Yaotl (FCbk8f9v)
This compound glyph for the personal name Yaotl (or Yaotzin, in the reverential form) refers to a ruler of Tetzcoco and likely here means “Combatant.” The glyph shows a profile view of the head of a warrior with face paint–in two dark gray horizontal lines across his cheek–and a feathered headdress with two long, wavy green feathers (possibly quetzal) and two small red and white possibly down feathers. He is looking toward the viewer’s right. Below the head is a vertical stone with curling ends and curving diagonal stripe across the middle. This stone (tetl) may be a phonetic indicator that he is a tecuhtli (lord).
Stephanie Wood
Yaotl was one of the most common names for men, at least as attested in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco (MH), and not every single attestation from that record appears in this database. It is unknown whether men bearing this name were aware of the Tetzcocan ancestor of this name, or was it simply appealing to have the name “Combatant,” along the lines of a valiant warrior. See some examples below of ways this name appears in the MH, typically a war shield and sometimes as a turtle (ayotl) shell, which was a near homonym and perhaps disguised the militance of the name Yaotl in the face of the colonizing clergy.
Stephanie Wood
yaotzin tecutli
Yaotzin Tecuhtli
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
Texcoco, gobernador, gobernadores, gobernantes, gobernante, tlatoani, tlahtoani, tlatoque, tlahtohqueh, teuctli, pluma, plumas, piedra, piedras, nombres famosos, nombres de hombres
yao(tl), combatant or enemy, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/yaotl
Yaotzin (“Combatiente”)
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. 9v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/8/folio/9v/images/e4119f37-0af... 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.”
