Ahuehuepan (Mdz24v)
This compound glyph for the place name Ahuehuepan includes two principal visual components: the ahuehuetl) or āhuēhuētl) (a type of cypress) tree sitting atop (which could imply the -pan, or "on," locative suffix) a standing, cylindrical drum [the huehuetl) or huēhuētl). The tree has a leader and two side branches with two-tone green foliage. The bark is terracotta in color. The drum, also colored terracotta, has three horizontal lines, one at the top and two toward the bottom. It also has zig-zagging lines at the bottom reminiscent of the way the legs would have been cut.
Stephanie Wood
Drum is phonetically reinforcing the reading of this particular tree as an ahuehuetl. This is Mexico's "national tree" today. Called an "ahuehuete" in Spanish, this tree can live for centuries and become massive, as seen in the town of El Tule in the state of Oaxaca, where it dwarfs the church standing next to it. The girth of the drum in this glyph might also point to the size of the trunk of the ahuehuetl, playing an semantic role. Note how this one compares to other, thinner ones (below, right).
Stephanie Wood
ahuehuepan, puo
Ahuehuepan, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
ahuehuetes, huehuetes, drums, trees, cypresses
![](https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/Ahuehuepan24v.jpeg?itok=kRiaeIO1)
ahuehue(tl) or āhuēhuē(tl), cypress tree, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ahuehuetl
huehue(tl) or huēhuē(tl), upright drum, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huehuetl
-pan (locative suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pan
"Cypress Place" [Frances Karttunen, unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.]
"On the Cypress" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. 170)
"Lugar de los Ahuehuetes"
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 24 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 59 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).