Tlillancalqui (Mdz18r)
This compound glyph represents the title or occupation, Tlillancalqui. It is a house or building (calli) shown in profile, facing to the right. The building is white with black (tlilli) beams in the shape of a T around the entrance. On these black beams are two white shapes, something like Maltese crosses, each one with with a black center.
Stephanie Wood
The Tlillancalqui was the "Keeper of the House of Darkness," and one of four trusted advisers to the emperor, who was sent to meet the invading Cortés expedition and had one of the earliest exchanges with them, according to Hugh Thomas (Conquest, 2013, 48). A person with the name don Pedro Tlillancalqui is referenced as the owner of a piece of land called a cuauhtlalli in a bill of sale in 1568 in Coyoacan, so it was a title that may have become a name, or perhaps the father that was referenced in the bill of sale was a person who had that occupation in Coyoacan the generation before the sale was made. (See Rebecca Horn, Postconquest Coyoacan, 1997, 128.)
The suffix -calqui also refers to a person who has a house, a resident. It has yet to be determined whether the black (tlil-) and the building (cal-) are in the glyph for their semantic and/or phonetic contributions. The quincunx designs also have yet to be analyzed.
Stephanie Wood
tlilancalqui
Tlillancalqui
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
jueces, judges, tlilancalqui
tlillancalqui, a high judge or a military title, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlillancalqui
tlil(li), black ink or paint, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlilli
cal(li), house or building, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/calli
-qui, one who does that thing, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/qui-1
calqui, a person who has a house, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/calqui-0
Codex Mendoza, folio 18 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 46 of 188.
Original manuscript is held by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1; used here with the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0)
