The Two Moteuczomas: Text-Image Soundscapes

• In Event: Hidden In Plain Sight: Text to Image / Image to Text in Ancient and Colonial Mexico

Abstract

Moteuczoma (r. 1502-1520) oversaw a complex ritual culture that grew out of the precedents of his forefathers, especially his homonymic great-grandfather, Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina (r. 1440-1468), who greatly expanded the empire, is known to have ruled prudently, and whose name achieved the greatest fame in Moteuczoma’s lifetime. I argue that the later king commandeered the fame of his ancestor by attaching or emphasizing his “hidden” or “family” name Moteuczoma (spelled variously historically but phonetically accurate here). Because Ilhuicamina was also well established as the “second” name of the first king, and because he is the only Aztec king who is given two names in the colonial-period sources, it is likely that Ilhuicamina was in common use during that king’s lifetime. As the later king emphasized his tocayo with his great-grandfather, he inscribed it on no less than eight monuments as a name glyph that includes imperial ornaments, symbols of generative power, and the king’s voice. Moteuczoma’s proclivity toward his own fame can be witnessed by the fact that his name glyph phonetically evokes his personal name at the same time it evokes deeply entrenched notions of kingship in Classic and Postclassic Central Mexico.
Moteuczoma’s name glyph functions differently in Aztec monumental inscriptions than manuscript illustrations from the colonial period, where it serves to label and designate pictographic representations of the king. Instead, monumental inscriptions evoke the king’s presence in the sculptural form, as a way of signaling the king’s relationship to the divine. For this reason, Moteuczoma’s name glyph includes a speech glyph to evoke the king’s title and command as Great Speaker (huei tlahtoani) invested in different religious and sculptural contexts. Perhaps it is also for this reason that the speech glyph was transformed or removed from Moteuczoma’s representation in the colonial-period sources, the scribes effectively silencing him.

Author

• Patrick T Hajovsky, Southwestern University