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.
Link to the article in the Miradas website: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/miradas/article/view/94236
References
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.
Tlacuilolli 