tepetl (Mdz51r)
This element for hill or mountain (tepetl) has been carved from the compound place name Itztepec. It is a standard two-tone green bell-shape with rocky outcroppings on the left and right slopes and horizontal red and yellow stripes at the base.
Stephanie Wood
Copious examples of this style of glyph for tepetl come from the Codex Mendoza. Other manuscripts, especially later ones, show more European influence in the way mountains and hills are painted as glyphs. They will often have one horizontal line at the base, but not always. And they begin to resemble landscape paintings of hills with contours and variable coloring. See below for a few examples.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
mountains, hills, montañas, cerros
tepe(tl), hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities/content/tepetl
la montaña, o el cerro
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 51 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 112 of 118.
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).
