tlalpilli. | Nahuatl Dictionary

Headword:

tlalpilli.

Principal English Translation:

something tied or knotted, such as something made of cloth, a hip cloth or a loincloth (see Molina); by extension, this can refer to someone who is taken prisoner by another or to the symbolic tying or bundling of the 52-year cycle (see attestations)

IPAspelling:

tɬɑlpiːlli

Alonso de Molina:

tlalpilli. cosa atada, o añudada, o prisionero de otro.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 124v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen:

TLALPĪL-LI something knotted or tangled, a knot, a nest, or a tangle of branches / cosa atada o añudada o prisionero de otro (M), amarradijo, nudo, manojo (T) [(2)Tp.226,232]. See (I)LPIĀ.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 276.

Attestations from sources in English:

See an image that represents tlalpilli in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

See the hieroglyph for the place name Tlalpican, a barrio or sujeto of Huexotzinco. (SW)
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=265&st=image&r=0.037,0...

yhuan quauhtanaçolli ychmecatica tlatlalpilli ypatiuh omochiuh 1 ts = also (bought) an old wooden basket with a handle, tied with maguey cords, that cost a tomín (Culhuacan, sixteenth century)
Testaments of Culhuacan (provisionally modified first edition), eds. Sarah Cline and Miguel León-Portilla, online version http://www.history.ucsb.edu/cline/testaments_of_culhuacan.pdf, 14.

yc opa tlalpilli marques = A second 52 years since the Marqués arrived (Tlaxcala-Puebla, seventeenth century)
Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley, ed. and transl. Camilla Townsend, with an essay by James Lockhart (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 174–175.

tlalpilli = a triangular hip cloth, worn around the waist and usually tied on the right side; a 52-year bundle
Justyna Olko, Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office: Elite Costume and Insignia of Power in Aztec and Early Colonial Mexico (Warsaw: Polish Society for Latin American Studies and Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition, University of Warsaw, 2005), 102.

Do not confuse the start to this term (tlal-) as having anything to do with tlalli (land). It is tla- + ilpia (with an added absolutive, making it a noun). (SW)

themes:

Textiles, Clothing