Amiltzinco (Mdz25r)
This compound glyph for the place name Amiltzinco consists of three notable visuals, a maize plant growing on an agricultural field [amilli) and the lower half of a human body providing a visual of the human bottom, rear end, or buttocks [the tzintli), meant as a phonetic indicator for the locative suffix -tzinco. The maize plant has a lead and four branches, and it has two ears of corn, one red and one yellow, on the lower branches. The agricultural parcel is segmented, textured, and painted orange and purple. The buttocks is a terracotta color, in profile facing to the viewer's right. The loincloth belt is white. The presence of a loincloth indicates that the person is a male.
Stephanie Wood
While the agricultural field appears to be a milli, the presence of the productive maize plant (a supplemental semantic indicator) may be a sign that this is an especially fertile and irrigated field, an amilli, or āmīlli, when we recognize vowel length. This word might have included a water element for the a- [from atl) at its start, but it does not show the water. Interestingly, the chinamitl in the Codex Mendoza (below, right) looks much like the amilli. Both involved agriculture with irrigation. The -co locative ("at") is added onto -tzin- ("little" or "lower" when referring to a place name), so the -co is not presented visually on its own. The locative -tzinco is what Gordon Whittaker calls a "secondary logogram." Frances Karttunen interprets the -tzinco ending to be a spin-off community, hence the "New" in New Amilco, her translation for the place name. There is an Amilcingo in the modern state of Morelos, Mexico.
Stephanie Wood
amilçinco. puo
Amiltzinco, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
cultivation, agriculture, maize, milpa, cornfield, buttocks, bottom, rear end, nalgas, trasero, agricultura, maíz, elote, irrigation, riego
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
amil(li), irrigated agricultural parcel, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/amilli
mil(li), agricultural parcel, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/milli
tzin(tli), buttocks), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzintli
-tzinco (locative suffix given to a spin-off community), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzinco
"New Āmīlco" [Frances Karttunen, unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.]
"On the Small Irrigated Lands" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. 171)
"Nuevo Amilco"
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Codex Mendoza, folio 25 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 60 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).