Techotlala (FCbk8f7r)
This compound glyph for the personal name Techotlala (also seen as Techotlalatzin, in the reverential) shows a light-brown horizontal stone (tetl) with curling ends and a white stripe across the middle. Above the stone is an arching stream of water (atl), painted turquoise blue. It has lines of current and five alternating shells and droplets (or beads) coming off of it as it curls around to the left of the stone. According to the companion text, Techotlala Chichimeca ruled Tetzcoco for seventy years (which would have been in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries).
Stephanie Wood
The ruler is shown with a bow and arrow in some manuscripts, which fits the “Chichimeca” designation given in this codex. His name glyph will also sometimes have a bird (perhaps a quecholli, providing the “-cho-” part to his name) and a stone. Because this is possibly the name of someone who was not Nahua, the visual rendering of his name is probably entirely phonographic. As of July 2025, we do not have any other glyphs of this personal name in this digital collection. But we hope to obtain a study of the glyph as it appears in the Codex Xolotl. But the water shown in this compound has a fully standard appearance, as examples below will attest. The stone has unusual coloring, but the shape is typical.
Stephanie Wood
techotlala chichimeca
Techotlala Chichimeca
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
Texcoco, piedra, piedras, agua, tlatoani, tlatoque, tlahtoani, tlahtohqueh, gobernador, gobernadores, gobernantes, gobernante, nombres famosos, nombres de hombres
Techotlala, a personal name and a famous ruler of Tetzcoco, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/techolala
(nombre de un gobernador de Tetzcoco)
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 4: The Soothsayers", fol. 59r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/4/folio/59r/images/addea61d-bf... Accessed 19 June 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
