Tecolotl (TK208r)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents the personal name Tecolotl (“Owl”). This is a local leader in the greater altepetl of Tepetlaoztoc in the Tetzcoco area. The owl’s body is shown in profile, facing the viewer’s left. But its face is shown in a frontal view. ost of the owl is a dark gray or purple, but the eyes, beak, and feet are a terracotta color. The owl’s ears are actually white feathers.
Stephanie Wood
We are tracking faces shown in a frontal view, because the profile view was a traditional favorite for human beings, and it remained so through the sixteenth century. Thus, faces in a frontal presentation are notable. And, determining which people and which creatures were given the frontal view may lead to an important cultural significance. Faces on suns (tonalli and tonatiuh), earth monsters at cave (oztotl) entrances, wolves and cougars, skulls/death symbols (miquiztli), dolls and children (nenetl and telpol), divine forces (teotl), and owls (tecolotl and chichtli) are some examples worth investigating. Both the owl eyes and the tonalli signs have small radiating rays coming off of them as though they have a special energy.
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 K06_A in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K06_A.
Stephanie Wood
.tecolotl.
Tecolotl
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
tecolotes, buhos, cara, caras, nombres de hombres, men’s names
tecolo(tl), owl, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecolotl
Tecolote o Buho
Stephanie Wood
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.
