The tlalmanalli
The offering laid out on the ground
What it covers
What a tlalmanalli was, what was laid on it, and what the sources say about how it was arranged.
The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why
What you have read above is this project's own summary of the tlalmanalli. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.
We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.
In Spanish the entry carries:
- La palabra
- Qué es
- Cómo se compone
- Su sentido
Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.
How to cite this page
Alma Mexica, «The tlalmanalli», The documents. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/document/tlalmanalli/