cempohualli (Mdz19r)
This multicolored painting is an iconographic example for the noun cempohualli (twenty). But it is also a sign for a day (ilhuitl) or some number of days, in this case twenty days. It involves concentric circles, including a pinwheel effect filling in between the two largest circles. The pinwheel has colors of red, green, yellow, and turquoise blue. A smaller inner ring is red. Around the perimeter are four tiny circles, evenly placed, creating something of a quincunx. These tiny circles are also red, green, yellow, and turquoise blue.
Stephanie Wood
As the gloss makes clear, this "flower" actually represents twenty days. In the context, there were four of these signs, adding up to 80 days. But John Montgomery made a drawing of four of these signs, each one with a flag over it and therefore each one representing twenty days, for a total of eighty days. He drew this from the Codex Aubin 149. The presence of the flag really facilitates an understanding of the meaning of the sign, which could be just one day in its simplest form (without the flag).
For a theoretical interpretation about the meaning of the four small outer circles, see the article on the left about vibrance in glyphs.
Stephanie Wood
cada una flor
veynte dias
cada una flor veinte días
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
veinte, números, días, calendarios
cempohual(li), twenty, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cempohualli
Codex Mendoza, folio 19 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 48 of 188.
Original manuscript is held by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1; used here with the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0)
