tezcatl (TK219v)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents a mirror (tezcatl). It is not glossed as such in Nahuatl, but the Spanish gloss (“espejo”) makes it clear what this is. The mirror is fairly obviously a smooth, black, round obsidian mirror with a brown–probably wooden–frame around it. The frame is pierced at the top so that a red tie makes it possible to hang up the mirror. The red tie might be leather or cloth, it is too thick to be a string or cord. The contextualizing image shows that five mirrors were part of the tribute payment, but the next page would show five more, plus a jewel featuring an eagle with what appears to be another mirror on its back. The town providing this tribute, Tepetlaoztoc, was very unhappy with the unreasonable taxation demands, and they were protesting to the Spanish court about these abuses.
Stephanie Wood
Tezcatlipoca (“Mirror’s Smoke”) is the name of a very important divine force in Aztec religion. A website about the 2010-2011 exhibition of Mesoamerican mirrors at the Getty Research Institute describes the way mirrors were perceived as a passageway for a journey to visit the underworld of the divine forces and ancestors. The Auguste Génin collection in Mexico City lent various shapes and sizes of obsidian mirrors to the Getty exhibition. Also, the information provided by the show mentioned how, after colonization, some of these mirrors were inserted into Christian crucifixes, giving their religious potency a new direction.
Most mirrors in this digital collection are shown to be round, at least one also has a tie for hanging, and one has a brown, possibly wooden frame. Other frames will also be found here. A star is observed in one mirror, and one shows a human face.
Stephanie Wood
los espejos
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
religión indígena, crucifijos, viajar, inframundo, fuerzas divinas, obsidiana pulida, tecnología
tezca(tl), mirror, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tezcatl
el espejo
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.
