Ayapan (MH871v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name or place of origin, Ayapan (perhaps "Thin Cotton Flag," attested here as a man’s name), shows a vertical flag (panitl or pamitl) flying toward the viewer’s right. It has a mesh pattern and a white border. It seems to be cloth, apparently an ayatl (a thin cotton cape material). At the base of the post for the flag are what may be three short streams of water (atl), which provide a phonetic indicator for the start to the name, A-.
Stephanie Wood
Ayapan was a fairly common name. Some other glyphs for this personal name appear below. It could be a place of origin. A place named Ayapan exists in the state of Tabasco, Mexico (see: Daniel Suslak, “Ayapan Echoes,” American Anthropologist, Nov. 2011), and there may well be others. If Ayapan is not literally about a cotton flag, perhaps it refers to the medicinal plant, ayapana, so this could be the root of the name, and if so, the compound would be fully phonographic.
Stephanie Wood
Juo ayapā
Juan Ayapan
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
banderas, telas, textiles, plantas, nombres de hombres

aya(tl), a thin cloak or blanket, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ayatl
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
pan(itl) or pam(itl), flag, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/panitl
Bandera de Ayate
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 871v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=815&st=image.
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).
