Atonal (MH764v)
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 sun, a day, or the solar-animating force) and, coming out of the bottom of that is an unusual sign for water (atl) with a droplet (or jade bead?) on the far right, a small circle in the middle, and a triangle with a dot inside it on the left. This water sign may involve multiple small streams of water, but they do seem united into a single wider flow by a horizontal line at the bottom. This flow of water may show currents in the way the lines are somewhat squiggly.
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
juā atonal
Juan 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 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).
