cihuatl (Mdz38r)
This complex sign for woman (cihuatl) consists of a profile of a woman's head. She is looking to toward the viewer's right. Her hair is coiled with two (braid?) points appearing over the forehead. The hair color is possibly meant to be brown or black, but it has a purplish tone. She has a round, turquoise-colored earring or earplug with two concentric circles; the outer band is turquoise and the inner is red. Her eye is wide open. On her cheek are two vertical, parallel black stripes, which look something like face paint or tattoos but really serves as an added phonetic feature (from huahuana, to make stripes). Her face is painted a flesh tone--light, almost tan or pale yellow.
Stephanie Wood
This sign doubles as the place name Cihuatlan. The hash marks on her cheek seem to represent the syllable "hua" (possession), providing part of the phonetic value of both cihuatl and Cihuatlan, the place name. See the same marking in the glyphs for Acalhuacan and Xicalhuacan, below. This woman's hair is fashioned in the traditional way of town- or city-living adult women called the a. (See also the detail of the hair in our iconography entry for cihuapilli, below.) The Florentine Codex discusses how girls and women wore their hair. This standard coiffure was called the neaxtlahualli (see https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/neaxtlahualli). Other words referring to this coiffure are aixtlahua and icuiya, both also in the Online Nahuatl Dictionary.
Stephanie Wood
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
Crystal Boulton-Scott made the SVG version.
cihua(tl), woman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cihuatl
neaxtlahual(li), woman's hairstyle, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/neaxtlahualli
woman
mujer
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 38 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 86 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
