Temamauhti (MH709r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Temamauhti (“He Frightens People”) is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a profile view of the head of an animal looking toward the viewer’s right. It has long horns that are red closest to its head and white toward the tips, something like the coloring of flint knives (tecpatl or itztli). Its mouth is open, and its teeth are visible. It has a protruding, curling, red tongue in three parts. The fur at the base of the animal’s head is gray.
Stephanie Wood
The gloss suggests that this is an animal (or perhaps supernatural) that frightens people. Juan José Batalla sees this and similar hieroglyphs as adopted European representations of demons or the devil. [See: "Análisis de elementos gráficos de contenido occidental en los glifos de los códices coloniales del Centro de México: el caso de los antropónimos nahuas," in El arte de escribir. El Centro de México: del Posclásico al siglo XVII, eds. Juan José Batalla Rosado and Miguel Ángel Ruz Barrio (Zinacantepec, Estado de México: El Colegio Mexiquense, A. C., 2018), 80.] Glyphs for tetzauh (something that frightens people) come in a range of visual expressions, but at least one is animal-like with horns (see below). Another one has face paint or tattooing that makes it seem to be a person of an “other” ethnicity. See also Tetonehua, possibly “He Who Torments People,” shown with unusual protrusions on the head in the location where horns might have been.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
asustar, alarmante, animales, nombres de hombres, a favorite
temamauhti, something that frightens people, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/temamauhti
te-, (nonspecific human object prefix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/te
Asusta a la Gente
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 709r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=496&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).
