chilnamacac (FCbk10f49r)
This iconographic example, featuring a chile pepper vendor (chilnamacac), 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. This example shows a female seller of chile peppers, and yet the translation by Anderson and Dibble uses the pronoun “he.” The woman sits on a large white cloth (perhaps a cuachtli) on some grass with a graduated stack of woven, lidded baskets (petlacalli) behind her and an array of chile peppers (chilli) on the cloth in front of her. One is green, two are red, and two are yellow. One of the yellow peppers has a stem with a leaf on it. The contextualizing images has a short woman standing near the cloth, facing the chilnamacac. The woman selling (with the verb being namaca, to sell) reaches back to one of the baskets with her right hand and reaches forward with her left hand to greet the potential buyer. The buyer has long hair pulled back. Since she is relatively short, perhaps she is meant to be young, given her hairstyle. The chilnamacac, in contrast, wears her hair in the traditional style of the adult or married woman, where the hair is twisted up into two points (the neaxtlahualli or axtlacuilli) above the forehead. Both women wear the handmade, white, cotton blouse or tunic (huipilli) over a long skirt of the same fabric. Both women have a flower or sun-like design on their chests. The seller’s chest patch has a design with what may be four petals and a small round center, a quincunx.
Stephanie Wood
The Florentine Codex describes a number of market vendors, and many have the suffix, -namacac (seller or vendor). Another one, for example, is the tlapitznamacac.
Stephanie Wood
chilnamacac
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
comida, chile, plantas, vegetales

chilnamacac, one who sells chile peppers, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chilnamacac
chil(li), chile pepper(s), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chilli
-namacaqui (pl. -namacaque), a suffix referring to an occupation, often a merchant selling something; in the Florentine Codex, often written in the singular as -namacac, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/namacaqui
la vendedora de chiles
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 49r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/49r/images/0 Accessed 10 September 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.”
