chilnamacac (FCbk10f49r)

This iconographic example, featuring a chile pepper vendor (chilnamacac), 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. This example shows a female seller of chile peppers, and yet the translation by Anderson and Dibble uses the pronoun “he.” The woman sits on a large white cloth (perhaps a cuachtli) on some grass with a graduated stack of woven, lidded baskets (petlacalli) behind her and an array of chile peppers (chilli) on the cloth in front of her. One is green, two are red, and two are yellow. One of the yellow peppers has a stem with a leaf on it. The contextualizing images has a short woman standing near the cloth, facing the chilnamacac. The woman selling (with the verb being namaca, to sell) reaches back to one of the baskets with her right hand and reaches forward with her left hand to greet the potential buyer. The buyer has long hair pulled back. Since she is relatively short, perhaps she is meant to be young, given her hairstyle. The chilnamacac, in contrast, wears her hair in the traditional style of the adult or married woman, where the hair is twisted up into two points (the neaxtlahualli or axtlacuilli) above the forehead. Both women wear the handmade, white, cotton blouse or tunic (huipilli) over a long skirt of the same fabric. Both women have a flower or sun-like design on their chests. The seller’s chest patch has a design with what may be four petals and a small round center, a quincunx.