tepetl (FCbk9f38v)
This iconographic example, featuring a mountain (tepetl), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a green and brown mountain or hill with lumps and bumps in what amounts to three levels. The darker (brown) coloring is on the left side, as though less sunshine reached that side, giving it an added three-dimensionality. While this is practically a landscape painting, some of the features of this mountain still echo hieroglyphs. What is now notably missing are the red and yellow, horizontal, labia-like features where water might emerge from the tepetl, along with the stylized rocky outcroppings of the glyphs, echoing the stone (tetl) features. Hence, this example of a tepetl helps reveal the transition from hieroglyphic painting to more all-out landscape painting, which increased with growing European artistic influences.
Stephanie Wood
In the contextualizing image, one can see that this mountain is in the background, where a long-distance merchant is passing with his cargo on his back using the tumpline. He also has a walking stick. He is on a road or trail marked by footprints. Below are examples of the classic tepetl hieroglyph as it appears in the Codex Mendoza, plus some versions of it as it was evolving toward a landscape painting.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cerros, montañas, tamemes, sendero, huellas
tepe(tl), hill or mountain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tepetl
la montaña
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 9: The Merchants", fol. 38v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/9/folio/38v/images/0 Accessed 31 August 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
