Huitznahuatl (MH515r)
This simplex glyph for the personal name Huitznahuatl (here, attested as the name of a man) shows two upright thorns or spines (huitztli), touching at the bottom. They have black tips and red (or pinkish red) bases, with a horizontal white stripe and a bit more white, edging into the black, in the middle. The two thorns are near (-nahuac) each other. This "name" may have once been a title or an occupation (such as mandón or alguacil, in Spanish), as explained in the Codex Mendoza.
Stephanie Wood
Thorns were used for blood-letting in self-sacrificial religious rituals. Some have the red color (symbolizing blood, most likely) at the tip. Some thorns that were used in rituals were decorated with a jade bead.
John Bierhorst (A Nahuatl-English Dictionary and Concordance to the Cantares Mexicanos, 1985, 143) says that Huitznahuatl was a "name or epithet of a god to whom slaves were sacrificed in Mexico." Other sources report that one of the ethnic groups that migrated from the Seven Caves came from a place called Huitznahuac, and there was a temple with this association in Mexico Tenochtitlan. Finally, Huitznahuatl was a high title, and it had an association with the South. The name was not inaccessible for tribute-paying men of humble means, such as found in the census of modern-day Morelos and in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco (modern-day Puebla). See the Online Nahuatl Dictionary for more information about Huitznahuac and Huitznahuatl.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
thorns, spines, espinas, lenguaje, discursos

Huitznahuac, a place, a calpolli from Chicomoztoc, an ethnicity, warrior-dancers, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huitznahuac
-catl, affiliation suffix, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/catl
huitz(tli), a thorn or spine, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huitztli
-nahuac, next to, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nahuac
(un título, o un oficio)
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 515r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=109&st=image
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).
