eztli (TK224v)
This painted example of iconography shows a Nahua man bleeding (eztli, blood) from his nose and rear end. His hair is being pulled, and he is falling down. He wears only a loincloth. The contextualizing image shows the perpetrator of the violence is a Spaniard named Espinosa, the local overlord who had the right to demand tribute in kind and in labor. When he didn’t get precisely what he wanted and went, he committed abuses, according to the complaints of the people of this town, Tepetlaoztoc (spelled Tepetlaoxtoc today).
Stephanie Wood
Aside from the physical attack being horrific, to pull someone’s hair was a grave insult, dishonor, and cause of intense emotion for Nahuas. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera writes about the ritual humiliation of hair pulling in Religion in New Spain, eds. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole (2007), 79.
Another iconographic example of blood appears below, where a Nahua man has been hit on the head with a log. In yet another, a man has been stoned and bleeds as a result. A woman bleeds from her mouth and other parts after being strangled. See these and other examples below, most of which entail conflict. However, for two self-sacrificial bloodletting examples,do a Quick Search for tlacoquixtia.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
encomendero, encomenderos, abusos, violencia, maltrato, maltratamiento, tirarle del pelo
ez(tli), blood, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/eztli
la sangre
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.
