Metepec (Mdz10r)
This compound glyph for the place name Metepec has two elements, a colorful maguey plant (metl) atop a hill or mountain (tepetl). The maguey is red and turquoise, and it has visible red roots. The mountain has the usual two-tone green bell shape, with red and yellow horizontal stripes toward the bottom. The locative suffix (-c) (as given in the gloss) is not shown visually, but it combines with -tepe- to form -tepec, a visual locative suffix meaning "on the hill" or "on the mountain."
Stephanie Wood
Many century plants have a blue-green color, which may explain the use of turquoise, aside from the fact that these plants were precious for the liquor that they produced. The red coloring of the maguey spines is reminiscent of the coloring of the huitztli spines. What is more, maguey spines were called by the term huitztli, and they were bloodied in auto-sacrificial rituals, suggesting that the red coloring recalls that sacrificial blood. See our Online Nahuatl Dictionary entry for huitztli for references to maguey spines.
Stephanie Wood
metepec. puo
Metepec, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
maguey, agaves, pulque, sacrificial spines, spikes, thorns, mountains, hills, magueyes, espigas, espinas, montañas, colinas, cerros, sacrificios
me(tl), century plant of the agave family (maguey in Spanish), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/metl
tepe(tl), hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepetl
-tepec, on the hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepec
-c (locative suffix, short for -co), in or at, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/c-7
"On the Hill of the Maguey" (apparently agreeing with Berdan and Anawalt) [Frances Karttunen, unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.]
"On the Hill of the Maguey" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. )
Codex Mendoza, folio 10 recto, 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).
