Mimich (MH483v)
This simplex glyph for the personal name Mimich ("Fish," attested here as a man's name) shows a horizontal fish facing toward the viewer's right. It body is covered with scales and it has four fins and a tail.
Stephanie Wood
The gloss for this name includes a reduplication of the first syllable, but there is no corresponding visual reduplication. Magnus Pharao Hansen defines Mimich as "Little Fish." [See his blog from 2014, "Nahuatl Names: The Nahuatl names in the 1544 census of Morelos."] There is a Mimich, for which this man may have been named, who was a Cloud Serpent paired with Xiuhnel and associated with hunting. And the translators of the Primeros Memoriales say that Xiuhnel and Mimich were prominent figures in many migration stories of central Mexican cultures. See the Sullivan and Nicholson edition of the PM (1997, 135).
Stephanie Wood
mimich
Mimich
Stephanie Wood
1560
Xitlali Torres and Stephanie Wood
fish, peces, pescado, hunting, cazar, Serpientes de las Nubes, Cloud Serpents, nombres de hombres
michin. This fish is one of a series of small images of aquatic life now on display in the Museo del Templo Mayor. It may represent a white fish (iztac michin), "whose flesh was a delicacy [among the Mexica] identified as that of the Atherindae...family." Alternatively, it could be an image of a member "of the Goodeidae...family, which were more abundant species with wider distribution in the Basin of Mexico." Photograph by Robert Haskett, Museo del Templo Mayor, 15 February 2023.
michin, fish, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/michin.
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 483v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=46&st=image
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).