chichimeca

[Susan Gilchrist]

I'm glad you're looking at the Coyoacan
page<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b73-1599-trial-Cholula-1519.0.jpg>more
closely, because
I don't have a good idea of the date of the event or of the drawing,
or earlier drawings that might have been the basis for it. I'm not sure
we've really contradicted each other about the dots, which I'm
copying for clarity:
o   o-o-o-o-o   o-o-o-o-o   o-o-o-o-o   o-o-o-o-o   o-o-o-o-o   o-o-o-o-o
o-o-o-o-o   o-+-o-o-o-o
It seems to me as though the basis for counting is a Biblical-sounding 40
years
made more precise by the extra dot at the left and the cross at the right
in a way that would have made perfect sense at the time.

Does it make sense to say it's some kind of a mix of European and Nahuatl
ways of counting time in any event, since Nahuatl picture writing doesn't
mark
time "ago" and uses dates instead, even if a person speaking Nahuatl might
say something happened "41 years ago"? If the person had stayed with the
normal system, we wouldn't have to wonder whether the event happened in
5-Calli (1523) or 10-Tecpatl (1528).

To me it seems as though an effect of the 40-year count is to make it so
that
everything on the page relates to Bartholome de las Casas and his Brevísima
Relacion<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b75-las-casas-brevissima-p1.jpg>,
including the "tyrants" at the top of the page and the scenes with the
dog and the men tied to a rope. If (combining two ways of doing the
arithmetic)
the idea was that bad things were happening 40-some years after 1492 and
still were happening 40-some years "ago" it's a way of making a very strong
connection to Las Casas and his books, and to the 40 year spans in the
Bible, where 40 years is a very long time, long enough for a generation of
people to die.

So far as metaphor goes, I'm introducing the Coyoacan drawing into a
discussion of a European painting where it seems as though the metaphors
are out of control. The way the artist represented dogs in a hell
scene<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b74-4-tochtli-and-dogs.jpg>is
so over-the-top that people seem to assume it has to do entirely with
medieval images of hell. Then since they're in a hell scene, the implication

is that the victims must deserve whatever happens to them. I think the
artists were representing similar events, but the European artist got a lot
more tangled up in metaphor. But I think the two artists may have been
working within a similar theoretical framework, that is they were both
invoking Las Casas as an authority on how Europeans should view the
events, and they were both looking at the Rhetorica ad Herennium
and the ancient artist
Apelles<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b77%2520apelles%2520and%2520ptolemy%2520eng.jpg>as
models. The story of how Apelles
identified a person by drawing a recognizable picture is something that
would likely have been familiar to a priest teaching Latin, and new to
people who were more familiar with indigenous art.

Another way to look at the Coyoacan picture is that it's a neat solution
to a problem in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, where the anonymous
author seems to think the reader ought to be able to visualize a long
row of "loci" marked in sets of 5 or 10, which is supposed to be an
easy way to remember things. It seems impossible if as the author
suggests, the reader tries to visualize spaces between columns (for
instance the columns in Charles V's palace in the
Alhambra<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b58%2520alhambra%2520cv%2520palace%2520wikipedia.jpg>).
But the
artist who made the Coyoacan picture made it easy to visualize 40
"loci" and/or the spaces between them.

So I'm not really adding anything to what's known about the Coyoacan
picture except to agree that it does seem obvious that the artist/writer
was learning from a priest, which is already obvious from the Roman-
alphabet writing. If the priest was going to say something about a picture,
it's likely he would have cited the RAH and even more likely he would have
cited Pliny. I would like to know more about the picture and its context,
particularly the date. Is there something I could  be reading, besides
your work-in-progress?
Can I add a note based on your e-mail to my weblog, or even attach the
whole e-mail? I don't want to contribute to filling the internet with half-
explanations of things.
Also, thank you for reading the Nahuatl language gloss. I don't know
Nahuatl and was relying on Ramirez, who says

