tenamitl (FCbk6f34r)
This iconographic example, featuring fortifications (tenamitl) at the top of a building is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making potential comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss. This example shows two rows of fortifications with the traditional stepped ramparts with small concentric circles below them. Inside each stepped structure is a vertical rectangle. The upper row has three stone glyphs, which provide the phonetic te- start to the term tenamitl, but also add a semantic contribution, given that the walls were made of stone. Between the rows of fortification there is a tlatoani (or tlahtoani, with the glottal stop), a ruler, which can be seen better in the contextualizing image.
Stephanie Wood
Two dictionary terms with virtually the same definition are tenantli and tenamitl. The root, tenan- or tenam-, depending upon what follows, can be for either. A third term, which is similar, is tepantli (which is also the contemporary Eastern Huastecan Nahuatl term), but it seems to translate mainly as wall. In this digital collection, we have primarily concluded that place names starting with Tenan- are referring to the tenamitl, but they would also be referring to a tenantli, given that the meaning is the same. In this iconographic example, the team at the Digital Florentine Codex also reads the visuals as representing tenamitl.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
arquitectura, fortificación, pared, muralla, almenaje, fortificaciones, paredes, murallas, almenajes, almena, almenas
tenam(itl), wall, fortification, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tenamitl
tenan(tli), wall, fortification, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tenantli
la fortificación
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 6: Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy", fol. 34r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/6/folio/34r/images/0. Accessed 5 July 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
