotl).
ch(i): The syllabogram chi, not recognized in the current version of the syllabic grid (Davletshin 2021: 48), actually appears in Codex Telleriano Remensis, where it forms part of the name te-chi, (Mo)te(l)chi(uhtzin), Motelchiuhtzin (b). However, in this case, the vowel is not read. This extreme acrophony cannot be equated to synharmony in Maya writing, given the fact that this phenomenon only happens at the end of a word (Johnson 2013: 62). Thus, the most probably possibility is that this sign denotes the phoneme /č/ being thus perhaps the only case of a true Aztec “alphabetic” sort of sign (!), although no doubt inspired by the contact with Western writing.
IHU(I)-a: Another ‘aberrant’ reading obtained by an irregular acrophonic process cutting right through the logogram IHUI without any regard for syllabic structure, in order to obtain, plus the syllabogram a, an incomplete spelling of the word ihuan, ‘and’.
OQUICH: Interpreted by Diel as referring to the human nature of Christ by alluding to his death (169), a variant of this logogram for oquichtli, ‘man’ is attested in Codex Huexotzinco 689r, where the shield is a native chimalli and some darts (b) rather than a Spanish adarga and lance (cfr. Thouvenot 2012). Hence, the shield and spear denote manliness, which belongs to the actual semantics of the word, which “when combined can refer to masculinity, manliness, courage, bravery; might also refer to the son of God (see Molina and attestations)” (Wood 2020).
Closing remarks
Filled with unusual readings and signs, this Catholic prayer in Aztec hieroglyphs must, of course, be taken as a unique case, rather than as representative of the whole system of Nahuatl writing. We can also ponder upon the fact that Christian prayers are canonical and fixed texts which do not admit any variation on their recording, hence the use of a purely logosyllabic system here, totally unusual. However, despite these irregularities, this text is truly native, hence the astounding innovations present in it within the indigenous tradition, which are in many cases difficult to understand for us: in contrast, the ‘Testerian’ writing, with its newly forged signs and its dominant pictographic nature (cfr. Galarza 1992), was more or less a rupture with past modes of representation.
However, despite being quaint, and despite its exceptional character, this text is not at all inconceivable within what has been suspected from Aztec writing in recent years. Thus, in his latest book on Aztec writing, Gordon Whittaker has urged us to consider the enormous array of possibilities that this system had at its disposal for denoting syllables and words (2021), which perhaps make a fixed syllabic grid, such as that present in Maya writing, somewhat deceiving or at least not telling the whole story. Instead, I suggest that, if we are to move beyond the reading of proper names in Aztec codices, scholars must embrace the creativity and originality of the tlacuilos in their writing endeavours, which, as we have seen, could even yield, just in this case at least, a true letter obtained by a complete acrophonic process, similar to those which gave rise to our own alphabet.
References
Bierhorst, John. 2009. Ballads of the Lords of New Spain. The Codex Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Castañeda de la Paz, María, and Michel Oudijk. 2019. El Códice Mexicanus. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Davletshin, Alberto. 2021. “Descripción funcional de la escritura jeroglífica náhuatl y una lista de términos técnicos para el análisis de sus deletreos” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 62: 43-91.
Diel, Lori Boornazian. 2018. The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Galarza, Joaquín. 1992. Codices Testerianos. Catecismos Indigenas. El Pater Noster. Mexico: Tava.
Mengin Ernest. 1952. “Commentaire du Codex mexicanus n° 23-24 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 41 (2): 387-498.
Karttunen, Frances. 1982. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Lacadena, Alfonso. 2008. “Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing”. The PARI Journal, 8, 4, pp. 1-22.
Stresser-Pean, Guy. 1995. Códice de Xicotepec. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Abstract: The presence of the yahui, the fire serpent of the Mixtec, in Codex Borgia 38, is discussed alongside Nowotny’s suggestion for phonetic glyphs in the same page, related to a cypress or ahuehuete represented with a tree and a drum (a-HUEHUE). It is argued here that the yahui glyph might be a tonal play for the word ‘plaza’ (yahui) in Mixtec, denoted by the crenelated enclosure that sorrounds this glyph, while the word play for ahuehuete, in Mixtec yutnu ñuu or ‘drum tree’, also seems to work in that language.
The exact provenience of the Codex Borgia, and of many of the manuscripts of the Borgia group in general, is mostly considered an unsettled question. Up to this day, the most authoritative overview of the question and the most reasonable hypotheses are to be found in chapter 8 of Elizabeth Hill Boone’s classic work, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, in which the author discusses the matter in great detail, summarizes previous scholarship, and presents a manuscript-by-manuscript list of hypotheses, where iconographic, cultural and stylistic considerations are naturally at the forefront (2007: 211-230). Indeed, given that the manuscripts of the Borgia group are completely logographic and pictographic, there seems to be no way to ascertain the presence of a particular language in the manuscript in order to confirm its definite provenience or that of its authors. However, at least one attempt to find phonetic glyphs in Codex Borgia has been made, which has been largely ignored despite its potential usefulness to help us ascertain the provenience of the manuscript or at least of its creators: that of the scholar Karl Anton Nowotny in his commentary to the Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanhaldt facsimile edition (1976). This entry will present both Boone’s and Nowotny’s arguments, and will add some arguments in favour not of a Mixtec geographic origin, but of a Mixtec hand behind this masterpiece of Mexican manuscript painting.
In first place, it is necessary to summarize Boone’s assessment: “The comparative evidence points to a Puebla-Tlaxcala provenience for the Codex Borgia, probably even Cholula, as Nicholson (1961:433, 1963: 71, 1966:153–154, 1994:113–114) has long affirmed. Although the Borgia painter worked in a style generally similar to the Mixtec historical manuscripts and used the AO year marker, he was probably not himself Mixtec” (Boone 2007: 227). Boone states that while there is a presence of Mixtec deities like 4 Serpent, 7 Serpent and the Tlazolteotls named 9 Reed and 1 Eagle, the Sun god dons Aztec facial painting rather than Mixtec painting, the Venus god wears a headdress with a Central Mexican style, and Tezcatlipoca, a non-Mixtec god, is rather prominent. Also, she notices the absence of the yahui, the Mixtec fire serpent (something that is actually not the case, as we will see). Interesting, and central to the discussion, are the small iconographic differences notices by the author: “the Borgia painter eschewed the Mixtec convention of designating stone by colored stripes; instead, he used colored stripes to qualify wood on occasion (as in the precious tree on p. 44; Fig. 117) and designated parched ground as being stony by means of black curls and gray clumps (pp. 2, 19, 54)” (Boone 2007: 227). Close stylistic parallels with Cholula ceramics, as well as the famous murals of Tizatlan, further strengthens the hypothesis of the Borgia having been produced in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region (Figure 1). As Boone mentions, the only counter argument is the fact that the colonial-era manuscripts from the area are painted in a different style, following the Aztec conventions of the centre of Mexico rather than the Mixtec ones; but she discards these differences as a product of colonial times. Of course, this assessment is rather strong, and there is little to disagree with: it essentially agrees with that of Nowotny (2005: 7), that the Codex Borgia is probably the book of a temple library in Cholula.
Figure 1. The region where divinatory codices of the Borgia Group originated (Boone 2007: 212), drawing by Heather Hurst.
Curiously, another argument exists for ascertaining the provenience and manufacture of the manuscript as Poblano-Tlaxcaltec rather than Mixtec, that of a possible presence of phoneticism in Codex Borgia. This argument, advanced by Karl Anton Nowotny, is usually ignored in the literature, perhaps because it is to be found in the until this day untranslated German commentary to the magnificent Adeva facsimile edited by him (1976). There, while discussing the Tempelrituale (‘rituals of the temples’) or ‘cultic part’, the long, unique, narrative section spanning pages 29 to 46 of the manuscript, Nowotny notices the presence of a possible phonetic glyph in page 38 (Figure 2). It goes without saying that Nowotny’s detailed and grounded description of these pages remains the best commentary to this day:
Figure 2. Codex Borgia 38, and a line drawing including the previous page, with the scene described by Nowotny ([1961] 2005: 95)
“From the black among the to the two confronted temples, the black Xolotl walks towards a small pyramid above a celestial dragon and throws a weapon with the shape of a fire serpent. Then, he hurls himself towards a black underground enclosure whose upper view is at its feet. All of this is surrounded by cult events. Then, the black Xolotl lies within a pond in an underground temple which is filled by Tlaloc, and has an earplug with the shape of an ahuehuete tree (determined with the phonetic hieroglyphs for the skin-covered drum, huehuetl)” (Nowotny 1976: 27).
