quilchiuhqui (FCbk10f29r)
This iconographic example, featuring a vegetable gardener (quilchiuhqui, also called a tlatocani and a tlalchiuhqui), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text on the previous page of the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se, and for various terms included here, we credit the DFC keywording team and we draw from the text. This example shows a man in profile, facing left, sitting on a small woven seat (icpalli), and wearing a loincloth (maxtlatl) and a cloak (tilmatli). A large book (amoxtli) appears open in front of him. He is pointing (mapilhuia) either at the book or at the moon (metztli) beyond the book. The point in the text is that the horticulturalist is knowledgeable about books (amoxmatini), and therefore he is one who knows how to count the days (tonalpohuani), months (metztlapohuani), and years (xippohuani). The benefit to his work appears in the form of a healthy plant behind the man. It has three large green leaves and four yellow roots. This is probably a quilitl, an edible herb, which also contributes to the term for horticulturalist, almost like a phonetic indicator for his identity.
Stephanie Wood
The book in this example appears to have lines of alphabetic writing (albeit heavily stylized) more than any hieroglyphic text, with particularly nothing like the tonalpohualli examples, below. But it is rather delightful that the horticulturalist is depicted and described as an avid reader and educated by books, especially about the seasons.
Stephanie Wood
guilchiuhgui
quilchiuhqui
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
milpa, agricultor, agrónimo, trabajador del campo, herba comestible, quelite, hortaliza

quilchiuhqui, a vegetable gardener, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/quilchiuhqui
el horticultor
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 29r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/29r/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.”