Fig. 6—Sobre la linea de ceros que alli se ve partida por una cruz, hay la
siguiente leyenda:
    Ynacico Marques ya cempoali xihuitl once axcan mauhxiuyoc in ya micque
Tlatoque [=] Vino á dar el Marques a los quarenta años es decir ahora á los
quatro años de muertos los caballeros
Susan Gilchrist
http://elboscoblog.blogspot.com/

On 10/28/06, Diel, Lori <L.Diel at tcu.edu> wrote:
>
> I have been researching the painting to which you refer.  I believe you
> are providing a metaphoric interpretation, but a more straightforward
> reading of the imagery is called for.  The painting references a historic
> event in which an indigenous man was ordered to be attacked by the dog
> (controlled by the Spaniard) presumably for refusing to accept Christianity
> (notice the rosary Marina holds and the sword held by one of the indigenous
> men).  The dots at the bottom do reference years (a total of 41) but these
> are meant to be counted from Cortes's arrival, as is stated in an associated
> alphabetic gloss in Nahuatl.  My reading of this gloss follows, but if any
> of the Nahuatl specialists out there have an alternative translation, I
> welcome hearing it.  My reading of "ynauh xiuyoc..." as "4 years later..."
> makes sense historically, but I'm not sure if it works linguistically.
>
> Ynacico marques ya onpoualxiuitl once  axcan ynauh xiuyoc yn ya miq
> tlatoque
> The Marques [Cortes] came 41 years ago, 4 years later the tlatoque died.
>
> This translation suggests the annotation was added in 1560, and the events
> depicted happened in 1523.
>
> Best,
> Lori B. Diel
>
>
> ---
> Lori Boornazian Diel, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor of Art History
> Dept. of Art and Art History
> Texas Christian University
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org on behalf of Susan Gilchrist
> Sent: Sat 10/28/2006 2:41 AM
> To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> Subject: [Nahuat-l] chichimeca
>
> Thinking about it a different way, I wonder if the
> Coyoacan picture<
> http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b73-1599-trial-Cholula-1519.0.jpg
> >relates
> to the wolf
> of Gubbio <http://www.assisiweb.com/foto/Pienza_SF_PB200102b.jpg>
> and the story of the
> wolf<http://www.wtu.edu/franciscan/pages/intro/gubbio.html>in the
> Little
> Flowers of
> St. Francis <http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/flowers1.htm>.
> In other words the horrible dogs the soldiers
> brought with them must have made it hard for
> Dominicans to explain the word play in "domini
> canes" and even worse for Franciscans to tell the
> story of how St. Francis was able to persuade a
> wolf to be nice to people. Plus as the person on
> the Dominican website explained, dogs can
> stand for priests in general.
> So maybe the rope that's attached to the dog in
> the picture (or possible to the person the dog is
> attacking?) hasn't got anything to do with
> "chichi-mecatl" and instead is there to make it
> clear that the situation is under the control of the
> soldier. It's worse than a wild animal, represented
> by the well-behaved coyote in the place sign (or
> the dog glyph for one person's name).
> That would make sense in European terms where
> it would be commonplace to say men were capable
> of worse behavior than animals. The idea of a
> picture that's recognizable is something that I think
> is also a European element (as in Pliny's biography
> of Apelles), since the dog is drawn in a European
> way.
> I was thinking about the Coyoacan picture in terms
> of the good dog-bad dog opposition in Murner's
> Logica Memorativa<
> http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic20/hoeltgen/fig11.html>,
> which might be something that
> actually was brought to Mexico fairly early.
> I'm still puzzled by the word chichi, even as a loan
> word from another language. Were there just wolves,
> coyotes, and the dogs we call chihuahuas? Did people
> call European dogs perros?
> Thank you to John Sullivan for the reference to the
> gourd tree in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca and to
> Pablo Garcia for the reference to the Gran
> Chichimeca Xolotl.
> Susan Gilchrist
> http://elboscoblog.blogspot.com/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/nahuat-l/attachments/20061029/1547bf5e/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl