Comaltepec (Mdz16v)
This compound glyph for the place name Comaltepec has two obvious elements, a round yellow circular object, representing the griddle (comalli) for cooking tortillas, and a two-tone green, bell-shaped hill or mountain (tepetl), with the usual rocky outcroppings (curling shapes on the surface, reminding us that tepetl begins with te- from tetl), and the typical yellow and red horizontal lines at the base. The locative suffix (-c) is not shown visually, but it combines with -tepe- to form -tepec, a visual locative suffix meaning "on the hill" or "on the mountain."
Stephanie Wood
Berdan and Anawalt give "On the Hill of the Comalli," which appears to be the literal translation. Might this be some kind of landscape feature that resembles a comal (in contemporary Mexican Spanish), or is it a reference to a place where comales are known to be made and sold?
Stephanie Wood
comaltepec. puo
Comaltepec, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
mountains, hills, cerros, montañas, comal, comales, griddles
![](https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/Comaltepec16v.jpeg?itok=X_fwbhT7)
comal(li), griddle, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/comallifdictionary
tepe(tl), hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepetl
-tepec (locative suffix), on the hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepec
"On the Hill of the Comalli" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. 181)
Codex Mendoza, folio 16 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 43 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).