Tepeyahualco (CmpRG)

The simplex glyph for Tepeyahualco, the church, and the alphabetic gloss (see below) appear near one of the corners of the map and just below a drawing of four arches with a stream of blue water flowing over them (see the historical contextualizing image). This latter element is a semantic element signaling the presence of aqueduct mentioned in the Spanish-language text of the Relación. On folio 1r it is described as “unos arcos de cal y canto” (“some arches of mortar and stone”). This may be what Peter Gerhard calls “the great aqueduct which carried water from Tecaxete to Otumba” (pgs. 68-69). While both distance and direction is hard to determine exactly on the map (as Barbara E. Mundy has observed, the map “has no fixed orientation”), it does seem as if Tepeyahualco was near to this significant water source. The artist who created the map also shows a fruit and flower laden nopal cactus and a second maguey plant to the right of the town’s Catholic church, once again possible semantic elements indicating the kinds of plants that grew in the area (suggesting, too, that despite the presence of the aqueduct the place was in a fairly arid territory). Peter Gerhard tells us that the Cempoala region is “a rolling, maguey-covered country of volcanic cones rising slightly above the plain…” that in the later sixteenth-century began to sprout haciendas devoted to pulque production (pgs. 67-68). For a study of the RG (which, however, does not mention these particular figures), see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), https://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/mapping-babel-a-sixteenth-century..., the same author’s The Mapping of New Spain (1996), and Ballesteros García (2005), 50-51, figure 2. For information about the Cempoala region, see Gerhard, Historical Geography of New Spain (1972).