amaxotl (HJ276:79pt3:178r)
This iconographic image may suffice for the native mulberry tree (amaxotl) or amaxocotl), but in the document the tree is called a moral (probably an imported mulberry tree). It is a black-line drawing of such a tree with its visible root ball (including both curling roots and straight ones). In our Online Nahuatl Dictionary we have a seventeenth-century Nahuatl testamentary reference to a mulberry tree using the term amaxotl. Molina calls the amaxocotl the fruit.
Robert Haskett and Stephanie Wood
This glyph appears as one of two images of mulberry trees on a pictorial manuscript submitted by indigenous petitioners on or around October 19, 1549, as evidence during a land dispute between the Cuernavacan community of Tezoyuca and the Marquesado del Valle. The petitioners claimed that six years previously the Marqués del Valle had usurped four parcels of community land, planting them with morales, undoubtedly related to his efforts to establish silk production in the region (see contextualizing image), given that silk worms thrived on mulberry leaves. The pictorial forms part of the so-called Códice del Marquesado del Valle. For more information, see Códices indígenas de algunos pueblos del Marquesado, 1933 and 1883, “Códice núm. 19;" and Santiago Sánchez, Códices del Marquesado del Valle, 2003, 165-169.
The Library of Congress hosts a codex, the Oztoticpac Lands Map, also from the 1540s, which shows the cultivation of trees, especially imported fruit trees grafted onto native trees. See this detail in our Mapas Project.
Robert Haskett
…[unos pedazos de tierra] las quales dixieron estar plantadas de morales….
Robert Haskett
1549
Robert Haskett
xiuhpohualli, año, turquesa, xihuitl
amaxotl or amaxoco(tl), indigenous mulberry tree, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/amaxocotl.
moral
Robert Haskett
Single-page codex, Archivo General de la Nación, México, Ramo de Hospital de Jesús, leg. 276, exp. 79, pt. 3, fol. 178r.
The Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), México, holds the original manuscript. This image is published here under a Creative Commons license, asking that you cite the AGN and this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.
