pozonaltia (FCbk8f12r)
This iconographic example, featuring an omen whereby the lake foamed up without wind is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making potential comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The companion text provides the causative verb (pozonaltia), “to make something foam.” This example shows a frontal view of a house with an entryway where the beams are painted red. To the right of the entrance, the building has some shading, suggesting some three-dimensionality (and European artistic influence). Below this house are three horizontal, wavy, streams of water with shells and droplets or beads splashing off the currents. The water is a turquoise blue, and the shells and droplets are white. The water rises on the left and right ends, seemingly threatening the house with flooding. Lines of current suggest movement.
Stephanie Wood
The editors of the Digital Florentine Codex calls this visual detail a water glyph (machiyotl), and the iconography of water glyphs clearly fits this example. But we are including this for the verb from the companion text. Foamy water appears in this collection in the form of alpozonqui and atl pozonqui (see below). The threat of flooding and conflagration is typically captured in the couplet in teoatl in tlachinolli (or in atl, in tlachinolli). Below are two glyphs for the personal name Tlachinol, which seem to include both the water and fire elements.
Stephanie Wood
quipoçonalti
quipozonalti
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
agua, lago, espuma, inundación, verbos, caracolillos, cuentas, gotas, movimiento, corriente, tezahuitl, presagio
pozonaltia, to make something foam, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pozonaltia
hacer espuma el agua
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 8: Kings and Lords", fol. 12r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/8/folio/12r/images/3d51eedd-06... Accessed 6 August 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.”