Of course, here Xolotl is to be understood as the nahualli or animal alter ego of Quetzalcoatl, as the so-called Legend of the Suns explains. Thus, it seems to be settled: Codex Borgia is most probably a Nahuatl manuscript painted in the Mixtec style in vogue in the Northern Mixteca-Puebla region, as the stylistic comparison with Tlaxcaltec murals and Cholula ceramics show; furthermore, its painters were not Mixtec, although they used their stylistic conventions. Until now, I was convinced by this asessment, but another glyph, present in the very same page, has made me reconsider: I am referring to the Mixtec yahui fire snake sign just right to the platform where the black Xolotl is hurling himself, referred by Nowotny with the words ‘celestial dragon’, which is accompanied by a personified tlachieloni, an emblem of Tezcatlipoca, which has a bag of incense and spines. This sign is definitely atypical for a Central Mexican manuscript: it consists on the Mixtec yahui serpent infixed within a crenellated enclosure. As it is known, the Mixtec yahui fire-snake is a mythological fire serpent which is also related to the idea of nagualism or sorcery (Lejarazu 2009) via a word-play related to the tonal nature of Mixtec, as we will see later; as Codex Vindobonensis shows, it is closely related to the Mixtec god 4 Snake[1]. It has been interpreted as being related to the Central Mexican xiuhcoatl, and it certainly is, but the ‘enclosure’ element in which it is affixed is iconographically difficult to explain from a Nahuatl perspective. As Ferdinand Anders, Marteen Jansen, and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez have noticed, this sign is also to be found in the Mixtec historical manuscripts, associated with ritual performances where it is usually censed with copal (1992: 117). It features prominently in Codex Zouche-Nutall (15, 17, 18, 19), where it is depicted as a compound of a yahui serpent, a crenelated enclosure, an altar-plaform and a ball-game emerging from the maw of the yahui, sometimes with a roof above all the compound (Figure 3). The glyph has been explained by Anders, Jansen and Pérez Jiménez as a temple dedicated to the yahui in the Zouche-Nuttall and as a ritual enclosure with xiuhcocoa or fire snakes in the Borgia (1993: 182); Robert Lloyd Williams interprets it as a Fire Serpent Ballcourt facing the temple of 9 Wind Quetzalcoatl, where diverse ceremonies led by Mixtec priests were performed.
Figure 3. The yahui glyph in Codex Zouche-Nuttall: a) Variant with roof in page 15, roofless variant in page 19: notice the ball-game, platform and enclosure affixed; b) and c): Incense offering to the same structure before the temple of 9 Wind d) Temple of 9 Wind sans yahui: notice the crenellated walls denoting the ritual enclosure.
While these assessments are certainly pertinent, this pattern departs from the usual representation of temples among the Mixtec, and it is unclear how or why this structure is to be found both in the Borgia and the Zouche-Nutall, specially since even Anders, Jansen and Pérez Jiménez, Mixtec experts, adhered to (and expanded upon) Nowotny’s theses of a Cholulteca origin in their own commentary to the Borgia, explaining this reappearance as a similarity in the layout of both temple complexes (1992: 117). I believe there is another explanation for the presence of the yahui sign in both manuscripts, as well as for the prominent featuring of a crenelated enclosure in it, that is grounded in the nature of Mixtec language and writing. Indeed, Mixtec is a tonal language: this is the reason why words that look the same in colonial documents could mean different things depending on their tone, which was regrettably not registered in colonial dictionaries. Hence the existence of different ‘tonal plays’ in Mixtec codices, where a word with a different tone could represent or substitute another, as well as complement it as a ‘phonetic determiner’ (Rodríguez Cano 2016: 6)[2]. Now, the word yahui had the following meanings in Alvarado’s colonial dictionary:
yahui: a fair, its location; fair, market, plaza, square, tianguez [market] yahui: sorcerer, a deceiver that flew through the air (Alvarado 2009: 170).
As Evangeliana Arana and Mauricio Swadesh noticed, the word yahui has a further verbal meaning related to the idea of payment and commerce (which explains its ‘market’ connotations), and when it was combined with the word -nduvua (‘arrow’) it meant ‘comet’ (Arana Swadesh 132-133), in a similar way in which comets (xihuitl) were represented with a xiuhcoatl in Nahuatl writing. Thus, while indeed the yahui is a fire serpent related to the God 4 Snake in Mixtec codices, as well as the verbal equivalent to the Nahuatl concept of nahualli, the glyph itself could also simply mean ‘square’ or ‘plaza'[3], more specifically, a ritual plaza. Ritual enclosures were prominently represented in Mixtec codices with the same crenellated pattern (Figure 4):
Figure 4. Crenellated plazas (Codex Selden II 3).
It could be hypothesized that the fire serpent here works as a ‘phonetic determiner’ of the enclosure sign, which simply denotes a tonal play. This could explain its presence in both Zouche-Nutall and Borgia: the glyph doesn’t really mean a fire snake ballcourt/temple nor an enclosure covered by xiuhcocoa, but is merely a phonetic determiner or tonal play for a ritual square which contains those elements. In all cases the glyph would read YAHUI, yahui, ‘square'[4]: this would explain why this sign is accompanied by ritual regalia such as the tlachieloni, rich blankets with sacred images beneath them, and a couple of priests (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Codex Borgia 38, detail with yahui snake, personified tlachieloni, sacred images behind cloths, and aged priests, probably representing Cipactonal and Oxomoco (line drawing taken from Nowotny [1961] 2005: 95)
But what about Nowotny’s phonetic argument? Actually, the word play HUEHUE, (a)huehuetl, ‘cypress’ noted by him can also work in Mixtec. Indeed, the name of the cypress in Mixtec is yutnu ñuu, ‘drum wood tree’, literally ‘tree-drum’, ñuu being the word for the vertical, skin covered drum or huehuetl (Gómez Gómez and Corona Alcalde 2006: 99), so this compound can also be read as YUTNU-ÑUU, yutnu ñuu, ‘cypress’, making a much more adequate fit with the Borgia, where the Nahuatl syllabogram a, usually in the form of a stream, is missing. In this way, both glyphs can be explained (Figure 6). Thus, it could be argued that the painter of the Codex Borgia was effectively a Mixtec tay huisi tacu or ‘person who has the office of painting’.
Figure 6. Possible Mixtec glyphs in Codex Borgia 38: a) YAHUI, yahui, ‘square, plaza’; b) YUTNU?-ÑUU?, yutnu ñuu, ‘cypress’.
However, is this truly enough to eschew all the stylistic, iconographic arguments of both Nowotny and Boone and argue for a fully Mixtec Borgia? Certainly not. The most reasonable hypothesis for me is that only one part of Boone’s assessment needs revision: the painters of the Codex Borgia were most probably Mixtec, but, as Nowotny asserted, the book reflects the religious rituals associated with Quetzalcoatl/9-Wind in Tollan-Chollollan, a deity that certainly surpassed ethnic barriers and was revered by both Nahua and Mixtec. This explains both the divergence with Mixtec mythology as presented in the Vindobonensis, the occasional presence of Mixtec gods, and the difference with the more ‘Aztec’ painting style of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. Probably the Mixtec painting tradition was rather prestigious, and the tlacuilos, or rather tay huisi tacu, tried the best that they could to stick to omit Mixtec glyphs in their endeavour, but slipped a couple of Mixtec glyphs in that ritual scene alone.
