amatl (MH641v)
This example appears in this collection in order to underline the iconography of paper. It is not glossed as such, but it appears enough like some glyphs and glyphic elements in the collection, that we are surmising it is paper. Here, it is largely horizontal, and it has some
undulating folds that give it a three-dimensionality. It also has marks that seem to simulate
writing (interestingly, this appears to be more alphabetic writing than hieroglyphic).
Stephanie Wood
The contextualizing image provides a suggestion for the appearance of paper. It may be a record that would have been kept by the tecpanpixqui or guardian of twenty tribute payers. The man holding the flag (representing the number twenty) probably had that position, and the paper appears underneath him. Alternatively, the tribute payers that appear to the left of the paper (not captured by the contextualizing image) may have been tlacuiloque (notaries or scribes). See the examples of amatl and amatlacuilolli, below, for the purpose of comparison.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
documento, papel, carta, escritura, tlacuilolli
ama(tl), paper, document, letter, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/amatl
el papel
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 641v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=365&st=image&r=-0.792,...
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).
