xochitl (TK210v)
This painted example of iconography features an elaborate cloak covered with a design of flowers (xochitl) in many colors. Each flower has four rounded petals, four leaves just barely poking out between the petals, and a round center. Each flower has one color for all its petals and another color for its center. The colors of the flowers alternate. There are fourteen flowers showing in all. The background for the flowers is white. The cloth has a border with blue and white alternating rectangles inside an inner and outer red stripe.
Stephanie Wood
The contextualizing image shows the notation of eleven above the cloth. This consists of two arching lines with three vertical short lines inside each one, resulting in two groups of five vertical lines, plus one additional line, for a total of eleven The gloss is above the notation. The demand was for eleven of these elaborately decorated cloths, which were called mantas in Spanish, and therefore likely tilmatli in Nahuatl. There is little doubt that the design could be called flower (xochitl) in Nahuatl, even though there is no gloss for the design itself. This manuscript was produced as part of the community’s resistance through the court system to the unreasonable taxation being demanded vis-a-vis the size of the community, especially as the population was declining as a result of diseases inadvertently brought over from Europe.
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 K08_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K08_B.
Stephanie Wood
estas son las honze mantas rricas
estas son las once mantas ricas (these are the eleven fancy cloaks)
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
flores tela, telas, capa, capas, manto, mantos, tributos, colonialismo, resistencia
xoch(itl), flower, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xochitl
la flor
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.
