Itzcuin (BMapL79)

Itzcuin (BMapL79)
Simplex Glyph

Glyph or Iconographic Image Description: 

This black-line drawing of the simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph for the personal name Itzcuin (short for itzcuintli, “Dog”) shows the head of a dog in profile, looking left. The contextualizing image shows that the dog is looking toward the head of the man whose name this is. Itzcuintli is a day name from the 260-day religious divinatory calendar (tonalpohualli). Such a day name would have had a companion number from 1 to 13. Perhaps that part of the tradition was fading away, or perhaps there was an effort to disguise the continuing use of the sacred calendar by dropping the numbers. The colonial clergy were trying to suppress the use of the ancestral calendar.

Description, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Gloss/Text Diplomatic Transcription: 

This glyph is not glossed; the decipherment of the glyph comes from Gordon Whittaker’s contribution to the study by Mary E. Miller and Barbara E. Mundy (2012).

Source Manuscript: 
Date of Manuscript: 

c. 1565

Creator's Location (and place coverage): 

Mexico City or the Valley of Mexico

Semantic Categories: 
Syntax: 
Cultural Content, Credit: 

Jeff Haskett-Wood

Shapes and Perspectives: 
Keywords: 

perros, calendarios, tonalpohualli, nombres de días, nombres de hombres

Glyph or Iconographic Image: 
Relevant Nahuatl Dictionary Word(s): 
Glyph/Icon Name, Spanish Translation: 

Perro

Spanish Translation, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Image Source: 

Beinecke Map/Codex Reese, section 8, no. 79 in the Whittaker study (published in the Miller/Mundy book, 2012), and see the original at: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3600017

Image Source, Rights: 

The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Historical Contextualizing Image: