neaxtlahualli (FCbk6F70r)
This iconographic example, featuring the Nahua woman’s hairstyle (neaxtlahualli or axtlacuilli) is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making potential comparisons with related hieroglyphs or their iconography. 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 three women in a ¾ view, although their heads are in profile, facing left. All three have the classic coiffure. This consisted of two portions of long hair divided in the middle and turned at the nape of the neck. They were bent upward on either side of the face, forming two horn-like tufts (as explained by Justyna Olko and quoted in our Online Nahuatl Dictionary). The detail here is helpful for seeing how the two portions of hair were bound at about the ear and again above the forehead.
Stephanie Wood
In some views of this hairstyle, only one binding–at the level of the ear–is visible. In other examples, it appears that there may have been a tie at the back of the head, reading a bulbous shape at the nape of the neck before the hair was turned upward. See, for example, the neaxtlahualli from the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, f. 513r, which also shows how the tie near the ear (at least in this one case) is red.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cabello, pelo, peinado, peinadas, mujeres
neaxtlahual(li), a hairstyle for Nahua women; long hair bound and turned up into two points, one on either side of the forehead, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/neaxtlahualli
axtlacuil(li), another name for the same hairstyle, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/axtlacuilli
peinado de mujeres
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. 70r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/6/folio/70r/images/0. Accessed 5 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.”
