Huei Tonatiuh (TK205v)
This simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents the personal name Huei Tonatiuh (“Great Sun”), a name held by the Chichimec ancestral leader who is pictured in the contextualizing image. The glyph shows a frontal view of a sun with an anthropomorphic face. A circle surrounds the face and short curving rays project out from the circle. The sun is painted a golden brown. This sun sign ties in with many others in this collection. What seems to be an earlier, pre-contact glyph is the one from the Codex Mendoza (see Tonatiuhco, below).
Stephanie Wood
The contextualizing image shows the man in profile, facing right, carrying a bow and three barbed arrows in his right hand and another arrow in his left hand. He wears sandals tied on at the ankle. His animal hide cloak is tied over his right shoulder, but both arms are uncovered. He also wears a headdress with a blue ring of flowers around his forehead and a two-tone blue and orange circular device on top of his head.The latter has four dangling attachments, each one with a feather at the end. On his back he carries a large quiver with at least additional arrows that have fletching in a variety of colors. Skins and bows and arrows recall the Chichimec culture. The name is also a powerful one with the reference to the sun and the large dimension or greatness.
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 K03_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K03_B.
Stephanie Wood
hueitonatiuh
Huei Tonatiuh
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
soles, solar, cara, caras, rayo, rayos, flecha, flechas, arco, arcos, plumas, piel, pieles, chichimeca, chichimecas, nombres de hombres, men’s names
tonatiuh, sun, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tonatiuh
huei, large or great, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huei
El Gran Sol
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.
