Xochitlan (YacRG)
This is a simplex glyph of a place name, xochitlan ("near the flowers"), an estancia (subject community) of the cabecera (head town) known today as Yecapixtla (Morelos). The glyph appears on the map of the Relación Geográfica de Acapistla dating from 1581. It consists of a branched plant with buds or blossoms on the ends of at least four of its five appendages. In this way, it appears something akin to tree-like floral glyphs (see below) that have been analyzed as indicating (cuahuitl) (tree) as part of their make-up (see below). That is not the case here, at least as far as the alphabetic gloss indicates (see the gloss). Following its lead, the glyph indicates the word flower (xochitl) joined with the locative -tlan, which means “near, by, among,” and the like. The glyph is presented in a green background. It is outlined in red and colored in reds and browns, with black marks indicting contours or depth. The locative is not visualized.
Robert Haskett
Xochitlan’s glyph appears to the right of a church. This building undoubtedly serves as a semantic indicator of “place,” in this way working as a kind of locative. The church, in frontal view, is outlined in red and colored in red and pink, has a large arched doorway, a double peaked roof surmounted by a cross. The structure has a horizontal, rectangular base which sits on top of a red-outlined but otherwise uncolored rectangular box holding the alphabetic gloss (see the historical contextualizing image and gloss). A waterway arches over Xochitlan; a branch of this watery element descends to the left until it hovers over a smaller church glossed as “atlitiqui estançia;” in other words, this water feature is a place glyph itself. For more information about this RG see Mundy (1996).
Robert Haskett
suchitlan estançia
Xochitlan estancia
Robert Haskett
1581
Robert Haskett
flowers, flores
This important Indigenous community, part of the Cortés Marquesado del Valle jurisdiction and one of the so-called Quatro Villas, was glossed in various ways over time (Acapixtla, Acapiztla, Yecapiztlan, Yacapixtlan, Yacapichtlan, Ayacapitztlan, etc.). The modern spelling is Yecapixtla.
xoch(itl), flower, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/Xochitl
-tlan, near, by, among, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlan
entre las flores
Robert Haskett
Relación de Acapistla – University of Texas Libraries Collections, 1580-11-15. https://collections.lib.utexas.edu/catalog/utblac:740d6d5b-280a-45f4-a3b...
Materials that are in the public domain (such as most of the maps in the PCL Map Collection) are not copyrighted, and no permission is needed to copy them. You may download them and use them as you wish. The image appears here courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. If you do publish anything from this database, please cite the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs.
