Timal (MH570r)
This simplex glyph for the personal name Timal ("Pus" or "Gentle Woman"), attested here as a man's name, shows two concentric circles. The ring between the two is segmented.The inner circles has a vertical grid of two vertical lines and three crossing horizontal lines. This shape is somewhat different from the glyphs for Timal from MH516r and MH559v (below), but it has a similarly symbolic nature.
Stephanie Wood
In the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca of 1598, Tezozomoc mentions a Toltec named Timal, who was known to have super necromantic powers. Oxford defines necromantic as "relating to witchcraft or black magic, especially the supposed practice of communicating with the dead." [Wimmer 2004 quotes Tezozomoc, and this is published in the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl, https://gdn.iib.unam.mx/diccionario/timal/175522.] The religious prejudice in choosing the term should not overshadow the take-away that Timal was perceived to have special religious or ritual abilities, which may enter into the glyphs for the name Timal, taken by various men of central Mexico perhaps in honor of the famous Toltec man.
In some vocabulary terms found in the dictionary, the element -timal- leans toward something like "full of pride" or "glorified by others." These glyphs for the name Timal deserve further study.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Stephanie Wood
sores, pus, blood, inflammation, granos, llagas, sangre, inflamación, pústulas, excretions, excretion, excreción, excreciones, mujer gentil, nombres de hombres
timal(li), pus or evidence of an infection, or, a gentle woman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/timalli
Pus, o Mujer Gentil
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 570r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=219&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).