Thus, it can be concluded that, perhaps, Codex Borgia is a manuscript made by Mixtec hands under the patronage of the powerful priesthood of Cholula, which commissioned the book probably in account of the magnificent style of Mixtec artistry, something that could perhaps be sustained in the quasi-legendary affirmation that it was Mixtec painters from the Tlailotlaque tribe which taught the art of writing to the Chichimec newcomers (Robertson 1959: 13). This also weakens the argument for a Tlaxcaltec origin, given the central role of the multi-ethnical rituality of Quetzalcoatl/9-Wind that took place at Cholula, and explains the divergence with the style of both Chololteca and Tlaxcaltec colonial manuscripts, which probably reflected the style of Nahuatl tlacuilos. Furthermore, the presence in these pages of the ceremony of the piercing of the septum, first noticed by Nowotny (1976: 30), strongly associated with Cholula both in Mixtec historical codices (cfr. Hermann Lejarazu 2021) and the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca 2, further consolidates this idea.
Since the Borgia lacks any noticeable phoneticism except (perhaps) the aforementioned, it was probably meant to convey divinatory and ritual texts both in Nahuatl and Mixtec through logograms and pictography: a bilingual text, something that is not uncommon in Mesoamerican writing, as the example of Codex Cuaxicala (formerly Xicotepec), a Nahuatl-Huastec mixed document, shows. In any case, the logographic and pictographic nature of the divinatory manuscripts of Central Mexico force us to rethink the idea of writing present in them, perhaps suggesting a multiethnic public and a potentially multilingual reading; despite this multilingual public, little pieces of evidence could betray the actual ethnic origins of their creators, as is perhaps the case of Codex Borgia.
Notes
[1] The name of this deity seems to be written in Codex Vindobonensis 30 as 4-COO YAHUI-NDICANDI, Quicoo Yahui Ndicandi, ‘4 Snake, Sun Fire Snake’, a name that can be reconstructed via an identical glossed name glyph in Codex Muro 3 and 8 (cfr. Smith 1973). Sadly, the name of his companion 7 Snake, who appears in the Borgia too, is barely legible and has no extant glossed counterparts, but it seems to be something akin to ‘7 Snake, Descending Eagle’, which could mean that both are companions of the Sun God in the sunrise and the evening. Nowotny suggests they are, respectively, the companion of the sun and the moon ([1961] 2005: 48)
[2] For example, the place name ñoyhi ‘green place’ is denoted in Codex Egerton by a frieze (ÑUU, ñuu, ‘town’ in the Teposcolula variant), and a jaguarundi. The word yhi means both ‘green’ and ‘jaguarundi, fox’: thus, the jaguarundi is just a ‘phonetic determiner’ or tonal play for the reading ‘green’ (Rodríguez Cano 2016: 416).
[3] Notice the similarity of the ’round crenelated enclosure’ motif and some variants of the TIANQUIZ(TLI), tianquiztli, ‘market’ glyph in Nahuatl (López Luján and Olmedo 2010).
[4] As mentioned, extant glossed sources like Codex Muro 3 and 8 make it possible to confirm the reading of this glyph. Of course, it could be argued that the ‘enclosure’ element is the phonetic determiner, and the fire snake denotes a fire serpent temple like that depicted in page 46. While not impossible, the point of this note is that the juxtaposition of both elements only makes sense in Mixtec writing, but makes little sense in Nahuatl.
References
Alvarado, Fray Francisco (2009), Voces del Dzaha Dzavui, eds. Marteen Janden and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, Mexico, CSEIIO.
Anders, Ferdinand; Jansen, Maarten, and Pérez Jiménez, Gabina Aurora. 1992. Crónica Mixteca: El Rey 8 Venado, Garra de Jaguar y la dinastía de Teozacualco-Zaachila. Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Zouche-Nuttall, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Anders, Ferdinand; Jansen, Maarten, and Pérez Jiménez, Gabina Aurora. 1993. Los templos del cielo y de la oscuridad: Oráculos y liturgia. Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Borgia, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Arana, Evangelina, and Swadesh, Mauricio. 1965. Los Elementos del Mixteco Antiguo, Mexico, Instituto Nacional Indigenista / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 2007. Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Hermann Lejarazu, Manuel A. 2009. “La serpiente de fuego o yahui en la Mixteca prehispánica: iconografía y significado” Anales del Museo de América 17: 64-77
Hermann Lejarazu, Manuel A. 2021. “Viaje a Cholula y ceremonia de tecuhtli”, Arqueología Mexicana, edición especial, núm. 97, pp. 46-55.
López Luján, Leonardo, and Olmedo, Bertina. 2010. “Los monolitos del mercado y el glifo tianquiztli”, Arqueología Mexicana 101: 18-21.
Nowotny, Karl Anton, ed. 1976. Codex Borgia: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (God. Borg. Messican 1) Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe des Codex im Original-format. Commentary by Karl Anton Nowotny. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druek und Verlagsanstalt.
Nowotny, Karl Anton. (1961) 2005. Tlacuilolli: Style and Contents of the Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts, with a Catalogue of the Borgia Group, ed. de George A. Everett, Jr. y Edward B. Sisson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Robertson, Donald. 1959. Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press.
Rodríguez Cano, Laura. 2016. Los topónimos de la Mixteca Baja: Corpus y Análisis epigráfico y cartográfico. PhD diss., National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Smith, Mary Elizabeth 1973. “The Relationship between Mixtec Manuscript painting and Mixtec language: A Study of some Personal Names in Codices Muro and Sánchez Solis”, in Benson (ed.), Mesoamerican Writing Systems, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., pp. 47-98.
Abstract: The famous plan of the teoithualco or sacred courtyard in folio 269r of Sahagun’s Primeros Memoriales has been of enormous importance in conceptualizing sacred spaces in Aztec religious history and archaeology, despite the uncertainties regarding its identification. This note argues that the most famous interpretation of this diagram, that of Eduard Seler (1901), probably misidentified two buildings, namely the Colhuacan Teocalli or ‘Temple of Culhuacan’ and the Cuauhcalli or ‘House of Eagles’, a temple for warriors. This misidentification stemmed from glossing over the CUAUH, cuauh·tli, ‘eagle’ glyph next to the small temple-house with the image of Huitzilopochtli, as well as from Seler’s usage of Durán’s information regarding the location of the cuauhcalli, now superseded by archaeological data.
Perhaps the most famous pictography in Sahagun’s Primeros Memoriales is the representation of what this document calls cececni tlacatecolocalco, ‘many temples of the devil’, a Christian misnomer of what probably was cececni teocalco or ‘many temples of the gods’. This image, one of the few extant indigenous diagrams of a ritual compound in in XVIth century Central Mexico (others are to be found in the Plano de Papel de Maguey and arguably in Codex Borgia), is precious for its alphabetic glosses but, sadly, each of the items of the image is not correlated with certainty with its accompanying list. The first scholar to attempt this work of identification was Eduard Seler, in an article “The Excavations at the Site of the Main Temple of Mexico” (1901), dedicated to recent findings in the Historical Centre of Mexico City. Most of these identifications, which presupposed that the diagram was indeed that of Tenochtitlan’s sacred precinct, have stood firmly the test of time (Figure 1). However, there is an element, or perhaps a couple of them, which are controversial (see Sahagún 1997: 117-120), and which Seler himself considered as not as certain (nicht mit gleicher Sicherheit) as the rest: I am referring to his identification of the structure at the top of the diagram (or to the east, since indigenous maps were oriented towards that direction) with the Colhuacan Teocalli, and that at the bottom left of the diagram (North West) with the Cuauhcalli, the ‘house of eagles’, a military temple.
Figure 1. Sahagun’s plan of a sacred precinct and its identifications according to Seler (1901): a) The two great temples; b) The cuauhxicalli or ‘eagle bowl’, an altar to the sun; (c) A calmecac, priest houses; e) The Cuauhcalli or ‘house of eagles’, a temple for warriors; (f) The teotlachtli or ‘ball court of the gods’; g) Tzompantli or skull rack; h) Yopico Teocalli, the temple of Xipe Totec, the flayed god; i) The temalacatl, where the ‘gladiatorial’ sacrifice or tlahuahuanaliztli took place; k) The Colhuacan Teocalli or ‘temple of Colhuacan’, which Seler identified as a Huitzilopochtli temple; l, m) The gods 5 Lizard and 5 House respectively; n) The ithualli or courtyards; o) The coatenamitl or ‘snake wall’.
