micqui (Mdz43r)
This element has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Mictlan. It appears to be an adult male, judging by his upright seated position, with his knees up. He is wrapped in a white cloth shroud, which is secured with a cord that crosses the corpse in three horizontal rows. The bare feet of the individual appear below the covering.
Stephanie Wood
The shroud has the hint of a cloak's edge--running vertically in the middle of the body--which may suggest a deceased noble or ruler. The ties around the cloth-covered deceased person can also be crossed, as we see on folio 49 recto of the Codex Mendoza (see below, right).
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
funeral bundles, wrapped corpses, cadavers, deceased individuals, death, muertes, cadáveres
mic(qui), dead person or corpse, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/micqui
dead person, corpse, cadaver
el cadáver
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 43 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 96 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).
