Xalicuilol (MH603r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Xalicuilol (“Sand Painting,” attested here as a man’s name) shows a rectangular shape that could represent a painting (icuilolli). Inside the rectangle are dots that represent sand (xalli). The swirl may be there to suggest a pattern, a design, which icuilolli can also suggest.
Stephanie Wood
If this was not a sand painting (which is a phenomenon known in New Spain, in the part that is now the U.S. Southwest), then it may have been some kind of cultivation-intervention in a sandy parcel. The use of icuiloa in compounds relating to cuemitl (furrow) and tlalli (agricultural land parcel) can be found in a few glyphs shown below.
In the gloss, the starting letter (S) substitutes for the more standard X. This is somewhat unusual for Stage 1 orthography, but it does occur. See, for example, the gloss for Xolotl in the Matricula de Huexotzinco, folio 638 verso.
Stephanie Wood
pedro salicuilol
Pedro Xalicuilol
Stephanie Wood
1560
Stephanie Wood
sand, arena, paintings, pinturas, cuadros, icuilol, writing, escritura
xal(li), sand, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xalli
icuilol(li), a piece of writing or a painting, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/icuilolli
Pintura de Arena, o Diseño/Cultivo en la Arena
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 603r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=287&st=image.
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).