Figure 2. The original list in Primeros Memoriales: <gloss: Teucalli. / Quauhxicalli. / Calmecatl. yxmomoztl. / Quauhcalli. / Teutlachtli. / Tzunpantlj. / Yopico teucalli / Temallacatl. / Colhvacan teucalli. / Macuilcuetzpalli / Macuilcalli. / Ytvalli. / Covatenamitl. /Teuquiyaoatl. Yc excā callacovaya> Translation: “House of the gods / Eagle vesssel / Priestly school / Front platform altar / Eagle house / Sacred ball court / Skull rack / Yopico Temple / ‘Gladiatorial’ stone / Colhuacan temple / Five Lizard / Five House / Courtyard / Wall of snakes / Sacred portals, entryways in three places” (cfr. Sahagún 1997: 119-120).
Before dealing in depth with the topic of this note, namely, whether Seler’s identification of the cuauhcalli with temple e in his diagram can be still upheld, an important warning must be made. As Thelma Sullivan explains in his edition and translation of this Sahaguntine document (1997), we don’t know whether this scheme depicts either a diagram of the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan, as many have assumed (Marquina 1960, 1964 ; González Torres 1985: 153-171 ; León-Portilla 1987a: 84-87 ; Townsend 1987: 372, 2010: 133; Matos Moctezuma 1999: 27; López Austin 2009: 32; Couvreur 2002), or an image of the sacred precinct of Tepepolco/Tepeapulco, the provincial town where Sahagun started his researches on Aztec religion, and from which the now lost pictographies that were put into text in order to create the Primeros Memoriales proceed, an opinion shared by H.B. Nicholson (cfr. Sahagún 1997: 117-120), Eloise Quiñones Queber (cfr. Sahagún 1997: 39), and Santiago de Orduña (2008). Indeed, the Primeros Memoriales stemmed from a questionnaire distributed by Sahagún among the old men of Tepepolco, in a way that has been compared (but cannot be equalled) to modern ethnology. The tlamatini or wise men in town, which did not use alphabetic writing, responded with a mixture of pictographies and logosyllabic writing, which were later re-copied and ‘translated’ into an alphabetic text, sometimes, but not always, illustrated with copies of the Tepepolcan pictographies, a work which was done by Sahagun’s Tlatelolcan students. This alphabetic ‘translation’ and redrawing is what we have today, since the non-alphabetic originals made by Tepepolcan tlacuilos, expressly recalled by Sahagun as having being in his possession many years later, are now lost (cfr. León Portilla 1999: 123-134).
Furthermore, a third possibility exists, which Sullivan also contemplates: that this diagram was simply an idealized image of the cececni teocalco or many houses of the gods, as they were expected to exist in towns that shared (more or less) the religious cults of the Mexica-Tenochca, such as Mexico-Tlatelolco or Tetzcoco. This question is unsolvable for now, and I won’t attempt to offer any definitive solution to it. Instead, I am going to concentrate on a feature of the diagram that has been generally ignored by the commentators: the glyph CUAUH, cuauh·tli, ‘eagle’ right next to the building that Seler identified as the Colhuacan Teocalli or ‘Temple of Colhuacan’ (Figure 3).
Figure 3. a) The House of Eagles in the Primeros Memoriales 269r. Notice the CUAUH or ‘eagle’ logogram in it; b) Eagle heads at the archaeological remains of the cuauhcalli, north of the main temple or huey teocalli.
From what we know nowadays about Aztec writing, this glyph is undoubtedly a logogram, and it works as a concrete label, which denotes a word beginning with the root cuauh, ‘eagle’. However, since Aztec writing was fond of abbreviations or elisions, this glyph can be correlated with two of the words of the list of the informants of Sahagun: the cuauhxicalli or ‘bowl of the eagles’, and the cuauhcalli, or ‘house of the eagles’. In fact, it could be argued that this glyph transforms the temple into a sort of logogram too, and that it must be read CUAUH-CAL, cuauhcall(i), ‘house of eagles, given the fact that, being a label rather than just an iconographic element, it can only name the temple itself, given the fact that no cuauhxicalli (a circular stone above a momoztli or altar) is in sight. Of course, this would be natural, since the real archaeological cuauhcalli had two eagle heads in its frontispice, which also must be read, as many elements in Aztec art, as a sort of label, as writing.
Of course, the reader would notice that, if we were to identify the cuauhcalli with the temple at the north, the label Colhuacan Teocalli would be missing its identification. Sadly, the Colhuacan Teocalli is a structure that appears nowhere in the extant information regarding Aztec culture gathered by the friars in the sixteenth century. It is missing from Sahagun’s list of the sacred buildings at the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan, which comprised 78 edifices (Sahagun 1981: 179-193). Because of this missing information, Seler had to propose that the Colhuacan Teocalli was a temple of Huitzilopochtli represented at his original mountain abode at Colhuacan, as depicted in the first page of Codex Boturini, from which the Aztec departed in the year 1 Flint according to Codex Aubin (Tena 2017: 34). However, the main problem is that, as stated, the glyph CUAUH associated to this depiction must be necessarily assigned to some place in the list: where that to be the case, then the cuauhxicalli would have been associated with this purposed temple, something that contradicts all extant information regarding these structures, given that the cuauhxicalli was located in a separate courtyard, in a building called cuauhxicalco, next to the temalacatl (cfr. Durán 2002: 106; Sahagún 1981: 48) which is now hypothesized to have been located in front of the huey teocalli (López Luján and Barrera Rodríguez 2011).
If we reject the identification of k in Seler’s scheme with the Colhuacan Teocalli, then the only other place where this temple was would be what he considered as the cuauhcalli, or e in his diagram (Figure 1). This structure, as Sullivan indicates, is clearly a temple for Cihuacoatl, the warrior goddess, called inantzi teteo or ‘mother of the gods’ in the Primeros Memoriales (Sahagún 1997: 123), identified by her facial painting, half red, half black (cfr. Sahagún 1997: 105). In the hymn dedicated to this goddess, also in the same manuscript, she is called colhoa, ‘she of Colhuacan’, as well as imaza Colhuacan, ‘the deer of Colhuacan’ (Sahagún 1997: 144). It is therefore possible to sustain the idea that the Colhuacan Teocalco was a temple for this goddess, rather than a representation of the cave of Quinehuayan in Colhuacan, the Urheimat of Huitzilopochtli, as Seler considered (1904: 778). Of course, we don’t have more evidence to make us decide for either identification, but the fact is that the CUAUH label cannot be ignored, and the idea that harmonizes more with the sources and the archaeological data available is that it is none other than the cuauhcalli, for the other possibility, that the glyph stands for a cuauhxicalli which would be in front or inside of the Colhuacan Teocalco, cannot be sustained through the sources.
As mentioned, another element of criticism against Seler’s identification is to be found in archaeology. In his article, Seler identified the Cihuacoatl temple with the Cuauhcalli, based on Duran, who asserted that the Cuauhcalli was under the place of the current Cathedral of Mexico, and stated that this was the approximate location in the diagram (to the West). However, nowadays we know that the Cuauhcallior ‘house of eagles’ was located to the north of the huey teocalli or great double pyramid of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, and right next to it (Figure 4). Thus, the archaeological sustain for Seler’s identification of the Cuauhcalli has weakened; instead, now we know that the Cuauhcalli was very near the ‘double pyramid’, probably because of its warrior connotations.
Finally, it seems redundant that Huitzilopochtli had another shrine representing his original abode at the cave of Quinehuayan in Colhuacan, for that was presumably one of the symbolisms of the great temple itself. This idea is not new: for example, Santiago de Orduña calls into question Seler’s identification, and considers that the temple that we see at the top of the diagram is an artistic reduplication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli atop the Huey Teocalli (2008: 57-59). I think that the patronage of Cihuacoatl was probably the association that Sahagun’s informants had in mind; furthermore, the term Colhuacan Teocalli was presumably a mere synonym for the temple of the goddess next to the Tlillan Calmecac, the ‘cloisters’ where the priestesses of Cihuacoatl lived, both of which were located inside the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan (Mazzetto 2014: 148).
Figure 4. The Colhuacan Teocalli, or temple of Cihuacoatl in the Primeros Memoriales 269r.
