Acapa (CmpRG)

This compound glyph for Acapa (the name of a medicinal plant) here names a male individual. It is one of three such elements found on the map (a fourth person wearing similar attire lacks an alphabetic gloss and is not clearly linked to a glyph naming him, though there are two possibilities nearby. All three of the men with glyphic names, but not Spanish titles or “Christian” first names, are dressed in what seem to be animal pelts of some kind (see the historical contextualizing image). This suggests that they are figures from the far past or possibly members of another ethnic group (Nahua lords living at the time of the map’s creation are shown seated on indigenous-style icpalli (thrones) wearing elite cotton garments and with noble diadems on their heads). For instance, Barbara Mundy suggests that they are Otomies rather than Nahuas. The Spanish text of the Relación states that Otomí peoples did live in the area, such as in or around the cabecera of Tlaquilpa. Another possibility is that they are among “algunos chichimecos que quere decir gente bárbara” (“some Chichimecos, which means ‘barbarians’”) who speak Nahuatl and live in two of Cempoala’s four cabeceras (Tzacuala and Tecpilpan). Whatever the case, Acapa is situated above another, similar figure glossed as Cuazcotzin. Both of them are seen not too far below the lower left edge of the large place glyph for Cempohuallan. Turning to the puzzle of Acapa’s name glyph, the possibility that it instead could be based on the medicinal plant, acapatli (also spelled acapahtli, with "h" for the glottal stop) finds some support from such sources as Dr. Francisco Hernández’s sixteenth-century natural history of New Spain, the so-called Mexican Treasury. In it, he describes the acapatli as a plant standing “the height of a man” with “hollow, smooth and square stems,” and leaves somewhat like radishes “but crenellated at the edge like a saw.” The leaves, when “crushed and applied . . . reduce the spleen and soothe its pain.” [See: Dr. Francisco Hernández, Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, seu, Plantarum animalium mineralium Mexicanorum historia (also known as The Mexican Treasury; Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1651); see also Simon Varey, Sed., The Mexican Treasure: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000; and UNAM). An early eighteenth-century book by the Irish-born, England-based naturalist Sir Hans Slone, who borrows heavily from Hernández’s description of the plant (Natural History, vol. 1, 1707, 135), describes its woody stem being used “to strike fire, if held between the knees, and a hard flick with a tapering point turned round in it by the hands.” Nahuatl glyphs meaning “fire drill” (mamalhuaztli (see below) in the Codex Mendoza seem to be referring to the acatl in the form of an arrow, with the feather elements attached to them. If Sloane’s description of the use of stalks of the acapatli for fire drilling is correct, then the presence of the round white element in the glyph could perhaps signal that function, as well. For a study of the Relación (which, however, does not mention these particular figures), see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), https://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/mapping-babel-a-sixteenth-century... Mundy (1996), 132, analyzes and discusses Acapa and the other three similar figures, and see also Ballesteros García (2005), 79. For information about the Indigenous communities in the Zempoala area see Gerhard, Peter, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 67-69.