molcaxitl (FCbk6f192r)
This iconographic example, featuring a three-legged sauce bowl (molcaxitl) is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making potential 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. This example shows a wide flat bowl with a horizontal gray stripe across the middle. The feet of the bowl are actually shaped like the paws of an animal. Sticking up from the top rim of the bowl is the food it contains, including a bone (omitl), suggesting meat (tlacatl).
Stephanie Wood
Exploring the glyphs below, note how they simply refer to molli (sauce), not molcaxitl. But they typically do show a three-legged (or tripod) bowl. Interestingly, two of the examples below include a third-person singular possessive pronoun.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
salsa, cajete, recipiente, cuenco
molcax(itl), mortar or sauce bowl, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/molcaxitl
el molcajete
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 6: Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy", fol. 192r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/6/folio/192r/images/0 Accessed 8 July 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.”
