Cihuatenan (MH516r)
This compound glyph of the personal name Cihuatenan features the head of a woman (cihuatl), shown in profile, looking toward the viewer's right, and, below her head, a horizontal stone (tetl) with curly ends and diagonal stripes. A purplish red appears on the (likely) leather strap that wraps her hair up near her eye. The woman's hair, and the way it is wrapped here is reminiscent of the wrapped hair lock that some male warriors and priests wore (see below). The same purplish red color appears on the right end of the stone. The stone has some gray coloring, too. The -nan part of the name is not represented separately, but could possibly be read into the cihuatl glyph.
Stephanie Wood
The stone plays a phonetic role, providing the syllable "te" in the middle of the name, Cihuatenan. The literal translation of the glyph is "Woman-Someone's Mother." The hairstyle of the woman is indicative of a married Nahua woman who lives in a permanent settlement (not in a semi-sedentary fringe area). The leather strap on her hair is reminiscent of the red leather tie on the man's tzontli, or hair wrapped into a type of ponytail (below).
Stephanie Wood
galisto çivatenā
Calixto Cihuatenan
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
women, mothers, mujeres, madres, stones, piedras, nombres de hombres
cihua(tl), woman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cihuatl
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl
nan(tli), mother, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nantli
Mujer-Madre de Alguien
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 516r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=111&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).