Tianquiztlato (MH523v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name or occupation, Tianquiztlato (or, Tianquiztlahto, with the glottal stop; Market-Crier?) is attested as pertaining to a man. It involves the head of the man who is the tribute payer in question, and builds off of it, adding three horizontal speech scrolls that curl under, referring to speaking (tlahtoa). To the right of the scrolls is a circle with three footprints inside, going in a circle, referring to the tianquiztli, market or marketplace. The modern Mexican Spanish for this term is tianguis, which is close to tianquiz. Finally, to the right of the circle are two more footprints heading upward.
Stephanie Wood
The final vowel of the verb has dropped away for the formation of the name, which is not unusual. The circling footprints point to human movement in the tianquiztli, where there is a hustle and bustle of commerce. Movement is also seen in the curling scrolls. Compare this tianguis to others, below. Footprints are not unknown.
In Nahua culture, the word tianquiztli was also applied to a constellation, which may have been owing to some coincidence of shape between the standard marketplace and the arrangement of the stars (citlalli) that made up the constellation.
The dark gray of the man's face in the contextualizing image does not really enter into the glyph, it is more of a statement about the situation of that particular tribute payer. (Perhaps he was sick or had died.)
Stephanie Wood
peo tiaguiztlato
Pedro Tianquiztlahto
Stephanie Wood
1560
markets, mercados, tianguis, gente, movimiento
tianquiz(tli), market, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tianquiztli
tlatoa, to speak, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlatoa-0
Mercado-Pregonero(?)
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 523v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=126&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).
