chien (FCbk11f252r)
This iconographic example, featuring a black and white sketch of a chia seed plant (here called “chien or chian”), 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 near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a leafy plant with visible roots and seed pods at the top of four of the five small branches. To the viewer’s right of the plant is an enlargement of a seed pod and, to the right of that, a cluster of about 18 chia seeds. Chia seeds produce an edible oil and are made into a beverage.
Stephanie Wood
This digital collection, with over 7500 records as of February 2026, has a few examples of chia seeds and seed pods. While dictionary specialists might favor the spelling of “chiyantli” (Karttunen), Alonso de Molina gives “chia” and “chian,” and “chia” entered Spanish as the preferred loanword. That said, in this collection, the glosses on the hieroglyphs favor “chian,” even as we have added the “y” to some of the metadata for the hieroglyphs. On one page, the Florentine Codex gives just “chian,” but with this example above, the text reads “chien anoço chian” (chien or chian), recognizing the existence of variant spellings.
Stephanie Wood
Chien anoço chian
chien anozo chian (or chiyan)
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
semilla, plantas, comida, grano oleaginoso
chiyan(tli), chia seeds, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chiyantli
las semillas de chía
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 252r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/252r/images/0 Accessed 16 November 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.”
