carga (TK210v)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents a load (carga, a Spanish loanword that was taken into Nahuatl) of tribute cloths. There is no Nahuatl language gloss on this image, but there is a Spanish-language explanation of the painting made by a Nahua, who would have understood the term carga very well. The companion text in Spanish also explains that this is one load (shown with a notation of one horizontal line) of fine cloaks. The design of these cloaks is shown in a rectangle on top of the neatly tied, three-dimensional bundle that contains the textiles. The textile design shows two groups of three red flowers with unusual stems in green and brown-gold. Each group of flowers also has what appear to be stems with buds or perhaps anthers. Alternatively, they might be gold ties with knots on the ends.
Stephanie Wood
The background pattern of this image is insignificant here; it is a bleed-through from the other side of the folio. Cargas of tribute goods are common in sixteenth-century codices, but this is the first one to enter this digital collection (May 2026). This one is beautifully symmetrical, and the tie is reminiscent of the way leather strips were tied (see below). The two groups of flowers on the textile design might represent maxochitl, hand-held bouquets that were carried in dances (also shown below).
This manuscript was produced as part of the community’s resistance through the court system to the unreasonable taxation being demanded vis-a-vis the size of the community, especially as the population was declining as a result of diseases inadvertently brought over from Europe.
Side Note: The folio numbers are not always clear in the copy published online by the British Museum. Marc Thouvenot gives this page the number K08_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K08_B.
Stephanie Wood
la carga
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
paquete atado, mantas, capas, tributos, colonialismo, resistencia
carga, a load, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/carga
la carga
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Kingsborough, also known as the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc, and the Memorial de los indios de Tepetlaoztoc, is not on display. It was transferred from the British Library and is now held by the British Museum. It is shared on line at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am2006-Drg-13964
©The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Please also cite the <em>Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphsem>, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-present) and this URL.
