tzoncalli (TK222r)
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 features a bird’s eye view of a golden lizard (probably a cuetzpalin), with its head turned into a profile. Its eye is open, and its mouth is biting a bug or an insect. It has a stinger coming out of its mouth, six legs, and a body with red and white stripes. Running the length of the back of the lizard is a large blue stripe outlined with black and a thin red stripe on either side. 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 red leather strip hangs down below the stripes. Another lizard on a headdress appears on ff. 227v-228v.
Stephanie Wood
This is another example of tributes in kind, which the town was protesting (while paying). The lizard is a day name in the 260-day religious divinatory calendar (tonalpohualli), which results in some personal name hieroglyphs for Cuetzpal. Most hieroglyphs of lizards in this digital collection are seen in a similar bird’s eye view, with the digits on their paws spread out. The stripes are not seen in those simplified representations. On the manuscript page for this iconographic example, there are two other lizards also with stripes on their backs, but the stripes vary somewhat, and one of the others is going after a different bug or insect, but then there are 62 species of lizards in Mexico according to an animal biology website.
Stephanie Wood
los penachos
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
animales, lagarto, lagartos, rayas, insecto, insectos, bicho, bichos, tocado, tocados, tributo, tributos, resistencia, colonialismo
tzoncal(li), a headdress (in this case), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzoncalli
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.