Before proceeding to propose this small correction for Seler’s diagram, it is necessary to address the question of whether this pictography actually depicts Tepepolco rather than Tenochtitlan or an idealized version of it. In her article on the illustrations of each of the veintenas in the Primeros Memoriales, Katarzyna Granicka (2015) concluded that they could not possibly depict the provincial life of Tepepolco in account of their complexity and their lack of accordance with the glosses (2015: 224). Instead, she believes that they closely follow the celebrations at Tenochtitlan as described in the Florentine Codex and in Durán, “an important argument in favour of the hypothesis that they (the images at the Primeros Memoriales) derive from Tenochtitlan” (2015: 225). This can also be inferred from the text constantly referring to the political life of the capital, as it is the case with the chapter on rulership, which in its Chapter III deals with the general notions of the Tenochca empire rather than with the provintial life of Tepepolco. This means that, probably, the originals drawn at Tepepolco, which are lost, were re-drawn and glossed by the Tlatelolca in their own way. But the problem remains: if the Primeros Memoriales depict life in Tenochtitlan rather than in Tepepolco, what to make of this diagram, which conflicts in many points with archaeology? [1] The only solution is that which Granicka proposes, namely, that the original testimonies and pictographies gathered at Tepepolco referred to Tenochtitlan but only in an approximate fashion, being prone to mistakes and errors.
In any case, here I present my own proposal, which differs from Seler in two points only. As for the location of the cuauhxicalli or ‘vase of the eagles’, which is not apparent in the diagram, I would agree with him that in the diagram it is confused with the ixmomoztli or ‘frontal altar’. This can be sustained with the fact that all sources agree that the cuauhxicalli was in front of the Huey Teocalli and next to the temalacatl, which in turn was in front of the Yopico Teocalli, and which were part of a courtyard dedicated to war deities (Xipe and Tonatiuh, the sun). Finally, the odd location of the Cuauhcalli in the diagram, which is to the east or behind the Huey Teocalli, rather than to the north or right next to it (as it really was), could be explained by the relative lack of familiarity of the Tepepolcan tlacuilos with Tenochtitlan, as well as the fact that the actual place of the cuauhcalli is occupied in the pictography by the oversized statue of the god Macuilcuetzpalin. Of course, however, the other two possibilities mentioned above, namely, that the diagram is either of Tepepolco or an idealized illustration, are not to be discarded: however, this proposal doesn’t conflict with either. In any case, here would be the corrected scheme (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Cececni teocalco, ‘The many houses of the gods’, as depicted in the Sahagun’s Primeros Memoriales, 269r.
Teocalli: ‘Temple’, a pyramid with two joined temples at its top, those of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, also known as huey teocalli.
Cuauhxicalli: ‘Vase of the Eagle’, a circular, sacrificial stone vessel depicted nowhere in the diagram, but which rested atop a momoztli or platform-altar next to the Temalacatl and in front of the huey teocalli.
Calmecac: A priestly school. We can see the steps of a priest which exists from it and censes the cuauhxicalli atop the ixmomoztli or ‘frontal altar’.
Ixmomoztli: ‘Front altar’, placed right before the great temple. Atop it lied the cuauhxicalli or vase of the eagle, a sacrificial vessel.
Cuauhcalli: ‘House of the eagles’, a temple associated with war, denoted by the glyph of an eagles’ head, with an image of Huitzilopochtli, god of warriors. The word could also denote the war council inside the palace of Moctezuma, and any kind of barracks or war-huts. In real life it stood next to the huey teocalli.
Teotlachtli: A ball court dedicated to the gods.
Tzompantli: ‘Skull banner’, a rack with skulls impaled across wooden beams. Now, thanks to archaeology, we know that its edges were placed circular ‘towers’ of skulls.
Yopico Teocalli: The temple of Xipe Totec, ‘our lord the flayed one’, god of goldsmiths, vegetation, and warriors.
Temalacatl: A circular stone to be used in the combat between captives and warriors at Tlacaxipehualiztli, ‘flaying of men’, one of the rituals of the 18 months in the Aztec year solar year or Xihuitl.
Colhuacan Teocalli: A temple dedicated to Cihuacoatl, warrior goddess of Colhuacan, considered, among other goddesses, as “mother of the gods”.
Macuilcalli: ‘Five House’, a calendrical name, the temple of a Macuiltonaleque-like deity, where the execution of spies took place.
Macuilcuetzpalin: ‘Five Lizard’, a calendrical name, the temple of a Macuiltonaleque-like deity associated with pleasure and excess. Of unknown function, although, given that other temples dedicated to the Macuiltonaleque were associated with the execution of captives, it could have had a similar purpose.
Ithualli: ‘Courtyard’, the patio itself. In the Florentine Codex (II: 179), the informants call the whole of the sacred precinct in ithual catca Huitzilopochtli, ‘The courtyard where Huitzilopochtli was”. It is possible that the term, ‘courtyard of the god’, was a synonym for these precincts as a whole, rather than just of the dancing plazas in them (cfr. Wood 2020, entry ‘Teuitoalco’).
Coatenamitl: ‘Wall of snakes’, the surrounding wall of the precinct, perhaps decorated with snakes. Not to be confused with the Coatepantli, an enclosure of snakes around the huey teocalli itself.
Teoquiahuatl: ‘Sacred portals’; as the Primeros Memoriales explain, there were three of them, on all sides except on the rear of the great temple.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Stan Declerc and Gabriel Kruell for their commentaries and suggestions while reading this entry; all the faults in this text are mine alone.
References
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Seler, Eduard. 1904. “Die Ausgraben am Orte des Haupttempels in México”. In Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Amerikanischen Sprach- und Alterthumskunde. Second volume, 767-912. Berlin: Asher & Co.
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[1] For example, by locating the cuauhcalli either behind the Huey Teocalli, or in front of it.
Abstract: A proposal for the glyph NAHUAL, nahual·li, ‘hidden, covering, sorcerer’ glyph in Aztec writing is presented here, as well as an overview of the (unsolved) debate on the root nahual. In the opinion of the author, the iconography of the nahual glyph, as well as its semantic connotations, seems to lend support to the opinion of Katarzyna Mikulska (2011) and of Roberto Martínez González (2016), who proposed that this rootwas related to covering and disguise, rather than to speech or incantation.
“Nahualli: A sorcerer; a shape-changer; a spirit, often an animal form or shape a person could take.”
Unlike its more famous Maya counterpart, WAY, way, ‘co-essence, sorcerer, to sleep’, the glyph denoting the rather polemical root nahual, ‘hidden, covering, sorcerer’ in Aztec writing has been largely ignored in scholarship. Perhaps this obeys to the fact that the way glyph, first identified by Stephen Houston and David Stuart in a now classic article (1989), is of a tremendous importance in Classic Maya writing and particularly in ceramics, being attested in well-known masterpieces as the famous vase of Altar de Sacrificios (K3120); in contrast, the nahual glyph (which later I will show to be related to the notion of sorcery too) appears in very limited occasions in Aztec writing, and its iconography is rather distant from the spectacular half-man, half-jaguar face that denotes its Maya equivalent. Instead, the nahual glyph (Thouvenot 2012) is really humble, almost disappointing in form: it mostly consists in a human face under a number of coverings (hats, animal heads), or, even more comically, of what seems to be a worm hiding inside a turtle shell, or even a half-darkened worm (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Different instances of the NAHUAL, Nahual, ‘hidden, covered’ glyph in the Matrícula de Huexotzingo a) NAHUAL, Nahual, ‘hidden, covering’: notice the ‘worm inside turtle-shell’ variant, the ‘half-darkened worm’ (hiding in shadows or underground) variant, and the ‘head inside snake’ variant (497r, 309r, 872v) b) COYO-NAHUAL, Coyo(tli)nahual, ‘a coyote is his covering’ (667r); c) CUA-NAHUAL, Cuanahual, ‘head covering’ (673v); c) NAHUAL-IX, Nahuallix, ‘covered eye’, probably refering to the eyelid and the eyebrow (?) depicted (488r).
