cocoxqui (CST27)
This painting of the simplex glyph for the term cocoxqui (sick person) shows a long-haired, nearly nude, man lying down with a dark gray blanket above him. He is shown in a ¾ view, which suggests European artistic influence, although his head is in profile, looking upward. His right hand comes up to his face, perhaps owing to his agony. Above his head may be foods and/or medicines, as the companion text says that 20 pesos worth of food were given to the sick people in the hospital “here in the altepetl,” probably Santa Catalina Texupan.
Stephanie Wood
This town saw 90% of its population vanish in a number of decades in the sixteenth-century, owing largely to the germs inadvertently carried to Mexico by the Spanish invaders and colonizers. Smallpox was the first killer, raging in 1520 in the capital and probably reaching the provinces to some extent. What Kevin Terraciano (Codex Sierra, 2021, 94) recognizes to be “catastrophic epidemics” in Texupan happened in 1545 and 1576, with each outbreak cutting the town’s population in half. The population was estimated to be 54,000 in the 1520s, and one estimate for the town’s population in 1590 is 1,622. See other examples of glyphs that address this horrific human disaster.
Stephanie Wood
1550–1564
Jeff Haskett-Wood
epidemias, cocoliztli, enfermedades
cocoxqui, sick person, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cocoxqui
persona enferma
Stephanie Wood
Códice Sierra-Texupan, plate 27, 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.
