chalchihuitl (FCbk10f137r)
This iconographic example, featuring a large blue-green stone bead (chalchihuitl) on a string, is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text in the vicinity of the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. The text has the noun possessed (“nochalchiuh,” our jadeite). This example shows how a chalchihuitl is not always green; it can be blue-green. The bead is also textured. The text is referring to a culture group called “Tenime,” and the text shows a prejudice toward the people, saying they are barbarous and incapable, and yet they “know our jadeite.”
Stephanie Wood
Our Online Nahuatl Dictionary notes how a jade bead can be equated with a vagina. And one of the Nahuatl hieroglyphs in this collection shows a chalchihuitl next to a woman named Chalchiuhnene, with the -nene part of the name referring to a woman’s genitals. At the same time, there is a glyph for a man’s name, very much like the image in this iconographic example, except that the bead is a green color. In fact, Chalchiuh is more typically a man’s name than a woman’s name in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco. Necklaces often have turquoise blue or green beads, and they are usually strung on red string. The mottling in the image above recurs, too, in various forms.
Stephanie Wood
nochalchiuh
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
chalchihuites, piedras preciosas, verde, verdes, azul, azules, joya, joyas, ensartado, ensartada
chalchihui(tl), green stone, cultural jade, or jadeite https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chalchihuitl
el chalchihuite, el jade
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 137r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/137r/images/0 Accessed 2 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.”
