Timal (MH631r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Timal ("Pus" or "Gentle Woman") is attested here as a man's name. It shows the head of a man in profile looking to the right. The hand of someone else is grabbing this man's hair, which is standing straight up on the top of his head. This motion is reminiscent of taking a captive by grabbing someone by the hair. How that relates to the either "pus" or "gentle woman" is a mystery.
Stephanie Wood
In the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca of 1598, Tezozomoc mentions a Toltec named Timal, who was known to have super necromantic powers. Oxford defines necromantic as "relating to witchcraft or black magic, especially the supposed practice of communicating with the dead." [Wimmer 2004 quotes Tezozomoc, and this is published in the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl, https://gdn.iib.unam.mx/diccionario/timal/175522.] The religious prejudice in choosing the term should not overshadow the take-away that Timal was perceived to have special religious or ritual abilities, which may enter into the glyphs for the name Timal, taken by various men of central Mexico perhaps in honor of the famous Toltec man.
In some vocabulary terms found in the dictionary, the element -timal- leans toward something like "full of pride" or "glorified by others." These glyphs for the name Timal deserve further study.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
sores, pus, blood, inflammation, llagas, sangre, inflamación, pústulas, nombres de hombres
timal(li), pus, evidence of an infection, or a gentle woman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/timalli
Grano, El Pus, o La Excrecencia
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 631r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=344&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).
