huehuetl (FCbk4f70r)
This iconographic example of a standing wooden drum called the huehuetl comes from the Florentine Codex. It is not glossed or described in the nearby text, so we are not calling it a glyph. It is included in this digital collection so that its iconography might be compared with glyphs. This huehuetl is a vertical wooden drum that is terracotta colored. It has a yellowish (perhaps jaguar) skin stretched over the top, and two wooden legs are visible with zigzag cuts in the front. In this scene a man is standing, wearing a white, red-bordered cape tied over the chest, and he plays the drum with his hands. Showing European artistic influences, the drum sits on a grassy ground, and the man’s cape shows some shading for three-dimensionality.
Stephanie Wood
The contextualizing image shows how this drum was played at the same time as the teponaztli.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
percussion, drums, atabales, atabal, timbal, timbales, tambor, huehuetes, tambores, vertical, percusión, piel de jaguar
huehue(tl), standing drum, upright drum, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huehuetl
el huehuete
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 4: The Soothsayers", fol. 70r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/4/folio/70r?spTexts=&nhTexts= Accessed 26 June 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.”
