Cuentlacuilol (MH664r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Cuentlacuilol is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a rectangular parcel of land (cuemitl) that is divided in half along the diagonal. It has dots and squiggles on the upper left half, and it is black on the lower right half. Perhaps it is meant to look something like a piece of writing or a painting (tlacuilolli), or perhaps in this setting, tlacuilolli refers to intense cultivation of the land, or the new plants curling up from the seeds. The translation is elusive.
Stephanie Wood
Marc Thouvenot identifies the verb icuiloa (or ihcuiloa, with the glottal stop), which means to paint, write, or print, as having a root of -cuil-. He notes how it also appears in tlacuiloliztli (writing), tlacuilo (writer), and cuicuiltic (mottled). He goes on to show various uses of icuiloa that take it beyond the simple definitions just given, resulting in something like the action of creating a design (e.g., on leather, ceramics, sculpture, or in textiles). It can also be something like the action of decorating (e.g., to put a flower on a cup of atole). He associates icuiloa and tlacuilolli with "cultural artifacts," such as arts and crafts or examples of writing and painting, but cuicuiltic with effects created by "nature." This short summary barely does his article justice; it is worth reading the entire piece. How Thouvenot's study might connect with the concept of bent or curved mentioned by Prem (1974: 555, 682) raises an interesting question. Perhaps the bent or curved lines of writing, painting, carving, embroidery, and so on, fall with in the realm of expressions of -cuil-. See
Marc Thouvenot, "Imágenes y escritura entre los nahuas del inicio del XVI," Estudios de Cultural Náhuatl 41 (2010).
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
escribir, pintar, agricultura, parcelas, tierras, nombres de hombres

cuem(itl), an agricultural furrow, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuemitl
tlacuilol(li), a piece of writing, a painting, or a design, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacuilolli
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 664r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=408&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).
