Ixtlil (MH744v)

Ixtlil seems to mean more “Black Face” than “Black Eye,” but it could be either. This name seems to be short for Ixtlilton, “Little Black Face,” the name of a deity or divine force, also known as Tlaltecuin or Tlaltetecuini, "Earth-Stamper,” who, as we note in the Online Nahuatl Dictionary, “belonged with the Macuiltonaleque, the young solar deities who presided over flowers, feasting, singing, dancing, gaming, and painting and who bore the names of the five tonalpohualli (260-day religious divinatory calendar) days assigned to the south, with numerical coefficients of five (the number signifying ‘excess’). Their most prominent member was Macuilxochitl, ‘Five Flower.’" See: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, ed. Thelma D. Sullivan, et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 101.] One also wonders if this name could be an apocopation of the fuller name, Ixtlilxochitl, borne by rulers of Tetzcoco. After all, the flower in this compound suggests the fuller name may have been Ixtlilxochitl, being named after a famous ruler of Tetzcoco. Or perhaps the flower is just meant to help the viewer conclude that the black face indeed meant Ixtlil and not some ethnicity, or the like. Other glyphs in this collection do include an Ixtlil and an Ixtlilxochitl.