{
  "id": "hule-de-las-indias",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Hule (olli, ulli) — the American elastomer described in Spanish print before Europe had a word for it",
  "summary": "Long before Europe had a word for an elastic solid, Spanish books described one. Oviedo wrote in the 1530s that these balls bounce, again and again, by themselves; Molina's 1571 Mexico vocabulary glosses Nahuatl ulli with a Taino word for the game; Ximénez's 1615 Mexico imprint gives the tree, the cut in the bark and the Spanish corruption \"vle\", ancestor of hule. Excavation dates the game to 1374 BCE. The cost stands in the same chapters.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "botany",
    "materials",
    "technology",
    "mesoamerica",
    "caribbean",
    "nahuatl",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "archaeology",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "new-spain",
    "columbian-exchange",
    "firsts"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "oviedo-historia-general-y-natural-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quatro-libros-de-la-naturaleza-1615"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "molina-vocabulario-1571"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tabaco-picietl-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "columbian-exchange"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is hule and where does the word come from?",
    "Who first described rubber in a printed European book?",
    "What were Mesoamerican rubber balls made of?",
    "How old is the Mesoamerican ballgame?",
    "Did rubber reach Europe before the eighteenth century?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The earliest description read here of a rubber ball and how it was made is in Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias, book VI, chapter II, headed \"Del juego del batey de los indios, que es el mismo que el de la pelota, aunque se juega de otra manera, como aqui se dirá, y la pelota es de otra espeçie ó materia que las pelotas que entre los chripstianos se usan\". On page 165 of the 1851 Madrid printing he writes: \"E las pelotas son de unas rayçes de árboles é de hiervas é çumos é mezcla de cosas, que toda junta esta mixtura paresçe algo çerapez negra. Juntas estas y otras materias, cuéçenlo todo é haçen una pasta; é redondéanla é haçen la pelota, tamaña como una de las de viento en España, é mayores é menores: la qual mixtura haçe una tez negra, é no se pega á las manos; é despues que está enxuta tórnasse algo espongiosa\". He is describing a compounded, cooked elastomer, and he notices that it does not stick to the hands.",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The property that would eventually make the material industrial is stated on the next page, in 1530s Spanish, as a thing worth reporting for its own sake: \"Estas pelotas saltan mucho mas que las de viento sin comparaçion, porque de solo soltalla de la mano en tierra, suben mucho mas para arriba, é dan un salto é otro é otro y muchos, disminuyendo en el saltar por sí mismas, como lo haçen las pelotas de viento é muy mejor.\" Oviedo then draws the mechanical consequence: because the balls are solid rather than inflated they are heavy, \"é si les diessen con la mano abierta ó con el puño çerrado, en pocos golpes abririan la mano ó la desconçertarian\", which is why the players strike them with shoulder, elbow, head, knee and above all the hip. A European reader in 1535 had no material of his own that behaved this way; the comparison offered is the wind-filled leather ball, and the American one beats it.",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Oviedo had seen the nearest European equivalent and says so, which is what makes the comparison evidence rather than rhetoric. \"En Italia, quando en ella estuve, ví jugar un juego de pelota muy gruessa, tan grande como una botija de arroba ó mayor, é llámanla balon ó palon\", struck with the foot; \"Pero saltan estas de acá mucho mas é el juego en sí es de mas artifiçio é trabaxo mucho.\" He also records who played: \"lo mas contínuamente juegan hombres contra hombres, ó mugeres contra mugeres, y algunas veçes mezclados ellos y ellas; y tambien acaesçe jugarle las mugeres contra los varones, y tambien las casadas contra las vírgines\" — women's teams, mixed teams, and married women against unmarried, set down as ordinary.",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The chapter ends with a priority argument that a sixteenth-century Spanish official had no obligation to make. Pliny, Oviedo notes (book VII, chapter 56), credits the invention of the ball game to king Pyrrhus; the people of the Indies have never heard of Pyrrhus; \"por manera que deste primor no debe goçar Pirro, hasta que sepamos quién fué el verdadero é primero enseñador de tal juego, pues questas gentes se han de tener por mas antiguas que Pirro.