Coatl (BMapI49)
This painted black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Coatl (“Snake” or “Serpent”) is attested here as a man’s name. It shows a backwards S-shaped serpent in profile, facing left toward the head of the man whose name this is. The serpent as a protruding bifurcated tongue. Its belly may have spots, but its back is a shade of gray changing to white or natural.
Stephanie Wood
Coatl is a calendrical day name in the 260-day religious divinatory calendar. The posture of this serpent suggests it might be about to strike. It is similar to the glyph for the name Ce Coatl in the Codex Quetzalecatzin (below). But many coatl glyphs show serpents coiled and stretched out somewhat straight but undulating.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1565
Jeff Haskett-Wood
serpientes, calendarios, tonalpohualli, nombres de días, nombres de hombres
coa(tl), snake or serpent, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/coatl
Serpiente
Stephanie Wood
Beinecke Map/Codex Reese, section 8, no. 49 in the Whittaker study (published in the Miller/Mundy book, 2012), and see the original at: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3600017
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).
