tlazotetl (FCbk11f203r)

This iconographic example, featuring a precious stone (tlazotetl), 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 near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a frontal view of a stone, drawn the same as the hieroglyph for stone, with its curling ends and curving diagonal stripes across the middle. Coming out of the top is a vapor or light smoke (shaped as volutes, which is, again, like the hieroglyphs for smoke). The text explains how wise men can spot precious stones when there is sunlight and vapor rises from them. The contextualizing image shows a man wearing a long-sleeved, Spanish-style tunic and a Nahua cloak (tilmatli or tilmahtli) over that. The inside of the cloak is shaded, giving it a three-dimensionality and showing European artistic influence. The landscape setting also shows this. The text also mentions how these precious rocks or stones come from a mother stone (“inan in tlaçotetl”), and sometimes the precious part is inside a plain stone, which can be smooth or rough. Perhaps this is a reference to a geode. But “mother” (nantli) is also used in reference to the precious greenstone, which is broken up and the pieces are refined and reshaped, grinding it with sand until it is polished (see the text on folio 204 recto).