Matlactli (MH553v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Matlactli (“Ten,” attested here as a man’s name) shows a wide diamond shaped quatrefoil with a thick black line and no colorant in the center. There was a gloss for this name, but it was crossed out, and the Roman numeral X was added to the right of the glyph.
Stephanie Wood
In many codices this symbol is a notation, and perhaps here it is, too, except that if this is the man's name, nothing is being counted, per se. It is possible that this was once a calendrical name and the day sign (from the 260-day divinatory calendar, the tonalpohualli) has disappeared or been suppressed over time. But calendrics were an important part of Nahuas' religious views of the cosmos.
Stephanie Wood
1560
José Aguayo-Barragán and Stephanie Wood
numbers, números, ten, diez, nombres de hombres
matlac(tli), ten, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/matlactli
Diez
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 533v, World Digital Library. https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=186&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).
