Tenochtitlan (FCbk9f38v)

Tenochtitlan (FCbk9f38v)
Compound Glyph

Glyph or Iconographic Image Description:

This compound glyph, featuring the name of the Mexica capital city (Tenochtitlan, “By the Rock Cactus,” per Gordon Whittaker), comes from the text on the same pages of the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a frontal view of an upright prickly pear cactus sitting on a horizontal light brown stone (tetl) with red and white stripes across its middle. Its ends are curly. The cactus has a base and two branches, each one with a flowering fruit (nochtli, which can also refer to this type of cactus itself) at the top.

Description, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Added Analysis:

Most representations of the compound glyph for the personal name Tenoch and for the city of Tenochtitlan, such as this one, do not include the eagle that appears on the glyph that is reproduced on the Mexican flag today. The eagle was present for the founding of the city, which is why it is not required when simply speaking of the great altepetl and not its founding, per se. See a short Mexicolore article about this.

Added Analysis, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Gloss Image:

Gloss Diplomatic Transcription:

tenochtitlan

Gloss Normalization:

Tenochtitlan

Gloss Analysis, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Source Manuscript:

Florentine/Florentinus, Codex (FC)

Date of Manuscript:

1577

Creator's Location (and place coverage):

Mexico City

Semantic Categories:

place name

Syntax:

noun(s)

Writing Features:

compound fully logographic

Cultural Content & Iconography:

Flowers

Names (places)

Plants, Flora

Stones, Rocks, Lapidary, Masonry

Cultural Content, Credit:

Jeff Haskett-Wood

Colors:

Shapes and Perspectives:

curving, curvy, curved

Parts (compounds or simplex + notation):

Reading Order (Compounds or Simplex + Notation):

upward

Keywords:

ciudad, altepetl, capital, piedra, nopalli, cacto

Glyph or Iconographic Image:

Relevant Nahuatl Dictionary Word(s):

Tenochtitlan, capital city, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/Tenochtitlan
noch(tli), fruit of the prickly pear cactus, also the cactus itself, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nochtli

Glyph/Icon Name, Spanish Translation:

Tenochtitlan

Spanish Translation, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Image Source:

Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 9: The Merchants", fol. 38v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/9/folio/38v/images/0 Accessed 31 August 2025.

Image Source, Rights:

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.”

Historical Contextualizing Image: