Cipac (BMapO106)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Cipac (short for cipactli, “Crocodile”) is attested here as a man’s name. It shows the head of a crocodile facing left, toward the head of the man whose name this is. The animal has protruding teeth and what seem to be arrow points spiking out from under the chin, and the rectangular ends of the arrows coming out from the top of its head. Its nose has a long, vertical snout, with something attached at the top.
Stephanie Wood
Cipactli is a day name in the 260-day religious divinatory calendar called the tonalpohualli. The cipactli in the Florentine Codex (see below) is the most like this one that appears in the collection as of April 2025. See the arrows coming out of its head and the ornament on its nose. Other Cipac glyphs, such as those from the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, vary widely.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1565
Jeff Haskett-Wood
calendarios, calendars, dates, fechas, days, tonalpohualli, caimanes, cocodrilos, nombres de días, nombres de hombres
cipac(tli), crocotile, alligator, or caiman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cipactli
Cocodrilo
Stephanie Wood
Beinecke Map/Codex Reese, section 8, no. 106 in the Whittaker study (published in the Miller/Mundy book, 2012), and see the original at: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3600017
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
