trigo (TK224v)
This black-line drawing presents the simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph for wheat (“trigo,” the loanword from Spanish that entered Nahuatl). The glyph shows a plant with a stalk and leaves that look something like a maize plant, but at the top there are two wheat spikes or florets with multiple awns. The contextualizing image shows that the wheat was grown to meet the tribute requirement of the Spanish overlord, a man named Espinosa, who requested six fields of wheat be raised and expected a production of 4,000 measures (elsewhere explained to be “hanegas,” i.e., fanegas) of wheat grain. This was only a part of the tribute requirement. Besides an enormous amount of gold coins, Espinosa also demanded the produce from three maize fields.
Stephanie Wood
This wheat would be destined for Spanish consumption even if Nahuas would gradually add it to their diet, too. The detail given to the wheat plant shows that the tlacuilo was already familiar with it. The town of Tepetlaoztoc charges the Spaniard who received this wheat with abusing members of the Nahua elite, and on this same page Espinosa is shown striking a Nahua man with a stick or a club, and blood spatters out from the nose and rear end of the victim. He is also pulling the man’s hair, a grave insult.
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 K22_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K22_B
Stephanie Wood
trigo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
comida, granos, cultivos, agricultura, sementera, sementeras, fanega, almud, tributo, tributos, abusos, sangre
trigo, wheat, a loanword from Spanish, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/trigo
el trigo
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.
