macuiltetl (Osu5v)
This is a black-line drawing of the notation for the number five (macuiltetl, another version of macuilli). It consists of five tan-colored circles in a horizontal row and connected by a line. This is a part of a larger count of bundles of lime for construction. It was a demand of tribute in kind that the Nahuas had to provide to a judge (fiscal) of the high court of New Spain (Audiencia). In many of these cases, the pueblo is complaining about not getting paid for this work of making the lime. But, in this case, the fiscal had died. The contextualizing image shows that the more numerous counters are simplex hieroglyphs that look like flags but are called tecpantli (twenty). This derives from the tribute labor draft, when leaders would often organize men in groups of twenty, holding up a flag, and lining up the men.
Stephanie Wood
As our Online Nahuatl Dictionary entry for macuiltetl explains, the -tetl suffix on numbers originated as a classifier for the counting of things that were round and solid, something like stones (tetl). Eventually, the use of -tetl on numbers began to lose its original significance, with the result that macuiltetl referred to five houses in that one example in the dictionary.
Five ones, as in this example, are often horizontal, but vertical is another arrangement witnessed in this collection. Sometimes they will also have a dot (perhaps representing a hole in a bead?) in the middle, and sometimes they will be painted a variety of colors. Suggested explanations for these variations are welcomed here. Where the number five is a part of a calendrical name from the tonalpohualli, at least in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, it will consist of five upright lines, typically connected by a horizontal line along the bottom.
Stephanie Wood
macuiltetl.
macuiltetl
Stephanie Wood
1551–1565
Jeff Haskett-Wood
número, números, contar, cuenta, cuentas, bulto, bultos, carga, cargas, cal
macuil(li), five, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/macuilli
macuilte(tl), five, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/macuiltetl
cinco
Stephanie Wood
Library of Congress Online Catalog and the World Digital Library, Osuna Codex, or Painting of the Governor, Mayors, and Rulers of Mexico, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_07324/. The original is located in the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
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