chilli (CST25)
This painting of the simplex glyph for the term chilli (chile peppers) shows a frontal view of a pair of horizontal red chile peppers. Their tips (on the left) curve upwards. Their stems (on the right) are bifurcated and come out of little caps. The caps and stems are brown (probably originally a green that turned brown over time, as Kevin Terraciano notes about the general color changes suggested by Elizabeth Hill Boone).
Stephanie Wood
Our Online Nahuatl Dictionary shares interesting attestations in Nahuatl (with English or Spanish translation) about chile peppers. For instance, in the Cuernavaca area in the 1540s, a pueblo resident might have to produce in one year: “one tribute cloak, one narrow cloak, four turkey hens, 20 turkey eggs, 300 chiles, and one cake of salt.” For more on the Codex Sierra, see Kevin Terraciano’s study (2021).
Stephanie Wood
1550–1564
Jeff Haskett-Wood
chiles, pimienta americana, productos agrícolas, comida, tributos
chil(li), chile peppers, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chilli
chiles
Stephanie Wood
Códice Sierra-Texupan, plate 25, page dated 1559. Origin: Santa Catalina Texupan, Mixteca Alta, State of Oaxaca. Kevin Terraciano has published an outstanding study of this manuscript (Codex Sierra, 2021), and in his book he refers to alphabetic and “pictorial” writing, not hieroglyphic writing. We are still counting some of the imagery from this source as hieroglyphic writing, but we are also including examples of “iconography” where the images verge on European style illustrations or scenes showing activities. We have this iconography category so that such images can be fruitfully compared with hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphic writing was evolving as a result of the influence of European illustrations, and even alphabetic writing impacted it.
https://bidilaf.buap.mx/objeto.xql?id=48281&busqueda=Texupan&action=search
The Biblioteca Digital Lafragua of the Biblioteca Histórica José María Lafragua in Puebla, Mexico, publishes this Códice Sierra-Texupan, 1550–1564 (62pp., 30.7 x 21.8 cm.), referring to it as being in the “Public Domain.” This image is published here under a Creative Commons license, asking that you cite the Biblioteca Digital Lafragua and this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.
