etl (TK214v)
This painted compound Nahuatl hieroglyph includes an individual black bean (etl). The white dot on this bean has an extra ring around it, setting it apart from many other beans in this collection. Below the bean is a bean pod, which might be called ecuetlaxtli or ecacahuatl, according to our Online Nahuatl Dictionary. The pod may be included as a complement to the individual bean in order to ensure the reading of etl and not, for example, olli (a black rubber ball).
Stephanie Wood
Many beans appear in this collection in part because this is a popular part of Mexican cuisine, but also because the etl can serve to provide a phonetic syllable, -e-, -el-, or -etl. The gloss has an early Spanish-language spelling for beans. The Nahuatl term, etl, does not appear in the text on this manuscript page. But the Spanish gloss and the visuals make it clear that etl is an appropriate label for this hieroglyph. 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 K12_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K12_B.
Stephanie Wood
frisoles
frijoles
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
beans, black beans, frijoles negros, tributo, tributos, colonialismo, resistencia
e(tl), bean, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/etl
ecuetlax(tli), bean pod, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ecuetlaxtli
ecacahua(tl), bean pod, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ecacahuatl
el frijol
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.
