Tezcacoac (Mdz20v)

Tezcacoac (Mdz20v)
Compound Glyph

Glyph or Iconographic Image Description: 

This compound glyph for the place name Tezcacoac (perhaps "At the Mirror-Serpent") includes a building or house (calli), which does not play a phonetic role here, but may be a semantic locative. The glyph also has a purplish-gray, scaly serpent (coatl) with a white belly. The serpent, with its red and yellow, bifurcated tongue, is emerging from the building, in the direction of the viewer's right. On the serpent is a mirror (tezcatl), a circle of red with a black center and four evenly-spaced small red circles around the circumference.

Description, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Added Analysis: 

The locative suffix -c is not shown visually, but the house, which is visual but silent, serves something like a locative and therefore probably what Gordon Whittaker would call a "semantic complement."

The association between mirrors and serpents calls to fore the possibility of a supernatural reading. The nahualtezcatl, which was a mirror for divining, may tie in with this.

Added Analysis, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Gloss Image: 
Gloss Diplomatic Transcription: 

tezcacoac. puo

Gloss Normalization: 

Tezcacoac, pueblo

Gloss Analysis, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Source Manuscript: 
Date of Manuscript: 

c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest

Creator's Location (and place coverage): 

Mexico City

Semantic Categories: 
Writing Features: 
Cultural Content, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Shapes and Perspectives: 
Parts (compounds or simplex + notation): 
Reading Order (Compounds or Simplex + Notation): 
Keywords: 

snakes, serpents, mirrors, buildings, serpientes, espejos, cohuatl

Glyph or Iconographic Image: 
Relevant Nahuatl Dictionary Word(s): 
Image Source: 

Codex Mendoza, folio 20 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 51 of 188.

Image Source, Rights: 

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).