Teuhton (MH527r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Teuhton (here, attested as a man’s name) shows a swirling cloud of dust (teuhtontli) represented visually with dots and curving lines.
Stephanie Wood
A person named Teuhtli, another way of saying "Dust," also appears in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco. Dust certainly makes whirlwinds (and their movement) more visible, and whirlwinds and whirlpools have the swirling motion that caught the Nahuas' attention. (See James Maffie's analysis of "motion-change" in his book Aztec Philosophy, 2014). Perhaps the name Teuhtli, "Dust," was related to the divine force known as "Teuhcatl." The Handbook of Middle American Indians: Anthology of Northern Mesoamerica (1971, 426) states that Teuhcatl was one of several Chinampaneca deities. According to the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl, this is a divinity close to Mixcoatl (Cloud Serpent). See also Molly Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things (2015), 162.
Stephanie Wood
1560
polvo, remolinos, nombres de deidades, nombres de hombres
teuhton(tli), dust, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teuhtontli
Polvillo
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 527r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=133&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).