cuacuahue (FCbk12fir)
This iconographic example, featuring a black and white sketch of a steer (cuacuahue), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a front leg, head, horns, and neck of one steer. From the context, it seems that it has recently been off-loaded from a Spanish ship. The landscape setting shows European artistic influence.
Stephanie Wood
Animals that crossed the Atlantic Ocean multiplied fairly quickly over the sixteenth century, eating and trampling Indigenous cornfields, and generally causing havoc. Still they appear fairly rarely in this digital collection. Primarily, the horns of cattle appear attached to the heads of Nahua men with the personal name Cuacuauh (perhaps “Horned”).
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
novillo, vaca, buey, toro
cuacuahue, ox, steer, bull, cow, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuacuahue
el ganado mayor
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 12: Conquest of Mexico", fol. ir, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/ir/images/0 Accessed 7 February 2026.
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.”
