Xoconochco (Mdz47r)
This simplex glyph for the place name Xoconochco features simply the cactus plant that produces the fruit called tuna in Spanish today (nochtli). The plant has a leader and two branches, each one with a flower on top, where the fruit would be produced. The cactus is painted a two-tone green (possibly meant to provide three-dimensionality). It has curling red roots showing, and lots of thorns, which are red at their base and white at their tips. The flowers are fairly detailed, green at the base, with petals that are white at the bottom and red at the top, and above that a red stamen with two yellow balls (anthers). The xocotl is not represented visually, nor is the -co locative suffix.
Stephanie Wood
Xocotl can refer to fruit in general or, more specifically, to a native plum tree and its fruit (see below, right). Here, perhaps, it is not featured separately from the cactus because the nochtli was meant to be emphasized. But the yellow anthers on the cactus flower do appear somewhat like their counterparts on the representation of the xocotl tree elsewhere in the Codex Mendoza (below, right).
In some flowers, such as this one, the anthers are rather pronounced. The anthers are the flower parts that produce and provide the pollen, which has the reproductive capacity that has been compared in Western cultures to semen.
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
cacti, cactos, nopales, nopalli, flowers, flores, fruits, frutas, espinas, spines, tunas
xoco(tl), a native plum tree, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xocotl
noch(tli), the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nochtli
-co (locative suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/co
Codex Mendoza, folio 47 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 104 of 188.
Original manuscript is held by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1; used here with the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0)
