Chicon (MH537r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph plus notation (functioning as a compound) for the personal name Chicon (“Seven,” attested here as a man’s name) shows a curving array of seven (chicome) small circles. Below this notation is a ceramic jug or pot (comitl), seemingly meant phonetically to reinforce the -con ending of the name. Another example of the name Chicon, below, shows just seven upright lines that are joined at the bottom by a horizontal lines. In that case, the comitl was not added.
Stephanie Wood
What is curious is whether the number in this man's name was once accompanied by a calendrical day sign. Chicomacatl is a popular name, for example. It combines the number seven with the day sign of acatl (reed/cane). The ceramic piece here is not a day sign. It is also curious that it would be seen as necessary to reinforce the -con ending on the number. There is one other example, however (see below).
As calendrical names evolved, it was more common to see the number drop away and the day sign remain. Macuil may be another name like Chicon. It may have started out as Macuilxochitl or Macuilquiyauh, etc., and then it became apocopated. Regardless of a possible omission here, calendrics still figured importantly in Nahuas' religious views of the cosmos in 1560.
Stephanie Wood
antonio.chicō
Antonio Chicon
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
números, numbers, seven, siete, cerámica, barro, ollas, cantaros
chicome, seven, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chicome
Siete
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 537r, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=153&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).
