Matlac (MH613v)
This is black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the notation and personal name Matlac (or Mahtlac, with the glottal stop, but either way meaning "Ten"). It is attested here as a man's name. It consists of two groups of five short black vertical lines, connected at their base horizontally. The two groups are also connected to each other. One group points upward and the other hangs down. The number ten would have been part of a calendrical name, drawn from the religious divinatory calendar, the tonalpohualli. The number would have been paired with a day sign, but that seems to have dropped away or been suppressed intentionally.
Stephanie Wood
There are various possibilities that explain the loss of the day sign in this name--a shortening of what may have been a long name, a forgetting of the calendrical system, or a desire to disguise the continued use of the calendrical system, which the colonial clergy tried to root out. The tonalpohualli, being used for "prognostication and divination, had no parallel and contravened Christian dogma so its use was disavowed and prohibited." [See Rubén G. Mendoza, Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica (2024), 439.] Nevertheless, calendrics were an important part of Nahuas' religious views of the cosmos, and this practice survived a long time under colonialism, even if in modified form.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
diez, números, nombres de hombres, men's names
matlac(tli), ten, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/matlactli
Diez
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 613v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=309&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).
