tecpan (Mdz32r)

This glyph is very similar to the calli (house or generic building), except for the decoration just below the top of the building. These circles suggest power and prestige, and therefore they highlight how this is a royal palace and not just a house. One will also see the term tecpancalli employed to refer to royal palaces. Alonso de Molina's sixteenth-century vocabulary provides huei tecpan and huei tecpancalli, both having the modifier (huei) to indicate their larger size, an indication that palaces could vary in grandeur. Motecuhtzoma's palace in the Codex Mendoza has the circles at the top (see folio 69 recto), but they are not colored. The term tecpanchan (with the added -chan, for home) is somewhat rarer and seemingly later. A sixteenth-century building with the pattern of circles running horizontally below the roof survives still today in Teposcolula, Oaxaca, as shown in a photo by the editor of this database, taken in 2009. And here is a detail showing the circle alone. Various manuscripts show this type of decoration on the tecpan, too, such as we see in the map of the Relación Geográfica de Itztapalapa of 1580 or the Códice de Moctezuma in a scene published in Arqueología Mexicana.

In the see-also field, note how similar the architecture is for the tecpan in what is now the state of Morelos (from the AGN Ramo Hospital de Jesús).