Teoxoch (MH492r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name of a woman, Agata Teoxoch, shows two elements. One is a stone (tetl), which provides the starting sound (Te-) for Teo-, and the other is an upright flower (xochitl), which provides the second part of the name. The stone has curling ends and diagonal lines. The flower has three visible petals and two protruding filaments with small circles (anthers) at the top.
Stephanie Wood
It is clear from the other example of the woman's name Teoxoch (below), that the gloss on this one is not in error. The stone is here to play a phonetic role. Glyphs for teo- [short for teotl) are known in other codices, but the use of te- for teo- in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco deserves to be tracked. This may be a prominent phonetic syllable worthy of note. It is also interesting that no effort to visualize teotl appears in this compound, whereas a face appears in the other compound, below.
In some flowers, such as this one, the anthers are rather pronounced. The anthers are the flower parts that produce and provide the pollen, which has the reproductive capacity that has been compared in Western cultures to semen.
Stephanie Wood
agatha teoxoch
Ágatha Teoxoch (or Ágata Teoxoch)
Stephanie Wood
1560
Stephanie Wood
flowers, flores, stones, rocks, piedras, names, nombres de mujeres, women
teo(tl), divine force, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teotl
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl
xochi(tl), flower, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xochitl
La Flor Divina(?)
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 492r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=63&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).
