cuachtli (FCbk10f45r)
This iconographic example, featuring a piece of fabric or a large cloth or mantle (cuachtli) often collected in tribute or used for purchases, 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 on the same page as the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a black-line horizontal rectangle that has been left white. The contextualizing image also shows another large cotton cloth that is folded over and has shading for three-dimensionality (a sign of European artistic influences). In the place in the text where we have extracted the term the translation refers to “large cotton capes of little value.”
Stephanie Wood
Cuachtli glyphs can be blank rectangles, or they can have a mesh pattern on them. One interesting example is a canopy in gray, white, and red. The term for the canopy is partly a loanword from Spanish (paño), but otherwise includes two Nahuatl words (cuachtli, cloth, and calli, structure).
Stephanie Wood
quachnamacac
cuachamacac
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
tela, textiles, tributos
cuachi(tli), piece of cloth or mantle, often a tribute item, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuachtli
-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
una tela grande
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 45r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/45r/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.”
