cozcatl (TK211r)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents a necklace (cozcatl). It is not named as such in the Spanish-language text on the same page, but it compares well enough to other simplex glyphs and elements of compounds to justify this label. This necklace has twenty-seven small pear-shaped pieces of gold strung on a red cord or leather strip. These gold pieces look something like bells, but they lack the design details, such as opening for the sound to escape at the bottom. Bumping up against each other, they could make a sound, and they seem to be flat and smooth, which would imply that they might shine.
Stephanie Wood
Necklaces in this collection are typically made of cultural jade or turquoise beads or pendants, but they can also have shells, flowers, and/or gold bells. Occasionally, there are corn cobs pendants. These examples from Tepetlaoztoc are especially heavy with gold, which is apparently what Hernando Cortés or his employee were demanding. This manuscript was produced as part of the community’s resistance 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 K09_A in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K09_A.
Stephanie Wood
las joyas.
las joyas (the jewels)
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
collares, jewelry, joya, oro, suenan, metales, cascabel, cascabeles, pinjante, pinjantes, campana, campanas, campanilla, campanillas, tributos, colonialismo, resistencia, coyolli, oyohualli
cozca(tl), necklace, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cozcatl
el collar
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.
