Ama (MH492v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Ama (attested in the contextualizing image as a woman's name) shows a rectangular frame with paper (amatl) hanging over a rung in the middle of the frame. Not appearing to be square itself, it may be wavy because it is blowing in the wind. It has lines on it. It looks something like fabric.
Stephanie Wood
Perhaps the paper was put out to dry. Another example of amatl (below) also suggests a fold, which may indicate that the paper was hanging at some point. In other examples of glyphs for paper, such as from the Codex Mendoza, we see paper rolls with ties around them (below). Together, the various glyphs for paper provide some hints about the technology for making paper, its storage, and its uses.
The name Ama sounds much like Ana, so perhaps this woman's name was really Agatha Ana, and the paper is only there for homophony. The line over the final "a" in Ama (in the gloss) seems to suggest an intrusive "n," or what we are calling here an intrusive overbar, so it has been ignored in the normalization.
Stephanie Wood
agatha amā
Ágatha Ama (or Ágata Ama)
Stephanie Wood
1560
Xitlali Torres
papers, papeles
ama(tl), paper, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/amatl
Papel (o Ana)
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 492v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=52&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).