\" The classical authority is set aside in favour of an American one, on the ground that the American peoples are older.",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Oviedo was right, and by a wider margin than he could have known. The Etlatongo excavation in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, published in Science Advances in 2020, reports \"the earliest highland Mesoamerican ballcourt, dating to 1374 BCE\", radiocarbon-dated to between 1443 and 1305 BCE, and notes that because no rubber grows in that highland valley the \"rubber balls used at Etlatongo would have been imported\". The 2012 PNAS study of a ballplayer figurine from the same site places the ritual apparatus of the game at about 1400 BCE, with an earlier court at Paso de la Amada in coastal Chiapas at about 1600 BCE and ballplayer figurines from El Opeño at about 1700 BCE, and names the material: it \"comes from the rubber tree Castilla elastica, which occurs frequently along the coastal plains and southern region of Mexico and to the south\". The game Oviedo watched in Hispaniola in the 1520s was already three thousand years old.",
      "sources": [
        "blomster-salazar-2020-etlatongo-ballcourt",
        "blomster-2012-ballgame-oaxaca"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The cost is printed in the same chapter as the description, in the author's own words and against his own interest. Describing what the Taino wore at the game, Oviedo breaks off to say that \"al pressente essos pocos que hay, todos andan vestidos ó con camisas, en espeçial los que están en poder de chripstianos; y si algunos no lo haçen assi, es entre las reliquias que han quedado destas gentes del caçique don Enrique\" — the survivors of the Hispaniola population, a remnant around the cacique Enriquillo, some thirty years after the conquest of the island. The ethnography and the collapse that made it retrospective are on the same page. Oviedo held office and property in the Indies and is a hostile witness to indigenous life throughout; that he records the disappearance in passing is evidence of scale rather than of sympathy.",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The material and the game crossed from the Antilles into New Spain in the vocabulary before they crossed the Atlantic. Fray Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, printed at Mexico by Antonio de Spinosa in 1571, gives on folio 94 of the Spanish-to-Nahuatl part three consecutive entries: \"Pelota como quiera. tapayolli. matotopetli. — Pelota para jugar al batey. ulli. ullamaloni. — Pelota de viento. tlayhyyotentli tapayulli.\" The lemma that means the rubber ball is glossed with batey, the Taino word Oviedo had recorded in Hispaniola, used in a Mexican dictionary of Nahuatl; and the language distinguishes the rubber ball (ulli) from the inflated ball, exactly as Oviedo's chapter heading does.",
      "sources": [
        "molina-vocabulario-1571-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The botany, the tapping and the word are in the Quatro libros de la naturaleza printed at Mexico in 1615, Francisco Ximénez's Spanish version of Francisco Hernández. Chapter X of the trees is headed \"DEL ARBOL QVE LLAMAN holquahuitl, ò arbol chilli\", of which two kinds are distinguished, one growing in Michoacán \"dōde le suelen llamar tarantaquam\", the other at Mecatlan and Yhualapa. Then the method and the name: \"sajada la corteza, destila vna goma q̄ los yndios llaman holli, y los Españoles corrupto el nombre vle, la qual es al principio de color de leche, y se va poniēdo amarilla, y vltimamēte negra … y de tal manera salta esta goma q̄ adereçada y puesta en figura de pelota redōda, comunmēte se vsa della en lugar de pelota\" de viento. A cut in the bark, a latex that is milk-white and dries black, and a gum that bounces: the tapping of rubber, in print in Mexico in 1615. The modern Spanish hule descends from the \"vle\" this page records.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The same chapter says the game was performed in Spain, and names who arranged it. After listing medical uses of the gum — it provokes urine, cleanses the womb, and taken alone or compounded \"sana los fluxos humorrales y las camaras de sangre\", also made into pellets with picietl, \"q̄ llaman tauaco\" — Ximénez writes: \"aquesta es aquella tan celebrada goma, con que los yndios solian exercitar aquel juego de pelota, tan admirable de veer q̄ ellos solian vsar, el qual se vido algunos años en España, procurādolo Don Hernādo Cortes Marques del Valle.\" A printed sixteenth-century Mexican book states that Nahua ballplayers and their rubber were brought to Spain at Cortés's procurement. This corpus takes that as the source's testimony and not as an independently verified date: no page giving the year or the place of that performance was opened for this entry.