Mayan (MH724v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Mayan (perhaps “He Was Hungry”) is attested here as a man’s name. It shows a hand (maitl), which serves as a phonetic indicator that the name starts with Ma-, putting a piece of fruit or some other type of food to the mouth of the tribute payer who has this name. The suggestion is that he is or was hungry (mayana).
Stephanie Wood
The gloss here simply says Maya, but the visual suggests the verb mayana, to be hungry, which would be truncated as Mayan. Since the letter “n” often drops away or intrudes inadvertently, it is easy to imagine that this name should be Mayan. This is an unusual name, but we do have an example of the iconography of a famine, mayanalo.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
tener hambre, persona hambrienta, nombres de hombres
ma(itl), hand, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/maitl
mayana, to be hungry, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mayana
Tuvo Hambre
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 724v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=527&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).