tzoncalli (TK221v)
This painted example of iconography features a multicolored headdress that we are labeling a tzoncalli, based on the Spanish-language gloss, “los penachos.”) This tzoncalli has a golden monkey (ozomatli) with its tail wrapped around a golden cross that is surrounded by red three-petalled flowers with green stems.The monkey is shown in a profile view with its back horizontal and its face looking down. It appears to wish to grasp a golden disc. The upper part of the tzoncalli is a green oval with more than a dozen small gold discs around it. The bottom part of the headdress has a horizontal row of more gold discs and then rows of horizontal stripes in blue, red, gold, and green. The discs are outlined in red. Finally, what appears to be a spotted strip of jaguar skin hangs down below the stripes.
Stephanie Wood
This is another example of tributes in kind, which the town was protesting (while paying). The monkey appears to be in a playful pose, and Nahuas saw monkeys as playful. Monkeys were also day signs in the religious divinatory calendar. So, this is an interesting mix of Christian iconography (the Latin cross) and Indigenous religious iconography. Of course, the cross does not have to be interpreted as solely Chritian. It is a universal shape found in the art of many cultures. But the cross with horizontal bar in the middle (like a plus sign) is more common in Nahua culture than the one with the horizontal bar closer to the top, the Latin cross, shown here. If this tzoncalli actually includes a Christian cross, this is a somewhat early appearance of it in a Nahua manuscript.
Stephanie Wood
los penachos
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
headdresses, tocado, tocados, penachos, flores, plantas, colores, monos, cruz, cruces, tributo, tributos, resistencia, colonialismo
tzoncal(li), a headdress (in this case), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzoncalliz
el penacho
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.
