cruz (TK227r)
This painted example of iconography shows a piece of jewelry in the shape of a cross (cruz, a loanword taken into Nahuatl from Spanish) atop three gold steps outlined in red. The cross is a dark blue or blue-green with a gold border. A wire with three small gold bells hangs from each side of the transom of the cross. At the bottom of the steps hang nine additional small bells. This is one of many pieces of jewelry that were made and delivered as tribute to the Spanish overlord. This manuscript represents a protest of the onerous tributes demanded from the Nahuas of Tepetlaoztoc (Tepetlaoxtoc today).
Stephanie Wood
This is clearly a Christian cross, a Latin cross, a reflection of the evangelization carried out by the Spanish colonizers and the emerging Indigenous Christianity by the 1550s. Other crosses do appear in this digital collection, as do Christian churches, one that is even called by the Nahuatl term, teopan.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cruces, crucifijo, crucifijos, joyas, oro, cascabel, cascabeles, campana, campanas, jingle bells, escalinata, escalinatas
cruz, a cross, a Christian cross, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cruz
la cruz
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.
