Citepec (CmpRG)
This compound glyph represents the toponym of Citepec ("On Jack Rabbit Hill"), a landscape feature located in the Cempoala area of Hidalgo and found on the 1580 Relación Geográfica de Cempoala (originally, Cempohuallan), in the modern state of Hidalgo, Mexico. The glyph consists of a hill or mountain (tepetl) with the head and neck of a jack rabbit or hare (citli) [coatl resting on top. The locative -c is not visualized specifically, but the hill can double as a semantic locative. The elements of the glyph are outlined in black. The tepetl is partially shaded in green fading to brown, while the body and head and neck of the jack rabbit (citli) are spotted and shaded in brown. The tepetl is rather short and rounded, with black-outlined pink stripes, curled at each end, at its base. The citli is shown in profile facing to the right, and its ears are erect and pointed slightly backward. Its eye is drawn in a way that makes it seem as if it is looking backward.
Robert Haskett
The glyph Citepec shows very little obvious Spanish influence in comparison to some of the others found on the map. For instance, it is not situated next to a church acting as a possible semantic indication for “inhabited place” as is seen in the case of some other place glyphs depicted on the map (see the Visual Lexicon entry for Coatpec, for example). Instead, it appears by itself near one edge of the manuscript below and to the right of another landscape feature glossed as "Nopalapa" (see the historical contextualizing image). For a study of the RG, see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), and see the same author's The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), Mundy (1996), and Ballesteros García (2005), 67-68, figure 39.
Robert Haskett
çitepec
Citepec
Robert Haskett
1580
Robert Haskett
place glyph, jack rabbit, rabbits, hare, conejos, conejo gato, liebre, cihtli
Photograph by Stephanie Wood, Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 14 February 2023.
ci(tli), jackrabbit, hare, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/citli
tepe(tl), hill, mountain, precipice, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepetl
El Cerro de la Liebre
Robert Haskett
Relación de Cempoala - University of Texas Libraries Collections. 1580-11-01. https://collections.lib.utexas.edu/catalog/utblac:f87917e2-e3c9-4eb2-a83...
Materials that are in the public domain (such as most of the maps in the PCL Map Collection), are not copyrighted and no permission is needed to copy them. You may download them and use them as you wish. The image appears here courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