Despite its lack of charm, the nahual glyph is interesting, because it could serve to bring more arguments to the (rather difficult) debate on what is exactly the origin of this root in Nahuatl and its relationship with the word nahualli, ‘sorcerer’. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but all of them derive (or distance themselves) from Juan Ruiz de Alarcon’s opinion, presented in his treatise on Aztec sorcery (1629): “The name and meaning of the noun nahualli can be derived from one of three roots: the first meaning ‘to command’; the second “to speak with authority”, the third, “to hide oneself” or “to wrap oneself up in a cloak”. And although there are conveniences for which the first two meanings apply, the third suits me better since it is from the verb nahualtia, which is “to hide oneself by convering up in a cloak”, and thus nahualli probably means “a person wrapped up or disguised under the appearance of such an animal”, as they commonly believe” (Ruiz de Alarcón 1987: 48).
Before reviewing the modern debate on this reconstruction, it must be clarified that, in Nahuatl, there are two very similar roots that are behind this problem: nahua, which means ‘to be audible, intelligible, clear’ (Karttunen 1992: 157), as well as ‘to embrace’, and a root nahual, which means means “to transform, convert, transfigure, disguise, re-clothe, mask oneself, conceal, camouflage, and finally to trick” (Mikulska 2010: 327), which is verbalized as nahualtia. However, as we will see, the problem is that there is no real agreement not only on the actual meaning of the root nahual, but also on whether it is a real root, or whether it actually derives from a form of nahua, and if so, in which sense.
The problem is very complex. For example, Frances Karttunen, following colonial dictionaries, lists the root nahual as meaning ‘sorcerer’, and derives the latter from an extended meaning of the root nahua, ‘to be audible, to speak’: “The basic sense appears to be ‘audible, intelligible, clear’, from which different derivations extend to ‘within earshot, near’, ‘incantation’ (hence many things to do with spells and sorcery) and ‘language” (2016: 157). This would be (mutatis mutandis) an example of agreement with Alarcon’s first two hypotheses, and is a very reasonable position, based on what we know of post-conquest Nahuatl.
As mentioned, in her article on the idea of ‘secret language’ (nahuallatolli) in Nahuatl culture, Katarzyna Mikulska proposed that the root nahual is actually related to the idea of disguise, covering, concealing, and tricking, rather than only to sorcery, as the colonial dictionaries imply (2010: 327). Similar to her opinion, but a bit different, is the proposal of Roberto Martínez González in his work El nahualismo (2016), perhaps the most important on the topic. Essentially, Martínez González discards the derivations from nahua, ‘to speak, to command’, and nahualtia, ‘to disguise, to cover’, since “the nāhualtia form can be derived from the substantive nāua-l-li, whose sense we seek to understand, plus the transitivizer suffix –tia.” (2016: 82). He equally discards the root nāhua, ‘to embrace, to dance’, because of its lack of correspondence with the sorcerous connotations of nahualli; another explanation whom he rejects is that of Alfredo López Austin (1967: 96), who associates the root ehua, skin, with a first-person possessive n-, proposing the etymology “that which is my covering”. Martínez González considers that the word has little to do with ehua, but considers that the nahua root is indeed associated with the idea of contour, covering or disguise, based on evidence such as the contemporary Tlaxcallan Nahuatl word nahual, ‘coat’ (gabán). Indeed, it seems that all of these meanings (‘to embrace, contour’) associated with a nahua root are not absent from Aztec writing, since they are all iconographically attested (Figure 2), making things a bit more complicated.
Figure 2. Possible instances of nahua as ’embrace’ and ‘surround’ in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco a) NAHUA, (To)nahua(l) (704r) b) XIUH-NAHUA, Xiuh(ca)nahua(l) (795v).
After pondering (and discarding) other proposals, like that of Ángel María Garibay, Martínez González settles on a hypothetical primitivenāhua root that would be related to the idea of disguise: “In summary, we can say that, although the exact derivation of the term nahualli is still unsolved, its general sense has been elucidated: it is akin to the notions of ‘disguise’ and ‘covering’.” (Martínez González 2016: 88). There are considerable difficulties in the reconstruction of this speculative nahua root; hence, in this article I have adopted something closer to Mikulska’s position, which is synchronic, and simply state that in Nahuatl writing there is a glyph NAHUAL, nahual·li, ‘hidden, covering, sorcerer’.
Now, the reader may wonder: what does the former examples have to do with Aztec sorcerers? After all, the colonial names attested here obviously do not denote names related to sorcery, but to the meaning of ‘hidden, covering’, as well particular types of headdresses. Of course, these examples clearly lend weight to the hypothesis that the nahual root is actually being related to the idea of covering and disguise, as Mikulska and Martínez González inferred, rather than just to the idea of sorcery, which is what we find in colonial dictionaries. In support to incorporating the meaning ‘sorcerer’ to this glyph, I would like to add a (particularly beautiful) final example which may portray an actual nahualli sorcerer or ‘man-god’ in the sense of Alfredo López Austin (1973) or the “nahualli-man” as studied by Martínez González. This example is to be found at the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, where it records the title of one of the ten tlatoque or rulers of Cholollan, one being the nahualle tlamacazqui or “sorcerer-priest”, a ruler of the Olmeca-Xicallanca, who were famed because of their sorcerous powers. This graphic realization (a rather grim soot-covered priest inside a cave) conflates the sense of the root as ‘cover, disguise, hiding’, since the since the character is seen to be hidden inside a cave, and the idea of the nahualli as a powerful ritual specialist, a ‘man-god’ of sorts (Figure 3). While this is far from conclusive, this glyph seems to confirm Mikulska’s and Martínez González intuition: that the root nahual has to do with disguises and coverings, and that it was extended to the sorcerers known as nahualli, which were ritual specialists that used their co-essences as a ‘disguise’ of their true selves in their workings of offensive sorcery. Hence, following both Mikulska’s proposal and considering Karttunen’s entry for nahual, I would propose the NAHUAL, nahual·li, ‘hidden, covering, sorcerer’ glyph as a counterpart of the now famous Maya WAY, way, ‘co-essence, sorcerer, to sleep’ glyph, its graphic realization being many sorts of iconographic strategies denoting the idea of being hidden, or covered.
I want to thank Gabriel Kruell for his comments on this entry.
References
Houston, Stephen, and David Stuart. 1989. The Way Glyph: Evidence for “Co-essences” among the Classic Maya. Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing 30, Washington DC: Center for Maya Research.
Karttunen, Frances. 1983. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
López Austin, Alfredo. 1967. “Cuarenta clases de magos en el mundo náhuatl.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 8: 87-117.
López Austin, Alfredo. 1973. Hombre-Dios. Religión y política en el mundo náhuatl. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas
Martínez González, Roberto. 2016. El nahualismo. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas.
Mikulska Dabrowska, Katarzyna. 2010. “‘Secret Language’ in Oral and Graphic Form: Religious-Magic Discourse in Actec Speeches and Manuscripts.” Oral Tradition 25(3): 325–363,
Ruiz de Alarcón, Hernando. (1629) 1987. Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions that today live among the Indians Natives in this New Spain. Eds. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Thouvenot, Marc (2012). Tlachia [online]. National Autonomous University of Mexico <https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/>
Abstract: An interpretation is proposed for some glyphs depicting an obscure historical event in Tizoc’s reign, which can be found in Codex en Cruz 7, Codex Azcatitlan 19v. They refer to an Otomi rebellion at Chapa de Mota, consignated in Anales de Tlatelolco and Codex Huichapan f52
Since our knowledge of Aztec pictorials is relatively extensive, thanks in no small part to colonial glosses and the continued attention of modern scholars since the work of Aubin, not many people talk nowadays about any “mysteries” in Aztec writing, in contrast to the still important number of undeciphered signs in Maya writing, or the uncertainties surrounding Mixtec pictorials. However, the truth is that some “passages” in Aztec codices are indeed rather elusive. This entry is about one such obscure sections in a document that deserves more contemporary attention: I am referring to the Codex en Cruz, excellently edited and studied by Charles E. Dibble (1981). However, despite Dibble’s authoritative, accurate and (almost) exhaustive comment, there are still some parts of this document which are in the dark for our current knowledge. One of them is the upper section of the year 4 Reed (1483) in folio 7 in Dibble’s copy, G in the diagram that accompanies the original at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This small bit of history, which happened during the reign of Tizoc, is only denoted by three mysterious signs: that of a snake above a disk of water, a wooden beam (huepantli), and a shield with a macuahuitl, which in this document usually denotes war (Figure 1).
