Atonal (MH704v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Atonal (“Water" the day sign, or Dzawindanda in Mixtec) is attested here as a man’s name. It shows a quincunx shape for tonalli (the solar-animating force) and, coming out of the bottom of that four short streams of water (atl) with a droplet (or jade bead?) at the end of each stream. The tonalli consists of four round circles with a much smaller concentric circle in each one and four lines separating the four larger circles. The water streams have lines of current that suggest movement. Please note that this glyph has suffered from considerable bleed-through from the other side of the folio. We have digitally “cleaned” it in order to make its main features more visible. See the contextualizing image if unsure about any of the details that have been modified.
Stephanie Wood
The name, Atonal or Atonalztin, would appear to be a calendrical one, perhaps based on the day the man was born. Tonalli not only refers to a day, but also to the sun, to summertime warmth, and heat, according to examples from our Online Nahuatl Dictionary. More than that, the tonalli "was a sort of soul, located in the crown of the head, that regulated body temperature and growth and played a major role in determining a person's character and fate. Tonalli loss resulted in illness and, if healing ceremonies were not performed, death," according to Louise M. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 190. This is likely a case where a relatively average citizen was given an illustrious calendrical name. The most famous Atonal was a Mixtec ruler. According to Wikipedia, Atonaltzin (in the reverential form of the name in Nahuatl) was also called Dzawindanda by the Mixtecs. He ruled the Mixtec kingdom of Coixtlahuaca. After the first Motecuhzoma took power over Coixtlahuaca, sometime in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Nahuas executed Atonal apparently in revenge for the deaths of a large number of long distance merchants. Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez (Time and the Ancestors, 2017, 337) suggest the following meaning for Atonal: "Atonal refers to a person with a calendar name that contained the day sign Water." See below for glyphs of tonalli, in this case representing either the sun or a day. This tonalli sign here also resembles the matlalin flower.
Stephanie Wood
peo. atonal
Pedro Atonal
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
nombres de hombres, nombres de personas famosas, gobernadores, Mixtecos, calendarios, días, agua, sol, canales, tonales, fuerzas animadoras, religión indígena, tonalpohualli, fuerza personal, personal force, cardinal points, cosmos, puntos cardinales
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
tonal(li), day, sun, energy, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tonalli
Agua, o posiblemente, Brillo de Agua
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 704v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=487&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).
