nantli (FCbk11f212v)
This iconographic example, featuring yellow gold’s mother (coztic teocuitlatl inan), is included in this digital collection as an example of the term nantli (mother) for the purpose of showing the broad use of “mother.” The term selected for this example comes from the text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows an oval-shape with some three-dimensional hatching and shading. It is meant to convey a stone, the “mother” of yellow gold. The landscape setting and the minor three-dimensionality of the scene suggests European artistic influence. The text explains that gold resides in the earth, and when it is seen, its mother is there, too. When it rains, her “urine” stains things yellow. Gold itself came from the sun, and “sun” was “the name of a god” (folio 213v).
Stephanie Wood
This stone has hieroglyphic influences in its general oval shape and diagonal curving lines across it, but it has lost the shape of the ends, which were typically three rounded pieces. “Mother” is a term in this codex that generally refers to human and divine mothers. For example, Book 6, folio 79v, refers to the “mother of the sun.” The sun is also “thy mother, thy father” itself (folio 142v). But it can also stretch to other things, animating them and/or adding divinity. Gold already has the element “teo” from teotl (divinity, deity), so the mother of gold may have been even more divine. Two of these potato-shaped mother-gold pieces also appear on folio 213 recto, in a pot over a fire.
Stephanie Wood
inan
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
piedras amarillas, madres
nan(tli), mother, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nantli
la madre del oro
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 212v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/212v/images/0 Accessed 16 November 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.”
