tianquiztli (FCbk8f50v)
This iconographic example, featuring the open-air marketplace (tianquiztli), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making potential comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text on the same page in the Digital Florentine Codex. This example shows a bird’s eye view of a circular market. It is brown (presumably a reference to the dirt floor) with two alternating footprints (referring to the movement of people through this space). The circle has a white border, perhaps a reference to a wall around the space. Double hash marks appear in the cardinal points of the circle, but at the top there are two inverted U-shapes, instead. These might be the kind of U-shapes that are given to parcels of land (tlalli).
Stephanie Wood
A Quick Search for tianquiztli will turn up more than a dozen examples of market glyphs. Most are circular, most have a border, and many have the hash marks around the perimeter, but some perimeters have even more elaborate designs, perhaps indicating stalls. Footprints are a regular (but apparently not a required) feature. As the term tianquiztli comes more into use as a translation for plaza, through European colonial influence, it can appear rectangular and crosses may appear.
Stephanie Wood
tianquiztli
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
mercados, plazas, círculos, huellas
tianquiz(tli), marketplace, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tianquiztli
el tianguis, el mercado
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. 50v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/8/folio/50v/images/0 Accessed 25 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.”
