micoa (TR46v)
This example of iconography shows about fourteen deceased people, all of them shrouded, and the shrouds are tied with cords or ropes. The colors of the shrouds alternate between brown and gray. The gloss, in Spanish, refers to "una gran mortandad," a major mortality. We are using the Nahuatl term micoa, the impersonal of miqui (to die) and which Alonso de Molina translates as "aver mortandad" (haber mortandad), for there to be mortality. We could probably add the modifier huei, for gran.
Stephanie Wood
The deceased in this image lost their lives as a result of epidemics. The Indigenous people did not have immunities to diseases brought over from Europe. Some eighty years after the invasion and colonization, the population of Mexico dropped from an estimated 25 million to roughly 1 million. At the time of the production of this manuscript, there were still a couple of decades to go before that loss was reached. In the seventeenth century, the Indigenous population would begin to rebuild.
Stephanie Wood
una gran mortandad
1578
Jeff Haskett-Wood
muertos, mortandad, muerte, epidemias
miquiliz(tli), death or dying, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/miquiliztli
miquiz(tli), death, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/miquiztli
micoa, to experience a large number of dead, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/micoa
la gran mortandad
The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is hosted on line by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8458267s/f118.item. We have taken this detail shot from the indicated folio.
This manuscript is not copyright protected, but please cite Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France or cite this Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020–present).
