ichcatl (TK217r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph for sheep (ichcatl) shows two animals with shaggy coats, one in profile facing left and one in profile facing right. These sheep are innocent bystanders in a sordid tale in which a local Spanish authority challenged what we would call a tlatoani (Nahua ruler) to give the Spaniard his Nahua wife. When the tlatoani, whose name was Tlilpotonqui, refused the Spaniard’s request, he was taken away from the pueblo for eighty days and made to watch sheep on the Spaniard’s ranch as a punishment. This is one of many abuses that the town of Tepetlaoztoc protests to the Spanish crown.
Stephanie Wood
In other examples in this digital collection, some elite Nahua women were indeed given to Spaniards, often as a symbol of alliance between Nahuas and Spaniards, because some Nahuas joined the invaders in the hope of defeating their own enemies or going off on expeditions that might be well remunerated. Rare are the glimpses into the women’s point of view in these exchanges. Doña Marina, also called Malintzin, was “given” to Hernando Cortés and, because of her considerable language skills, became his personal interpreter. If this was her own true wish is unclear, but once she was pregnant by him, she strove to see that her son Martín would end up with a good life. As Frances Karttunen shows in her study of Malintzin (“Rethinking Malinche,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, eds. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, 1997), she became a powerful figure.
Stephanie Wood
ovejas
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
animales, ganado mayor, ovejero, pastor, pena, abuso, esposa, marido, encomendero, encomenderos, abusos, protesta, protestas, resistencia, colonialismo
ichca(tl), sheep, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ichcatl
Marina, also known as Malintzin and Malinche, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/marina
la oveja
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.
