teyauh (FCbk10f25v)

This iconographic example, featuring a murderer (teyauh), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss. This example shows a man with a dog’s head. He is fully dressed in Spanish-style a white cotton, belted tunic and trousers. All of this clothing involves some shading that gives it a three-dimensionality, showing European artistic influence. His body is in a frontal view, but his head (the dog’s head) is in a profile view, turned toward the right. In that direction are three Nahua men wearing the same clothing but with added cloaks (tilmatli), and they are sitting on low woven seats (icpalli). The teyauh is threatening them with an obsidian blade-studded wooden club (macuahuitl), while also holding a large round shield. The shield has a red rim and a large black center with an anthropomorphic face on it. Yellow and red feathers hang down from the lower side of the shield, and they are held together with a white band running horizontally. The text says that this murderer had a dog’s heart and is, in fact, a dog. But this figure with the dog head is also reminiscent of the way Coyotl Inahual has been drawn in other places in Florentine Codex.