Coyohuacan (Azca23)

This painted black-line drawing of the compound place name Coyohuacan (“Place Where People Have Coyotes”) shows the head of a coyote (coyotl) facing left. This head is painted a pinkish red. Its ears are back, its visible eye is open, and it has long whiskers. Below the left ear is a hole (coyoctli), which is a phonetic complement to the coyotl, ensuring the reading that this is a coyote and not a dog or the like. The hill or mountain (tepetl) upon which the coyotl head rests may serve here as the visual for the locative suffix (-can, where). The hill in this case overlaps with another one on the left, so the viewer cannot see the rocky outcroppings that should appear on this hill on the left side. The rocky iconography is semantic, but it also serves to provide the phonetic -te start to tepetl (from tetl).