Tampatel (Mdz10v)
The compound glyph for the place name Tampatel includes two notable visual elements. At the top appears to be a liver (elli, eltapachtli, or teltapach). It is shaped like a flower and it is predominantly red with yellow tips and a yellow base. It sits on top of a hill or mountain, the typical two-tone green bell shape with curling rocky outcroppings on the slopes and yellow and red horizontal stripes at the base. The hill may provide a silent locative.
Stephanie Wood
This compound glyph refers to a town in the Huasteca (Huaxtec country), where so many community names begin with Tam- (which means "place" in Huaxtec). Here, the tepetl) (hill, mountain) sign is a visual but silent locative (roughly the equivalent of Tam-), what Gordon Whittaker would call a "semantic complement." The sign on top of the mountain, according to Berdan and Anawalt, represents a liver, which could provide the -tapa- sound, as liver in Nahuatl is eltapachtli. The Aztecs were trying to approximate the phonetics of a town name from Huaxtec. Despite the liver interpretation, in the end, Berdan and Anawalt (1992, v. 1, p. 205), suggest the English translation of this place name as "Place of Metal." The author of the Dictionnaire de la langue nahuatl classique (on line), suggests coral. See: http://sites.estvideo.net/malinal/1.hist/T.html Coral, in Nahuatl, is tapachtli. The artists of the Codex Mendoza were familiar with coral and did use it for another Huaxtec place name, as shown below.
Stephanie Wood
tanpatel .puo
Tampatel, pueblo (in the State of Veracruz today)
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
If the tepetl provides the semantica equivalent of Tam-, the order should begin at the bottom. But there is some phonetic reinforcement of the Ta(m), perhaps, in the liver. It could be that the liver was meant to provide the final -el; but that would also provide an upward reading order.
organs, livers, hígados, cerros, montañas
eltapach(tli), liver, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/eltapachtli
el(li), liver, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/elli
teltapach, liver, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teltapach
tapach(tli), seashell, coral, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tapachtli
"Place of Metal" (Berdan & Anawalt, 1992, v. 1, p. 205)
Codex Mendoza, folio 10 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 31 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).
