chimalli (TK210r)
This painted example of iconography features a fancy Nahua war shield. It has a feathered design of a butterfly and a man wearing a feathered headdress and holding a feathered dancing device all inside a circle trimmed with alternating colors of red, gold, blue, brown or purple, and green. The shield also has gold bells hanging down with the multi-colored feather fringe.
Stephanie Wood
There is no gloss, per se, but the text on the same page as this war shield describes it in Spanish as a shield of “fine gold and rich feathers.” As the contextualizing image shows, this shield accompanied the gold pieces that the altepetl of Tepetlaoztoc paid in tributes to Hernando Cortés every year for three years. The shield definitely stands out as especially elaborate and colorful compared to most hieroglyphs of war shields in this collection. Most shields had symbolic or stylized designs, but there is one that features a bee, and another that features an eagle’s claw. See 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_A in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K08_A.
Stephanie Wood
una rrodela de oro y pluma rrica
una rodela de oro y pluma rica (a shield of gold and rich feathers)
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
oro, amarillo, rodelas, shields, plumas, cascabel, cascabeles, colores, mariposa, mariposas, tocado, tocados, penacho, penacho, temacxochitl, maxochitl, iconografía
chimal(li), war shield, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chimalli
la rodela
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.
