tematlapatzca (FCbk10f132r)

This iconographic example, featuring a deceased captive, a person who was crushed in a net (tematlapatzca, a verb), 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. But a similar verb is mecapatzca, which appears in the nearby text. This example shows two men carrying a bloody, deceased man, who is caught in a net. He is a captive whose destiny was to be given as an offering to the deity named Coltzin. The contextualizing image shows Coltzin to the right of the sacrificial scene, sitting on a woven mat (petlatl), wearing a hide cape, and having a hairstyle where his long hair is swept up into a huge curl above his forehead. The culture group here, according to the text, involved the Toloca, Matlatzinca, or Cuacuata (plural ethnic labels in this case). The text explains that they did not generally speak Nahuatl, although there were some Nahuatl speakers among them. The Toloca got their name from the abundance of reeds (toli) in the region.