In this paper, we provide a generalization of binary quadratic residue codes to the cases of higher power prime residues over the finite field of the same order, which we will call qth power residue codes. We find generating polynomials for such codes, define a new notion corresponding to the binary concept of an idempotent, and use this to find square root lower bound for the codeword weight of the duals of such codes, which leads to a lower bound on the weight of the codewords themselves. In addition, we construct a family of asymptotically bad qth power residue codes. / text