The Nahuatl, or Aztec, writing system of the Central Mexican highlands, one of the few such systems that developed in the Americas in Prehispanic times, is still far less known and understood than its older Maya cousin in the jungles to the south- east. No books, and only two stone monuments, with writing survive from the Aztec period. However, after the catastrophe of the Spanish Conquest, scribes continued to employ the script for indigenous concerns and even to render Spanish words and names in indigenous documents, both historical and administrative in nature, up to the close of the 16th century, providing us with a minimal corpus of hieroglyphic signs and sequences. Potentially of great interest to students of writing is the flex- ible and playful manner in which writing interacts with, and makes use of, pictorial representations and relationships while adhering to well-established principles of logography and phonography. The presentation will explore these issues.