Figure 1. a) The year 4 Reed (Codex en Cruz 7); b) The ‘water-snake’ and the ‘shield, macuahuitl and beam’ event in question, in the upper section. Both drawings are from Charles Dibble.
Before venturing a new reading of this passage, it is necessary to explain its context, and what Dibble has already said about it. The year 4 Reed or 1483 in the second 52 year cycle depicted in the Codex en Cruz corresponds to the reign of Ahuizotl, the short-lived seventh tlatoani of Tenochtitlan. Despite being a Tetzcocan manuscript, the history of Tenochtitlan, the seat of the power of the Culhua-Mexitin, is constantly present in it. The first sequence above the year sign has been interpreted by Dibble as the birth of a character named Huaxtzin in Chiauhtla; the second, to the raising of a temple at a location that may be very well Chiauhtla itself too (1981: 27). After this, another line divides the geographical scope of the events depicted in the column, and the glyph of Tenochtitlan situates the rest of the signs in relationship to this polity. Dibble (1981: 28)correctly interprets the event depicted directly above the Tenochtitlan sign as the laying of the foundation of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, one of the main events in Tizoc’s reign: we can see the king with his name-glyph, working with a digging stick above the foundation , an event depicted in most extant pictorial chronicles about his reign (like the Telleriano-Remensis and the Azcatitlan).
Afterwards, two captives are seen above the king, each associated to different glyphs. Dibble correctly observed that they were from Huexotzinco, thanks to the curved lip ornament that denotes the inhabitants of this Altepetl. He hypothesized that they were name-glyphs, but they are difficult to read: the first is interpreted by him to be an eagle, but the problem is that such predator could denote many names: Cuauhtzin and Tlotli are a couple of alternatives, among many others; the second, mostly effaced in the original, is even more obscure. A probable clue lies in Chimalpahin, which relates that in the year 4 Reed, not only the foundations of the temple of Huitzilopochtli were laid, but also captives from Cozcacuauhtenanco and Tlaollan were sacrificed (1998: 275). The first glyph could certainly resemble collar-less versions of the glyph COZCACUAUH, which are rare but do exist, or perhaps is a mere abbreviation of CUAUH. The second glyph, however, is almost impossible to figure out: it seems to be a face with a bun on its back, and therefore seems to have no relationship to the well-known toponym for Tlaollan, a basket with corn kernels, so this issue must be left unsolved for now, although I suspect that another close examination of the original could reveal something, since the different copies by León y Gama, Pichardo, and Dibble all disagree.
The names, or perhaps places of origin, of these captives are certainly an interesting question, but the mystery regarding what follows is the focus of this entry. Dibble, with a very insightful intuition, observed that an unknown toponym composed of a serpent with water, the shield and macuahuitl sign, and a beam (huepantli) sign, suggested a war-event related to the procurement of beams for the construction of Huitzilopochtli’s temple. He also relates these signs with a parallel and also obscure event depicted at Codex Azcatitlan 19v, which also happened during the reign of Tizoc: after the foundation-laying event in Tenochtitlan, denoted by a wall, a huictli (compare with Telleriano Remensis 38v), and the name-glyph of that polity, a very obscure compound of signs follows: the wooden beam sign with a cord, a shield, a deer’s head, and the name of an unknown place denoted by a body of water and a flag. Both passages remain obscure until now: Barlow suggested the reading Ahuepanco for the place by joining the water and beam signs. Recent re-examinations of the Azcatitlan, such as those by Graulich (1995: 120) and Rajagopalan (2019: 64), offer again Barlow’s tentative reading while remaining a bit skeptical.
Figure 2. The reign of Tizoc, Codex Azcatitlan 19v.
Before offering a new interpretation/reading for this passage, something must be said about the main aspect of Aztec writing that is still obscure or undecided for us: what is the real nature of the signs that are neither toponyms nor calendric signs, nor numbers, nor names, which sometimes become completely difficult to differentiate from “writing proper” due to the iconic nature of the Aztec script, but definitely carry more information than their logosyllabic counterparts? For example, in this passage: what are the “shield and macuahuitl” sign which seem to denote the action of war rather than just the word yaotl, and the beam sign, which seems to denote more than the mere word huepantli, codifying a little story of sorts? Many labels have been offered for such signs: semasiography (Galarza 1990, Boone 2000), iconography (Lacadena 2008) or, a proposal that has great potential, that of “embedded texts” of Janet Berlo (1983), which Albert Davletshin (2003: 62) and Dmitri Beliaev (2016: 205) have urged us to re-consider. However, it is more prudent to “suspend judgment” on this question for now, but it is important to keep it in mind, because it can give us an inkling on what Aztec writing itself was about.
The truth is that the method of interpretation followed by Dibble was very insightful and pertinent, and, as we will see, it retains its relevance. Roughly speaking, it consisted in assessing the glyph’s iconography and consider possible readings, and then offering an explanation for their apparition through parallel events in alphabetic chronicles and other pictorials in order to substantiate the interpretation. After searching for possible parallels, I feel that it is possible to propose a reading for this passage, which was obtained by following a similar method to that of Dibble, although aided by the enormous advances in the catalogation and understanding of Aztec script brought by later specialists (Thouvenot 2012; Zender et. al. 2013). As mentioned, the idea was simple: to look for passages of historical events associated to Tizoc which can be related to these glyphs regarding of what they looked like, and see if anything could fit. The relevant passage is in a source that Dibble actually used in his edition of the Codex en Cruz: Anales de Tlatelolco. There we read the following concerning the year 5 Flint (1484):
Quiualtzaque in chiapantlaca, uepanato Itzmiquilpa, ahuehuetl in quiuillanato ytlaquetzallo yezquia yteucal Huitzilopochtli; y no umotlatziuhcaneque contlatique yn iuepamecauh y quiualtzaque.
The Chiapantlaca rebelled, they were cutting ahuehuetes in Iztmiquilpan, which they dragged to make the columns of the temple of Huitzilopochtli: they rebelled when they worked with laziness and burned the cords which they used to drag the logs (Tena 2004: 96-97).
Thus, we have a passage clearly related to the context that Dibble (correctly) guessed: a rebellion or war event related to the beams used to start building the temple of Huitzilopochtli, which happened during the reign of Tizoc. The only difference is the date, which in the Tlatelolco chronicles is set one year later, but the rest of it is identical: furthermore, the Tlatelolco document set the accession date of Tizoc 1 year later than the Codex en Cruz, at 3 Rabbit, but the discrepancy is easily explained through the disparity of local historiographic traditions. But what about the glyphs? The ‘snake and water’ sign is clearly the toponym of Chiapan/Chiyauhpan. It is related to the root chiyauh, ‘filth, grease’; Molina also reports that chiyahuitl was a certain kind of snake (Wimmer 2004a), probably living in swamps. It seems that this root was either depicted by a marsh, by the snake, or by both, to form the logogram CHIYAUH, ‘filth, grease, swamp snake’. The CHIYAUH logogram appears in the Matricula de Huexotzinco to denote the name chiyauhcoatl, or ‘marsh snake’, and the toponym chiyauhtzinco, “place of the little marsh”, for Chiyauhtlalli means swamp or marsh, just as the name sign depicts.[1] Thus, the snake and water sign is a somewhat abbreviated form of the toponym Chiyauhpan, or Chiapan, “place of marshes”. This can be better understood by comparing with the renditon in the Azcatitlan, which has the marsh sign next to a flag or pa syllabogram, forming CHIYAUH-pa, Chiyauhpan.
Figure 3. a) CHIYAUH-COA, Chiyauhcoa(tl) (Matrícula de Huexotzinco 711r, 816r); b) CHIYAUH-tzin, Chiyauhtzin(co) (Matrícula de Huexotzinco 601r; cfr. Thouvenot 2012); c) CHIYAUH-pa, Chiyauhpan, Chiyauhpan (Azcatitlan 19v); d) CHIYAUH,Chiyauh(pan), Chiyauhpan. (Codex en Cruz 7).
