Techocahuilli (TK205v)
This compound Nahuatl hieroglyph represents the personal name Techocahuilli (not yet translated), a name held by the Chichimec ancestral leader who is pictured in the contextualizing image. The glyph shows two elements. At the top is a part of a face that features the lips (tentli), supplying the -te- phonetic syllable at the start of the name, Te-. Below the lips, and connected by a line, is a man who is sitting with his knees up (a male posture) and the arms bent up in front of his face. He carries a pack on his back. It is attached to a tumpline on his forehead. He would normally be considered a tlamama, a person who carries a load. He wears only a loincloth and has no shoes. His load appears to be wrapped in a woven mat (what would be a petlatl) that is tied with a white cord or rope in two places, attached to a white frame.
Stephanie Wood
Beyond the start to the name, Te-, it is unclear how the carrier supplies the -chocahuilli part of this name. The man with the name Techocahuilli appears in a sitting position in the contextualizing image. He carries a bow and two arrows, and he wears an animal hide that has been made into a cape. He also wears a headdress with a blue ring of flowers around his forehead and a two-tone blue and orange circular device on top of his head.The latter has four dangling attachments, each one with a feather at the end. On his back he carries a large quiver with at least five additional arrows that have fletching in a variety of colors. The one in the middle is black and white, perhaps a feather from a quail.
Side Note: The folio numbers are not always clear in the copy published online by the British Museum. Marc Thouvenot gives this page the number K03_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K03_B.
Stephanie Wood
.techocahuilli.
Techocahuilli
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
tamemes, carga, cargar, labios, chichimecas, pluma, plumas, arca, flecha, flechas, tocado, tocados, penacho, penachos, sentarse, piel, pieles, nombres de hombres, men’s names, fonetismo
ten(tli), lips, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tentli
petla(tl), woven mat, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/petlatl
tlamama, a person who carries things on the back, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlamama
The Codex Kingsborough, also known as the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc, and the Memorial de los indios de Tepetlaoztoc, is not on display. It was transferred from the British Library and is now held by the British Museum. It is shared on line at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am2006-Drg-13964
©The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Please also cite the <em>Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphsem>, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-present) and this URL.
