teotl (Mdz10r)
This element for divine force(s) (teotl) has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Teotenanco. The missing bits on the bottom of this glyph were where the ramparts of the tenamitl obscured part of the divine force glyph. It should be a full half circle (a full circle would make it tonatiuh), with the yellow, white, green, and red segments and texturing fleshed out. Two white concentric circles appear on the outer perimeter of the half circle, along the top. A shape reminiscent of a capital A is found near the top and at the center of the half circle.
Stephanie Wood
See other examples of teotl (below) for the full, more complex design. And, see our record for tonatiuh (sun, day) in order to compare this half disk with a full disk. The half disk is used regularly in the glyphs of the Codex Mendoza to represent the phonetic sound "teo" and a meaning of divine force(s), sun, and calendrics. Magnus Pharao Hansen and Christophe Helmke have pointed out that it is usually the upper half of the sun sign that is used for teo-, as we see here. For further discussion of teotl and tonatiuh, see the work of Hansen and Helmke in Contributions to New World Archaeology, v. 13 (Kraków, 2019).
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
divinidades, soles
teo(tl), divine force(s), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teotl
Codex Mendoza, folio 10 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 30 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