The rest is, of course, easy to understand in the Codex en Cruz through the parallel alphabetic passage in the Anales de Tlatelolco, but not so in the Azcatitlan. In the Codex en Cruz, the ‘shield and macuahuitl’ sign is a ‘pictogram’ for war/rebellion, as it is in the rest of the Codex, while the beam or huepantli sign explains the circumstances of this war: hence, the final reading would have been similar to that offered in the Anales de Tlatelolco. But what about the Azcatitlan? Here something interesting happens. The toponym Chiyauhpan is clearly read CHIYAUH-pa: the tepetl or ‘mountain’ sign is, again, ‘iconographic’, ‘semasiographic’ or whatever terminology we want to use, only denoting the abstract idea of an Altepetl polity, the place where the action occurred. But what about the water sign, which gives an unlikely complement to huepantli? It is probable that this sign simply is a spelling added to indicate something like ahuehuepantli, that is, ‘beams made of the ahuehuetl tree’. Another explanation, offered to me by Gabriel Kruell, is that the sign actually denotes the verb huepana, “to drag wood”, a solution that is also likely. The shield sign is another variant for the aforementioned pictograph of war, and is identical to the version present at the Codex Aubin; however, its motivation is also related to how the war actually started, according to Otomí sources.
Indeed, the final confirmation for this reading, as well as the full details of this event from the point of view of the rebels, comes from Codex Huichapan, an Otomi codex. In the folio 52 of this document, the same event is represented, associated with the year 5 Reed of the Otomi calendar (Figure 4). The Otomi gloss gives us an insight on the actual location of this rebellion, and the true reasons for it: in fact, the rebellion started because the Aztec wanted the Otomi to drag a huge ahuehuete tree; however, the Huichapan Codex states that the tree would not budge after reaching Tlalnepantla: hence, they left a shield above the tree, and the rebellion started:
Here began the war in Chapa de Mota: it started with the rooted tree that could not be lifted, it only reached to Tlanepantla amid the lands, and when they came to take the tree further, they just laid a shield on it. The war with those of Chapa de Mota was re-started: thus began the war at Chapa de Mota. (Ecker 2003: 79).
Figure 4. The rebellion at Chapa de Mota in 5 Reed (Codex Huichapan f52)
Finally, only the deer head remains mysterious. There are two possibilities. The first, considered by Barlow, is that it represents Tizoc’s conquest of Mazatlan (1949: 125), but the problem is that conquests in the Azcatitlan usually have the tepetl or ‘mountain’ sign denoting a polity or altepetl. Herren Rajagopalan’s recent study on the Boturini, Aubin and Azcatitlan offers an explanation which solves this problem in my point of view. This deer head is clearly incomplete, lacking the bottom part of its ‘frame line’: Rajagoplan suggests that it is an incomplete day-sign, and I agree that this is the most likely explanation in graphic terms (2018: 64). Probably, it states the day where the rebellion occurred. With all these elements, the passage is finally clear.
All things considered, this little bit of history doesn’t seem like much. But this exercise in interpretation tells us something important: the logic of Aztec tlacuillolli as a full communication system was overwhelmingly pictorial, and in it sometimes it can be actually difficult to ascertain the separation between ‘writing’ and ‘iconography’. We are left in the dark about the meaning of the whole when we consider the individual signs in isolation, to the point where we don’t really know if they are ‘iconography’ or ‘writing proper’: we need a historical context, transmitted to us through alphabetic glosses, to get a grasp of the nature of the signs and the ‘embedded text’ contained in them. This ‘embedded text’ probably roughly corresponded to the alphabetic account of the Anales de Tlatelolco, rather than to a text only produced by the reading of these signs as logograms. Of course, these assertions are conflictive with the current narrow definition of writing (Daniels 1996: 3), which specifically states that any system that needs the intervention of the original utterer (here, the tlacuilos ‘speaking’ through the alphabetic colonial versions of Aztec histories) to relay its full message is not writing, for writing is not considered as a mere assembly of signs but as the whole working of them. The dilemma is this: can tlacuilolli, taken as a whole rather than at the level of names, be considered as writing, or we need to continue using the split ‘iconography’ vs writing which doesn’t really correspond to the native categories, who lacked a word to distinguish logograms/syllabograms from “iconography”?
Regardless of the solution to this conundrum, which I cannot advance here, it must be said that the logic of these documents is dominantly ‘top-down’ rather than ‘bottom-up’: unlike in Maya writing, we gain little by the correct understanding of individual signs (as Barlow’s mistake makes evident), while contextual meaning is everything. It is also not always clear when something is “iconography” merely because of its appearance: the ‘war’ sign and even the beam sign, which denote something beyond mere names, or even more, can effectively double as “names” and “embedded texts”, proves it. In any case, the heuristics introduced by Dibble for this document still hold up, and can be used to our advantage in other obscure passages in Aztec writing: ‘attack’ the context as far as reliable parallel alphabetic sources permit it, and the signs will fall in place themselves; only after these possibilities are exhausted we can venture hypotheses based on analogies to known “pictographic” and logosyllabic signs. Of course, as mentioned, originally the source of this full reading was nothing else but that which Daniels calls ‘the original utterer’, that agent which in the perspective of current mainstream grammatology forbids Aztec writing from being considered ‘real writing’: a tlacuilo, a trained painter-writer in the historical tradition, which closed the gap between these signs and the reader and uttered for the readers a full message. But the answer to this question must be left for the future.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Stan Declercq for facilitating me the relevant pages of Graulich’s edition of the Codex Azcatitlan. As in many other entries, I also want to thank Gabriel Kruell for reading this text and offering his views on it. He offers the following reading for the Azcatitlan: “Tizocicatzin was installed on the throne. In this year, he laid tezontle on the Temple of Huitzilopochtli. The inhabitants of Chiapan rebelled, wooden beams were brought from Itzmiquilpan, ahuehuete logs were dragged to serve as beams in the temple of Huitzilopochtli, but they didn’t want to work, they burned the ropes, and they mutinied”
References
Anonymous. 2004. Anales de Tlatelolco. Trans. Rafael Tena. Mexico: CONACULTA
Barlow, Robert. 1949. “El Códice Azcatitlán.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 38: 101-135.
Beliaev, Dmitri. 2013. “Genesis of History Writing in Ancient Mesoamerica » in Dimitri Beliaev, and Timofey Guimon, eds. The Earliest States of Eastern Europe, 203-241. Moscow: Dmitriy Pozharskiy University.
Hill-Boone, Elizabeth. 2000. Stories in Red and Black. Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin, TX: University of Austin Press.
Berlo, Janet. 1983. “Conceptual categories for the study of text and image in Mesoamerica”, in Janet Berlo, ed. Text and image in Pre-Columbian art. Essays on the interrelationship of the verbal and visual arts. Proceedings, 44th International Congress of Americanists, 79-118. Manchester, Oxford: BAR Publishing.
Chimalpahin, Domingo. 1998. Las ocho relaciones y el Memorial de Colhuacan. Trans. Rafael Tena. Mexico: CONACULTA.
Daniels, Peter T. 2006. “The Study of Writing Systems”. In Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds. The World’s Writing Systems, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-18.
Davletshin, Albert. 2003. Paleography of the Ancient Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Ph.D. diss., Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, Knorozov Center of Mesoamerican Studies.
Dibble, Charles. 1981. Codex en Cruz. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.
Ecker, Lawrence. 2004. Códice de Huichapan: Paleografía y traducción. Eds. Yolanda Lastra and Doris Bartholomew. México: UNAM.
Galarza, Joaquín. 1990. Amatl, Amoxtli. El papel, el libro. Los códices mesoamericanos. Guía para la introducción al estudio del material pictórico indígena. México: Tava.
Karttunen, Frances. 1983. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Lacadena, Alfonso. 2008. “Regional Scribal Traditions. Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing.” The PARI Journal 8 (4): 1-22.
Rajagopalan, Angela Herren. 2019. Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Tena, Rafael. 2004. Anales de Tlatelolco. México: Conaculta.
Thouvenot, Marc (2012). Tlachia [online]. National Autonomous University of Mexico <https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/>
Zender, Marc, Davletshin, Albert, Lacadena, Alfonso, Stuart, David, and Wichmann, Søren. 2013. An Introduction to Nahuatl Hieroglyphic Writing. 2013 Maya Meetings and Workshops, University of Texas, Austin. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin.
Tlacuilolli 