ilhuicatl (TR42v)
This is an element carved from an iconographic record. It represents the sky ("cielo," which we are translating as ilhuicac). It is a bowl shape with a yellow border along the curving bottom. The curving shape is filled with turquoise blue paint. Inside the blue paint are two white stars of a European type (not the starry or stellar eyes of the Codex Mendoza).
Stephanie Wood
The Florentine Codex conveys how the heavens or sky could be thought of as "a blue gourd bowl filled with popcorn." See: Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 237.
Stephanie Wood
1578
Jeff Haskett-Wood
skies, cielos, stars, estrellas
Ilhuicac, heavenly, in heaven, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ilhuicac
The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is hosted on line by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8458267s/f110.item. We have taken this detail shot from the indicated folio.
This manuscript is not copyright protected, but please cite Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France or cite this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020–present).
