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Illustration of Tonatiuh by Miguel Covarrubias, based on his image in the Codex Borgia (Click on image to enlarge) |
Good question! Many know that the Mexica sun god’s name in their language, Náhuatl, was Tonatiuh; less well known is what this name means. Like many Náhuatl terms, it’s a composite word, made up of two shorter parts: tona, meaning ‘for the sun to shine’ (ie, to be a warm, sunny day), and the ending -tiuh, meaning to go, to do. As there is a strong sense of an active verb in the name, perhaps we should translate Tonatiuh as ‘To Go and Make the Sun Shine’. In this picture of Tonatiuh, adapted from the Codex Borgia, the great sun disk and its rays are clearly visible.
Sun and moon, painted ceramic specially created for Mexicolore by celebrated Mexican ‘Tree-of-Life’ artist Tiburcio Soteno (Click on image to enlarge) |
Tonatiuh can also refer to an epoch, (world era) or ‘sun’, in the sense of the sequence of creations that the Mexica believed our world has been going through (we’re now in the fifth Aztec era, called ‘5-Movement’, so dramatically portrayed on the giant Sunstone).
Interestingly, in Nahua communities today the every-day word for a ‘day’ is a tonatiuh. So every day in the Aztec language is a Sun-day!
Info from:-
• An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl by Frances Kartunnen, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992
• Diccionario de la Lengua Nahuatl by César Macazaga Ordoño, Editorial Innovación, Mexico City, 1979
Picture sources:-
• Main picture scanned from The Aztecs: People of the Sun by Alfonso Caso, University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.
• Tiburcio Soteno art: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore