Search Issues: Update 2026-09-16 - Repairs to some of our search pages are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

matzopetztli.

Headword: 
matzopetztli.
Principal English Translation: 

bracelet or hand band (Olko); a wrist band (Sahagún)
Justyna Olko, Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office: Elite Costume and Insignia of Power in Aztec and Early Colonial Mexico (Warsaw: Polish Society for Latin American Studies and Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition, University of Warsaw, 2005), 286.

IPAspelling: 
mɑːtsopetstɬi
Alonso de Molina: 

matzopetztli. brazalete.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 54r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

matzopetztli in cuetlaxtli, vej chalchiujhtl ololiuhquj, anoço vej teuxiujtl ipac ca in jmaquechtlan qujtlalia ujtziloxitica injc tlachiuhtli injc tlapetzolli = A wrist band of cured leather, on which was a large, round, green stone or a fine turquoise which he placed on his wrist; [it was] treated with Peru balsam, so that it gleamed; (central Mexico, sixteenth century) Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 8 -- Kings and Lords, no. 14, Part IX, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1951), 27.

matzopetztli in cuetlaxtli = a wrist band of cured leather (Florentine Codex CV VIII:27)
Justyna Olko, Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office: Elite Costume and Insignia of Power in Aztec and Early Colonial Mexico (Warsaw: Polish Society for Latin American Studies and Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition, University of Warsaw, 2005), 286.