cuicatl (Mdz43r)
This simplex glyph for the verb song (cuicatl) can have multiple readings, including the noun cuicani (singer), the verb cuica (song), and the place name, Cuicatlan. It consists of a human face in profile, looking to our right. From the open mouth emerges a huge speech scroll with an elaborate design. The scroll is segmented, red and white, with black line drawings.
Scrolls associated with representations of sounds can also be found coming out of drums. See, for example, Valeria Ballomia, "Sound artefacts as containers. The materiality of rhythm in ancient Mesoamerica," Pallas: Revue d'Études Antiques 15 (2021), 121–145, especially section 4.
Stephanie Wood
The symbols inside the segments are reminiscent of symbols for writing or painting, as shown on folio 70 recto, where a "pintor" writes on a codex. See Mexicolore for this an another image (of a woman) writing/painting. The outside of the scroll of this glyph for cuicatl has small, white, curling shapes that could be feathers. The elaborate decorations on the speech scroll may take speech to a new height to represent song.
Other symbols inside the large scroll here may include shells, including the turbinate shell that appears so often splashing off from a stream of water. See the examples of the shells called cilin and cuechtli, below. Jeanette Peterson (The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco, 1993, 47) identifies a song scroll in the Malinalco murals, and in it she identifies the ilhuitl sign (which also stands for writing and the tonalamatl), the shell, and a flower. So, in content, it is very similar to this glyph.
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
songs, singing, singer, canciones, cantando, cantar, cantor
Codex Mendoza, folio 43 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 96 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).