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The gum was also a drug, and the 1615 book prices its properties in the language of the day. On page 34, in the chapter on cacao, it prescribes four cacao beans \"mezclados con vna onça de aquella goma q̄ llaman olli, ò vlle\", given to a patient with bloody flux, which \"las detiene admirablemēte\"; both the beans and the gum may be lightly toasted first, and the gum, the text observes, \"es tenaz y glutinossa\". Alongside it Ximénez records claims he does not vouch for himself — that ulli swallowed in pellets with the insect axin gives extraordinary suppleness and softens the bones, and that the powdered leaves of the tree kill big cats. The pharmacology is of its period and mostly wrong; the physical observations of the material are not.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What this entry does not claim, stated so that nothing is read into it. None of the sources opened here describes the chemical processing that archaeology has since attributed to Mesoamerican rubber-makers — the mixing of Castilla elastica latex with the juice of another plant to toughen it — and no claim above says who first processed rubber, or when. Neither does anything here connect these books to the eighteenth-century French and English experiments, to the word caoutchouc, or to nineteenth- century vulcanisation and the Amazon rubber boom, with its own very large human cost: no source read for this object covers that history, and the chain from a 1615 Mexico imprint to an industrial elastomer is not drawn by any page opened here.",
      "sources": [
        "ximenez-quatro-libros-1615",
        "blomster-2012-ballgame-oaxaca"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Popular accounts of rubber start in 1736 with La Condamine, or in 1839 with Goodyear, and treat the Mesoamerican ball as a curiosity in a first paragraph. The Spanish record is two centuries earlier and far more precise than that framing allows, and it is quoted here from the pages themselves: Oviedo describing repeated rebound and explaining why a solid elastic ball cannot be struck with the hand; Molina's 1571 Mexico vocabulary glossing Nahuatl ulli with the Taino word batey, which is a transfer of vocabulary between two conquered peoples visible in one dictionary line; Ximénez's 1615 Mexico imprint giving the incision in the bark, the latex changing from milk to black, and the Spanish corruption \"vle\" from which hule comes. Two peer-reviewed excavation papers then date the game the Spaniards were watching to 1374 BCE, which is the evidence Oviedo lacked when he told Pliny that Pyrrhus should not keep the credit.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hule-de-las-indias",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/hule-de-las-indias.json",
  "jsonld": {
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    "name": "Hule (olli, ulli) — the American elastomer described in Spanish print before Europe had a word for it",
    "description": "Long before Europe had a word for an elastic solid, Spanish books described one. Oviedo wrote in the 1530s that these balls bounce, again and again, by themselves; Molina's 1571 Mexico vocabulary glosses Nahuatl ulli with a Taino word for the game; Ximénez's 1615 Mexico imprint gives the tree, the cut in the bark and the Spanish corruption \"vle\", ancestor of hule. Excavation dates the game to 1374 BCE. The cost stands in the same chapters.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hule-de-las-indias",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, compuesto por el muy Reuerendo Padre Fray Alonso de Molina, dela Orden del bienauenturado nuestro Padre sant Francisco",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=IK4rAQAAMAAJ&pg=PP3"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Quatro libros de la naturaleza, y virtudes de las plantas, y animales que estan receuidos en el vso de medicina en la Nueua España",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=qQpFp_bImPMC&pg=PP1"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar Oceano, primera parte - the text of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=yw4-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA280"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Origins of the Mesoamerican ballgame: Earliest ballcourt from the highlands found at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7069692/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Early evidence of the ballgame in Oaxaca, Mexico",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3361378/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Hule (olli, ulli) — the American elastomer described in Spanish print before Europe had a word for it"
  }
}