totolin (TK216r)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents the head of a wild turkey hen (totolin, called “gallinas de la tierra” in the Spanish-language text on the same page). Fifteen hundred of these hens were extracted from Tepetlaoztoc in one year by the mercantile agent working for Hernando Cortés. This tribute item is one of many shown and described on the same page. The town was protesting in the courts the onerous tribute they were required to pay.
Stephanie Wood
Nowhere on the page does the term totolin appear, but we are choosing this term based on the Spanish text and the look of the glyph in comparison with others that can clearly be called totolin. Note the protrusion above the beak.
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 K15_A in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K15_A.
Stephanie Wood
gallinas (Spanish-language gloss)
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
guajolotes, pavo, pavos, comida, tributo, tributos, abusos, resistencia, colonialismo, comida, animales
totol(in), Wild Turkey, turkey hen, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/totolin
“totolin,” Marc Thouvenot, TLACHIA, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K14_A.
el guajolote
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.
