micquetl (Mdz12r)
This simplex glyph shows a male corpse (micquetl) lying horizontally, it also stands for the place name Miquetlan. The body faces us frontally, and it is nude. The head is in profile, with the eye closed (indicating death). The hair at the top of the head is spiky. The deceased person is drawn in black ink and painted with a flesh tone or terracotta color, including the hair.
Stephanie Wood
Linguist Frances Karttunen (follow the link to our Online Nahuatl Dictionary) notes that the word micqui can refer to a deceased animal as well as a deceased person. This glyph clearly refers to a person. The ethnicity of the person is possibly detectable from the hairstyle. In some glyphs for micqui, we see a corpse wrapped in a shroud, tied around the body, which, instead of being laid out, is in the position of a seated male, with his knees up under his chin. Thus, both ways of rendering a corpse visually in the Codex Mendoza show them as men. Perhaps the nude corpse that is laid out is more likely a micquetl and the shrouded one is a micqui.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
deceased people, corpses, muertos, difuntos
micqui, a dead person or a corpse, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/micqui
Codex Mendoza, folio 12 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 34 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
