Alti (MH764v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Alti (perhaps “He Bathed” or “A Sacrificed Enslaved Person”) is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows the head of a man in profile, looking toward the viewer’s left, face to face with the tribute payer. A whirlpool of turquoise blue water sits on his head, and water also covers his hair.
Stephanie Wood
The visual is all about bathing, but the term altia has another meaning, referring to the sacrifice of enslaved people to appease the divine forces or deities. So this could be a phonetic rendering or a logographic one. Note how the root of altia is atl, and the “t” from atl has dropped away. This happens occasionally, such as with the term altepetl. A couple of other examples appear below.
Stephanie Wood
po alti
Pedro Alti
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
esclavos, sacrificio, agua, nombres de hombres
altia, to bathe oneself, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/
posiblemente, Se Bañó, o Persona Esclavizada Sacrificiada
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 764v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=607&st=image.
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).
