teopantli (T2681:6:2r)

This simplex glyph, showing a good deal of Spanish cultural influence, can be translated as “the church of Santo Domingo,” so we have chosen to call it a teopantli (church or temple in Nahuatl). It is found on a later-sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript having to do with Cuitlahuac (or Cuitlahuacan), Chalco. It consists of a black and white image of a church within its walled, rectangular atrio, in a frontal view. The church has a Dominican crest attached to it. The church also has three levels including a bell tower with a cross on top, an arched doorway, and three windows. Some of the walls show shading, which gives it a three-dimensionality. The church and atrium have a considerable amount of symmetry.

On the pictorial manuscript where it is found, the church is situated on what may be either an island or a stylized rendition of a more traditional tepetl glyph with green and brownish shading surrounded by chinampa agricultural plots and an alphabetic gloss that says “Santo Domingo” (see the historical contextualizing image). Unfortunately, the Spanish and Nahuatl documents related to this pictorial do not indicate what the local Nahua population would have called the church a teopantli, teopancalli, iglesia, or perhaps convento, adopting loanwords). Whatever the case, the compound glyph here shows how indigenous artists were adapting glyphic communication almost sixty years after the arrival of Spaniards in Mexico.