30 May 2025 / 10 House
Article suitable for older students
Find out moreWhat do we know about Teotitlan?
The Aztec toponym for Teotlilan, Codex Mendoza
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - Thomas: Do we know *anything* about the (mazatec?) enclave of Teotitlan ? I can’t find anything about it online... Thank you for your amazing website :) (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
Thanks for your kind words and intriguing question. We thought it would be straightforward to answer (we’d heard of Teotitlan before) but far from it...! You’re right, there’s next to no information out there, either online or in historical sources, on this place - or ‘places’...?! It’s most confusing.
The first obvious place to look, we think, would be the Codex Mendoza, but the Codex lists Teotitlan, Teotitlan del Camino, Teotitlan del Valle and Teotlilan! So we consulted the excellent Nombres Geográficos de México: only Teotitlan is listed, and the location is given as ‘towns in the states of Mexico and Oaxaca’ but, to our surprise, the toponym (from the Mendoza) shown - incorrectly - is that of Teotlilan! We show it here (above). Whereas Teotitlan means ‘Near the sacred standard’, Teotlilan means ‘Place of the sacred (black) ink’ in Nahuatl. Teotlilan - also found as Teotlillan - is actually Teotitlan del Valle, a small village and municipality located in the Tlacolula District in the east of the Valles Centrales region, 31 km SE from the city of Oaxaca in the foothills of the Sierra Juárez mountains.
What’s more, Teotitlan is the same place as Teotitlan del Camino - only it was renamed Teotitlan de Flores Magón in 1977! It’s a town and municipality in the Cañada region of Oaxaca, over 100 miles north of Oaxaca City. It was much more strategically placed historically...
Before the Spanish invasion Teotitlan (del Camino) lay within the tributary province of Tochtepec, probably conquered by Moctezuma I. Tochtepec was situated ‘at a convenient transportation nexus linking routes to Huaxacac (Oaxaca), Teotitlan and Tehuacan (and thence to the Valley of Mexico) and along the coast’ (Berdan & Rieff Anawalt 1997: 113). Gordon Brotherston (1995) suggests that Teotitlan was one of twenty towns in the Upper Papaloapan river region on the edge of the lowlands that stretch to the coast of Veracruz and Tabasco, identified with Tula and the Toltec nation.
The Tochtepec province was populated by speakers of Chinantec and Mazatec languages - though Nahuatl was the lingua franca. An area rich in natural resources, it provided an extensive array of commodities to Tenochtitlan every year (see picture, left).
Susan Toby Evans sheds more light on the importance of Teotitlan’s location:-
’Nahuatl expansion into the Tehuacán Valley transformed it from a backwater of small settlements to a region with three substantial towns - Tehuacán Viejo, Cozcatlan, and Teotitlan - that were part of the Toltecs-Chichimeca “alliance corridor” linking Tlaxcalan sites in the north with Huexotzingo and Cholula before extending southeast to reach the Tehuacán Valley and continuing over Coixtlahuaca, at the edge of the Mixteca Alta... From Coixtlahuaca, Mixtec-Zapotec alliances and trading partnerships extended west and south down into the Valley of Oaxaca’ (2004: 421-422).
Sources:-
• The Codex Mendoza by Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, vol. II (Description, Bibliography, Index), University of California Press, Oxford, 1992
• The Essential Codex Mendoza by Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, University of California Press, 1997
• Nombres Geográficos de México by César Macazaga Ordoño, Edit. Innovación SA, Mexico DF 1979
• Painted Books of Mexico by Gordon Brotherston, British Museum Press, 1995
• Ancient Mexico & Central America: Archaeology and Culture History by Susan Toby Evans, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 2004.
Picture sources:-
• Codex images scanned from the James Cooper Clark 1938 London facsimile edition of the Codex Mendoza
• Map scanned from Susan Toby Evans (op cit).
Comments (1)
Thomas
21st Mar 2023
Thank you for answering my question so quickly and again thank you for your amazing website !
I did not know about the trade routes, finally I learn something about that elusive place !
I also had some trouble figuring where Teotitlan was, there is so little to work with. Seems like a good chunk of their territory is under the lake Miguel Aleman now, I wonder if there is still stuff to discover under it’s surface... Who knows :)
Thank you for your time !!
Mexicolore
Thanks for writing in to us. We enjoyed working on this question!
The Aztec toponym for Teotlilan, Codex Mendoza
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