30 May 2025 / 10 House
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Find out moreWhat word would the Aztecs have used for an empress/female huey tlatoani?
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Will Edwards: I greatly appreciate all of the work you’ve done to make information on the Aztecs more accessible. A lot of my fiction writing draws on Mesoamerican cultures, whether that be a fantasy world with inspiration from them or Tezcatlipoca himself appearing as a character, so your website has been an invaluable source of information for me. On that note, I have a somewhat hypothetical question to ask. What word would the Aztecs have used for an empress/female huey tlatoani? I’ve found claims that a female tlatoani is known as a cihuatlatoani, so my current guess is ‘huey cihuatlatoani.’ However, I’m not confident in this assumption, as my knowledge of Nahuatl comes purely from what words and meanings I’ve been able to find online rather than fluency. I would be deeply grateful if you could take the time to offer your insight on this. (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
Many thanks for your positive feedback and good question. In fact, you’re absolutely right: the Nahuatl term for queen, princess, lady of high rank, and similar would be cihuatlatoani, and you could indeed prefix it with huey to convey the notion of ‘great’.
One of the classic Nahuatl dictionaries, the Diccionario de la lengua nahuatl o mexicana by Rémi Siméon (1885) gives precisely huey cihuatlatoani for ‘great lady, great queen’.
Few are aware that there was in fact a Mexica queen, Atotoztli (‘Water-Bird’) who was the daughter of Motecuzoma I and Chichimecacihuatzin; she married emperor Itzcoatl’s son Tezozomoc and became mother to the later kings Axayacatl, Tizoc, and Ahuitzotl.
Picture source:-
• Codex image downloaded from Wikipedia and from https://amoxcalli.hypotheses.org/2083.
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