Coaixtlahuacan (Mdz43r)
This compound glyph for the place name Coaixtlahuacan (Coixtlahuaca, today) has three principal visual components, a serpent (coatl), a long rectangular plain (ixtlahuatl), and two eyes(ixtli). The serpent is very straight, facing to the viewer's right, with its bifurcated tongue protruding (reminiscent of a flame; see tletl, below). The tongue has a white band around it just below the bifurcation, and below that, the tongue appears to be the same yellow as the snake's belly. The snake's back is a brown color. The two eyes are the standard concentric half-circles drawn in black and largely white, except for the eyelid, which is red. Both eyes are upside-down. The plain is segmented and alternates colors--two terracotta and two purple. The land is textured with dots and u's that are tipped over and look like backward c's. The -can locative suffix is not shown visually, but it may be represented semantically by the landscape features of the compound.
Stephanie Wood
The eyes (ix-) appear here not with any human anatomical meaning, but rather, to provide a phonetic clue to the reading of ixtlahuatl and help distinguish it from agricultural parcels such as tlalli, milli, or chinamitl, which have a very similar look. The ixtlahuatl shown here, however, is a bit longer than the usual agricultural parcels, which do not appear in the Codex Mendoza hieroglyphs with more than three segments. Perhaps plains were not always farmed, but a simple rectangle without the typical texturing of land might not have led the viewer to know it was land.
Berdan and Anawalt have suggested that the eyes are intentionally upside down to call forth īxtlapal, which sounds like ixtlahuatl. But Frances Karttunen says that īxtlapal is closer to "sideways" than "reversed" or "inverted." So, she supports the idea of the eyes (ixtli) providing the phonetic start of the word ixtlahuatl. (Source: Frances Karttunen, "Critique of glyph catalogue in Berdan and Anawalt edition of Codex Mendoza," unpublished manuscript.)
Stephanie Wood
coyxtlahuacā, puo
Coaixtlahuacan, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
From the serpent to the plain is a downward reading (from the middle). But the eyes on top provide an added phonetic value that helps with the reading of the plain (which is on the bottom), so that would be upward again.
snakes, serpents, plains, eyes, serpientes, culebras, llanos, ojos, cohuatl
coa(tl), snake or serpent, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/coatl
ixtlahua(tl), plains, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ixtlahuatl
-can (locative suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/can-2
"Place of the Plain of Snakes" (Karttunen apparently agrees with this translation of the place glyph, although she differes with the interpretation of the eyes.) [Frances Karttunen, unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.]
"Place of the Plain of Snakes" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. 179)
Codex Mendoza, folio 43 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 94 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).
