Pimentel (FCbk8f9r)
This simplex glyph for the personal name Pimentel (a Spanish name that was taken by a Nahua ruler in Tetzcoco) shows two human bare feet in profile, with parts of the legs attached, and these are facing toward the viewer’s right. How this visual results in a reading of Pimentel is somewhat obscure, but the Spanish word for foot is pie, which might be intended as a phonetic start to the borrowed surname (Pi-). The ruler’s first name is Hernando, probably taken from the first name of the Marqués del Valle, Hernando Cortés. The name Hernando would seem to have even a weaker relationship to the feet. In other places he also has the added name Ihuian–after Pimentel. Ihuian means slowly, bit by bit, and perhaps that could be visualized by feet walking.
Stephanie Wood
See article about the “Multivalence of Footprints” in the lefthand navigation side bar for some of the many readings for feet (especially, -xo-) and footprints in Nahuatl hieroglyphs.
Stephanie Wood
don hernando pimentel
Don Hernando Pimentel
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
Texcoco, pierna, piernas, pie, gobernante, gobernantes, gobernadores, gobernador, tlatoani, tlatoque, tlahtoani, tlahtohqueh, apellidos españoles, nombres de hombres
Pimentel, a Spanish surname sometimes taken by Nahua nobles, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/Pimentel
Pimentel (el apellido español tomado por algunos Nahuas nobles)
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 8: Kings and Lords", fol. 9r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/8/folio/9r/images/78a99221-8a7... Accessed 27 July 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
