Tenanco (TK207v)
This painted compound Nahuatl hieroglyph represents the place name Tenanco (“At the Wall”), a location near Tepetlaoztoc, Tetzcoco (or, in contemporary spelling, Tepetlaoxtoc, Texcoco). The compound has three parts, and the reading order is upward. At the bottom is a horizontal multicolored stone with curling ends. It is terracotta-colored on the right end, it has a vertical but curving white stripe in the middle, and the left end is red. This stone (tetl) supplies the phonetic syllable for the start of the place name, Te-. Moving up, there is a woman’s head in profile, facing right. This woman is intended to be read as “mother” (nantli), providing the phonetic syllable -nan-, which comes in the middle of this place name. On top, the third element is a ceramic jug or pot (comitl), contributing the final phonetic syllable, which is the locative suffix, -co (at).
Stephanie Wood
In this digital collection, we are tracking the use of phonetic hieroglyphic writing. One can do a search for all the examples that have some degree of phoneticism. Go to the Advanced Search, use the Writing Features dropdown list, and ask to see, for instance, “writing fully phonographic.” The manuscripts from the area of Tetzcoco are especially notable for this. The Tenanco glyphs from other regions, below, are very different from this one.
Side Note: The folio numbers are not always clear in the copy published online by the British Museum. Marc Thouvenot gives this page the number K05_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K05_B.
Stephanie Wood
tenaco.
Tenanco
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
piedra, piedras, mujer, mujeres, madre, madres, familia, olla, barro, nombres de lugares, topónimos, topónimo, fonetismo
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl
nan(tli), mother, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nantli
com(itl), pottery jug or pot, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/comitl
Junto al Muro
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Kingsborough, also known as the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc, and the Memorial de los indios de Tepetlaoztoc, is not on display. It was transferred from the British Library and is now held by the British Museum. It is shared on line at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am2006-Drg-13964
©The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Please also cite the <em>Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphsem>, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-present) and this URL.
