Mocuica Icuilo (MH711r)
This colorfully painted compound glyph is a personal name for a Nahua man, Mocuica Icuilo (perhaps “His Painting was Sung”). It shows speech scrolls coming out of the tribute payer’s mouth. One is red, and it is rising and curling upwardly. The other is yellow, and it is descending but curling upward at the end. A line connects these two volutes, and the same line connects them to a painting. The painting is a vertical rectangle with two identical parts. Perhaps it is meant to be a screenfold. The signs on the painting are like a quincunx flower, each with four petals and four dots, one dot between each petal. These details are colored red, yellow, and white. The two squares on the vertical rectangle are separated and bordered by yellow bands, one at the top, middle, and bottom.
Stephanie Wood
Nahuas did not have a clear boundary between painting and writing (as shown in other examples below). European influence eventually led to a large number of glyphs showing books with alphabetic texts, but here, it seems there is still a memory of screenfold codices that were painted and included hieroglyphs.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cantar, canción, volutas, pintura, escritura, nombres de hombres
cuica, to sing, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuica
icuiloa, to paint or write, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/icuiloa
mo- (reflexive), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mo-1
posiblemente, Se Cantó Su Pintura
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 711r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=500&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).