chilli (Mdz13v)
This element has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Tecuantepec (today: Tehuantepec). It is a small, upright, red chile pepper with a green stem.
Stephanie Wood
This sign is not a phonogram of that place name, but an ideogram. It is like an emblem that tells us something about the region of Tehuantepec, where hot peppers are grown in abundance.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
chiles, peppers
chil(li), red pepper, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chilli
el chile
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 13 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 37 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).