tlacamecayotl (TK205r)
This example of iconography for the term tlacamecayotl (lineage) is included here for the purpose of comparisons that might be made with other records in this digital collection. No gloss explains that this example presents “lineage,” but the companion text explains that the woman pictured is the daughter of a Nahua ruler, and her children appear below her. Her name is doña Ana, but in the gloss the title and the name have been run together. The contextualizing image shows five siblings (three female and two male) along with the offspring of each one. The father was a ruler, and all of the people portrayed bear the honorific titles of “don” and “doña,” which are indicators that they are of the ruling class. Their clothing is also colorful, and it has elaborate designs.
Stephanie Wood
Tlacamecayotl is a term that refers to people (tlacatl) and a cord (mecatl), which is a metaphor for lineage. The suffix (-yotl) generalizes the group as having that relationship, as explained more fully in our Online Nahuatl Dictionary. Lines, which are a root for the term “lineage” in the English language, and líneas, which are the root for linaje in Spanish, figure prominently here, connecting offspring with their parents. This is convenient, too, for the concept of mecatl, given that cords can connect people and things. Prior to the Spanish invasion and colonization of Mexico, genealogies were maintained orally and in codices, so the concept of tlacamecayotl is unlikely to be a calque or a neologism. Another lineage–from the Tierras collection of the Archivo General de la Nación–appears below.
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 K03_A in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K03_A.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
genealogía, linajes, ancestros, madres, padres, hijos, hijas, hermanos, hermanas, nietos, nietas
tlacamecayo(tl), human lineage, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacamecayotl
el linaje ancestral
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.
