tamalli (FCbk9f25v)
This iconographic example, featuring a basket of tamales (tamalli), 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 keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss. This example shows an open woven basket (chiquihuitl) with five tamales brimming over the top. These objects appear rolled, which supports the DFC team’s reading of tamales. Several have a notable swirl in the middle. The contextualizing image shows how a man and a woman admonish a young man about food, and the texts refer to elders admonishing youth about living a principled life.
Stephanie Wood
Tamales were apparently stored and possibly served in baskets, as this example and a couple of others (below) demonstrate. But an individual tamale formed into a ball and wrapped with strips of maize husk is the norm for simple hieroglyphs and the elements of compounds. However, the personal name Tamal has an unusual shape here, very pointy, star-like.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
los tamales, comida, familia, admonición, padres, hijo
tamal(li), tamale, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tamalli
el tamal
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 9: The Merchants", fol. 25v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/9/folio/25v/images/0 Accessed 29 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.”
