Tepepollan (Mdz20r)

Tepepollan (Mdz20r)
Compound Glyph

Glyph or Iconographic Image Description: 

This is a multicolored painting of the compound glyph for the place name Tepepollan.

Description, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Added Analysis: 

The gloss provided in the codex for this compound glyph, representing the place name Tepepollan, does not help make entire sense of the visual elements. The hand ("ma" from maitl) and the house ("cal" from calli) do not appear to play a role. The "tepe" from tepetl makes sense. What follows, "pol," may mean wretched or big. Analysis has thus far preferred the latter, resulting in "By the Big Hill" (Whittaker, "The Study of North Mesoamerican Place Signs," Indiana 13, 1993, p. 37) and "Where There Are Many Big Hills" (Berdan and Anawalt, Codex Mendoza, 1992, vol. 1, p. 210). The locative suffix (-tlan) does not appear visually in this compound, but the local landscape shown in the compound may serve as a semantic locative.

Added Analysis, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Gloss Image: 
Gloss Diplomatic Transcription: 

tepepulan. puo

Gloss Normalization: 

Tepepollan, pueblo

Gloss Analysis, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Source Manuscript: 
Mendoza/Mendocino, Codex (Mdz)
Date of Manuscript: 

c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest

Creator's Location (and place coverage): 

Mexico City

Semantic Categories: 
place name
Syntax: 
locative (not visual, but represented semantically)
noun(s)
Cultural Content & Iconography: 
Anatomy, human body parts
Architecture, Construction, Buildings
Landscape Features
Names (places)
Socio-Political Units, Cities, Towns, Neighborhoods
Cultural Content, Credit: 

Stephanie Wood

Colors: 
green (dark)
green (light)
orange/terracotta
red
white/neutral
yellow or golden
Shapes and Perspectives: 
bell-shaped (upright)
facing right
frontal view
profile view
Parts (compounds or simplex + notation): 
3
Reading Order (Compounds or Simplex + Notation): 
undetermined as yet
Keywords: 

mountains, hills,hands, arms,buildings

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

tepe(tl), hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepetl
-pol-, wretched, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pol
huehuepol, a big old man (with pol being the reference to size, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huehuepol
-tlan (locative suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlan

Image Source: 

Codex Mendoza, folio 20 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 50 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).