Ometoch (MH898r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Ometoch (“Two-Rabbit” or “2-Rabbit”) is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows the head of a rabbit (tochtli) in profile, looking toward the viewer’s right. Two (ome) short black lines stand up from the back of the rabbit’s head. This name derives from the religious divinatory calendar, the tonalpohualli, or the year calendar, the xiuhpohualli.
Stephanie Wood
Ome Tochtli (sometimes spelled Ometochtli) also refers to two deities (Izquitecatl and Tepoztecatl) associated with alcoholic beverages (such as pulque, called octli in Nahuatl) and intoxication/drunkenness. Rabbits also came to have this association, and so the rabbit became a symbol for pulque. If one was born on the day sign of Ome Tochtli, it was a sign that the child would grow up to be a drunkard. The footprints that appear in the contextualizing image suggest that the person with this name, Ometoch, has run away. This was a common form of passive resistance to the heavy demands of the taxation system (tributes) that got worse as people were dying from epidemic disease and survivors were still expected to come up with the same payments as before.
Stephanie Wood
andres ometoch
Andrés Ometoch
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
calendarios, nombres de días, números, nombres de hombres
ome, two, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ome
toch(tli), rabbit, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tochtli
Dos-Conejo, o 2-Conejo
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 898r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=868&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).
