Iztactlalocan (Mdz13v)
This compound glyph for the place name Iztactlalocan includes two visual elements, a hill or mountain (tepetl, visual but silent, serving as what Whittaker calls a "semantic complement") that is white (iztac), and above the hill, the head of the figure of Tlaloc, the rain deity.
Stephanie Wood
Gordon Whittaker (2021, 207) notes that this town could have two names, depending upon whether the final "l" should be double or single. "Where the White Tlaloc Is" could be one reading, and the other is "Where There is a Lot of Land."
Stephanie Wood
yztactlalocan. puo
Iztac Tlalocan, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
The reading starts with the white (at the bottom) and goes up to the figure of Tlaloc, but then it could be seen as going down again, if the tepetl is accepted as the rough equivalent of the locative (-can).
iztac, white, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/iztac
Tlaloc, rain deity or priest associated with rain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/Tlaloc
-can (locative suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/can-2
Codex Mendoza, folio 13 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 37 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).