huictli (FCbk10f28v)
This iconographic example, featuring a man using an agricultural tool (huictli), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss or text sample. This example shows a man next to a tall maize plant, using his huictli to dig into the soil. This huictli has a notably large flat, triangular blade. The point of the triangle is down, and the flat part of the triangle is where the man puts his foot, applying pressure to help the point go into the soil. The man working the land wears a loincloth and a cloak, typical of the rural farmer. His clothing shows shading for three-dimensionality, revealing European artistic influences. This is true, too, of the other men in the contextualizing image. That context gives another view of the huictli with the large triangular blade. Whether this suggests a regional variation on the tool or the effect of European influence are questions to pursue further.
Stephanie Wood
See some other examples of this tool below. Often the “flat blade” is rather small and narrow. Just one stands out as something like this one in the group below. One can also do a Quick Search for the term huictli and find many more examples. A number of glyphs for the personal name Axoquen also feature an agricultural tool with a large blade and a handle with a snake (coatl) design, perhaps resulting in the Spanish name coa for the huictli. Not counting the serpent head, the axoquen farming tool looks much like a European shovel. A Quick Search for axoquen will turn up additional examples to those provided below.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
herramienta, agricultura, labrar la tierra, milpa, maíz, quilchiuhqui, tlalchihua

huic(tli), a digging stick, agricultural tool, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/huictli
la coa
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 28v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/28v/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.”
