Huitzilihuitl (Azca21)
This painted black-line drawing of the compound gloss for the personal name Huitzilihuitl (perhaps “Hummingbird Feathers”) shows a full-bodied hummingbird (huitzilin) in profile, facing toward the viewer’s right. The bird is colored a golden yellow, but there is some whiteness around the visible eye and at the top of the visible wing. The wings are folded. Around the perimeter of the bird are small, round, probably down feathers (ihuitl), six in all. The contextualizing image shows this ruler on a throne with a large spray of feathers behind him. The other glyph for Huitzilihuitl from this same page, which only shows the bird’s head, includes a shrouded corpse on a throne, suggesting the ruler had passed away.
Stephanie Wood
We are calling this a glyph even lacking a gloss, being certain of its interpretation when based upon comparisons with other compound glyphs of this name. Normally, what are called iconographic examples in this digital collection are so labelled due to the lack of a confirming gloss. However, ideally, comparisons with glossed glyphs will help bear out the interpretations. Note the examples of Huitzilihuitl glyphs, below. Some are just a head but we have at least one other example of a full-bodied bird.
Stephanie Wood
post-1550, possibly from the early seventeenth century.
Jeff Haskett-Wood
colibrí, colibries, pájaros, plumas, nombres de hombres
huitzil(in), hummingbird, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huitzilin
ihui(tl), feather, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ihuitl
Plumas de Colibrí
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Azcatitlan is also known as the Histoire mexicaine, [Manuscrit] Mexicain 59–64. It is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and hosted on line by the World Digital Library and the Library of Congress, which is “unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection.”
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15280/?sp=21&st=image
The Library of Congress is “unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection.” But please cite Bibliothèque Nationale de France and this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.
