Tepetzinco (Azca15)

This painted black-line drawing of the place name Tepetzinco (“On the Little Hill”) shows a hill or mountain (tepetl) with rounded, curling, stone-like (tetl) protrusions on the top and on both sides at the bottom. These stone elements are both semantic and potentially phonetic indicators that tepetl starts with te-. At the bottom of the hill is a red horizontal slit where spring water has the potential to emerge. Out of the bottom of the hill appears the lower body (tzintli, although not his rear end, which is the norm) of a Nahua man. This lower body provides the phonetic indication for the locative suffix -tzinco. His two knees are bent, as though he is running. While his flesh-colored legs are in profile, his loincloth is shown in a frontal view. At the top, the loincloth has two black vertical stripes. Below these are one horizontal black stripe and one horizontal red stripe.