Pochtlan (MH695r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the place name Pochtlan (“A Place with a Market”) shows a profile view of a red-and-white building, which conveys that this is a place name. The element above refers to Pochtlan. It has one large circle with two smaller concentric circles inside, in the middle. Between the outer and inner circles are four subdivisions, creating something of a quincunx. Each of these subdivisions also contains an inner shape, like a small trapezoid. Outside the perimeter of the large circle are fourteen smaller semi-circles running around and attached to the circle, fairly evenly spaced.
Stephanie Wood
Pochtlan was a place famous for its long-distance merchants, the Pochteca. Thus, the place name and the ethnic affiliation came to be equated with the occupation of long-distance merchant (pochtecatl), according to James Lockhart in The Nahuas (1992).
In Nahua culture, the word tianquiztli was the word frequently used for the marketplace. This term also applied to a constellation, which may have been owing to some coincidence of shape between the standard marketplace and the arrangement of the stars (citlalin) that made up the constellation. Many glyphs for tianquiztli include footrpints, which can have a semantic reading of people in movement in a busy place such as a market. But footprints in those glyphs also provide the -quiz- (from quiza, to emerge) phonetic complement to tianquiztli. A fruitful comparative study could be made of the pochtlan and the tianquiztli glyphs in this collection as it gains more examples. Europe had a market “square” and the Nahuas had market circles. The division and use of space calls out for further attention, along with a possible cosmic reading.
Stephanie Wood
pochtlā
Pochtlan
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
mercados, pochteca
pochtlan, a place with a market, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pochtlan
pochteca(tl), a long-distance merchant, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pochtecatl
tianquiz(tli), market, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tianquiztli
Lugar con un Mercado
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 695r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=470&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).
