Cihuateotzin (MH686r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Cihuateotzin (“Female Deity” or "Female Divinity” in the reverential form)" is attested here as a man’s name). The glyph shows two vertical stripes painted onto the cheek of the tribute payer himself. This is either the glyph for the phonetic syllable “hua” of huahuana (to make stripes), or it has morphed into the glyph for “cihua.”
Stephanie Wood
See examples of the glyph for Cihuateotl (without the reverential suffix) below. One is the head of a woman in a profile view with the stripes on her cheek, reiterating “woman.” The other is the head of a nenetl (deity or doll, both often female) in a frontal view, and no cheek stripes.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cihua(tl), woman, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cihuatl
teo(tl), a divine or sacred force, divinity, deity, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teotl
-tzin (reverential suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzin
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 686r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=452&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).