Article suitable for Top Juniors and above

Fruit harvest?

16th Feb 2015

Aztec farmer digging for ‘rain gold’ - a rare crystal-filled meterorite

Especially since this image, from Book XI of the Florentine Codex, appears at the end of a long section on medicinal herbs, we could easily be forgiven for assuming this is a common-or-garden scene of a Mexica (Aztec) farmer harvesting a large fruit or vegetable of some kind. Far from it...! (Written by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

What he’s digging up is in fact quiauhteocuitlatl - ‘rain gold’ - a rare stony-iron meteorite known to contain stunningly beautiful black-and-yellow olivine crystals. Such precious stones were associated by the Mexica with lightning and the stones cast down by the tlaloque (rain deities). Learn more about this from our new feature in the AZTEFACTS section...

Images from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.

“Rare ‘rain-gold’” (AZTEFACTS)