axoquen (FCbk11f28r)
This iconographic example, featuring a great blue heron (axoquen), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the Nahuatl text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a bird in profile, facing the viewer’s right, and standing only on its right leg. The left leg is raised as though it might be walking. The bird is largely gray and white, but it is blue from the back of its head down to near where the tail feathers begin. It has some shading that gives it a three-dimensionality, which shows European artistic influence.
Stephanie Wood
Axoquen is also the name of an agricultural tool that looks something like a shovel, but it has a handle that curves and has an animal head at the upper end. Maybe surprisingly, the animal head does not resemble a heron’s head. So, in this digital collection, at this point (October 2025), the only glyphs of axoquen are of these tools. Interestingly, all three examples are personal names of men, and they all come from the Martícula de Huexotzinco. Most men in that area were probably farmers.
Stephanie Wood
Axoquen
axoquen
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
pájaro, pájaros, ave, aves, garzas
axoquen, great blue heron, a bird, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/axoquen
la gran garza azul, o la garza morena
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol.28r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/28r/images/0 Accessed 16 October 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
