Mazahuatl (MH517v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph of the personal name (or ethnicity) Mazahuatl, has the (European) shape of a sun or star with an added small circle at the center. This sun has sixteen rays spreading out from outside the center circle.
Stephanie Wood
Juan José Batalla Rosado (2018, 89–90) has suggested that this representation of the ethnicity called Mazahua is a phonetic reproduction of deer (mazatl) spines (ahuatl), without intending the corresponding meaning. Early on, the word for deer was applied to horses, which were a re-introduction from Europe. And the shape here, as suggested by Batalla, points to the spur that horseback riders would wear on their boots. This same shape is echoed in a number of other glyphs in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, as Batalla demonstrates. I have also seen a similar shape used for the name Citlal, but that one is greatly removed from all the others, which represent the neologism tepozahuatl (metal spines) or tepozhuitztli (metal thorns).
Stephanie Wood
peo maçavatl
Pedro Mazahuatl
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
spurs, espuelas, etnicidades, mazahuas
Mazahuatl, a name, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mazahuatl
Mazahua, culture group west of central Mexico, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mazahua
Mazahua
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 517v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=114&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).