Stone Of Five Suns: Aztec Calendar

Carrasco, David and Scot Sessions. Daily Life of the Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998.

At the top of these temples is where the most important ceremonies and sacrifices took place. In Fiero’s text they were described as being like the Mesopotamian ziggurat. “The Maya temple was a terraced pyramid with a staircase ascending to a platform capped by a multiroomed superstructure. A shrine and sanctuary, it also served as a burial place for priests or rulers.” ( Fiero 461) Many of their temples were built with astronomy in mind, and certain ones were aligned to the movements of Venus, the sun and the moon.

“In the Western Hemisphere, no early culture was more remarkable than the Mayans” (Background Essay). The Mayans were an adept civilization and accomplished many exceptional things during their time. Their deeds include things such as a number system, immense cities, and a vast trade network but there is no Mayan achievement more remarkable than their calendars. The Mayans created three calendars: a sacred calendar called tzolkin, a solar calendar called haab, and a long cycle calendar.

Celestial bodies - the sun, moon, planets, and stars - have provided us a reference for measuring the passage of time throughout human existence. Ancient civilizations like: China, India, Babylon, and Greece relied upon the apparent motion of these bodies through the sky to record and determine seasons, months, and years. We know little about the details of timekeeping in prehistoric eras. However, records and artifacts usually uncover that in every culture, people were preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time. Stonehenge, built over 4000 years ago in England has no written records, but its alignments show its purposes apparently included the determination of seasonal or celestial events, such as lunar

In addition to sacrifices, religion even influenced the indigeneous peoples' geographic location. Most of us are familiar with the image that is on the Mexican flag; it is an eagle standing on a cactus, eating a snake. Huitzilopotchli, who was the leader of his people was told to leave Aztlan and travel south until he found a symbol to settle down. As he was traveling, he found an eagle on a cactus eating a snake and decided that that was the sign he was looking for; so he settled down. That now-famous image became the central symbol on the Mexican flag. This was symbolic to them because the eagle represented the sky or heaven, the cactus represented the underworld, and the snake represented the ground. In addition, the bird eating the snake on the cactus also represented duality, the coexistence of natural elements, as it fused together the bird which represented the sky, and the snake which represented the ground. Duality was important because it represented the stability and equality of everything(Covarrubias 2012). The stone of the fifth sun, also known as the “Aztec Calendar”, is a widely known symbol. However, what is not widely known is that the stone of the fifth sun is actually a religious reminder created by the Mechica/Aztecs. The four squares represent earth, fire, wind and water; and also represent the four previous suns. The two faces in the stone of the fifth sun appear

In the Aztec religion there was not only god, there were many sun-gods over many ages. In the Aztec religion there were five ages, or five suns. Each of these sages had a different Aztec sun god and each age ended in disaster. Tezcatlipoca (smoking mirror) was the first god to be a sun. Tezcatlipoca was the god of the night and was an enemy of Quetzalcoatl which is another god (Ancient Aztec Religion). After Tezcatlipoca was knocked by Quetzalcoatl from his exalted position, in revenge Tezcatlipoca took the form of a jaguar and destroyed the world (Aztec-History). Aztecs believe that the world was created and then destroyed with wind, and then two floods (Ancient Aztec Religion). Quetzalcoatl (feathered serpent) became the next sun, but the rivalry continued, and the paw of the jaguar knocked him from the sky. The reign of the second sun god came to an end. A strong wind arose and there was great destruction on the earth. The gods next chose Tlaloc (god of rain) to be the sun. Quetzalcoatl wasn't happy and made the fire rain down, causing destruction on the earth and the end of the age. The next god of the Aztec sun goddess was Tlaloc's sister named Chalchiuhtlicue (lady of the jade skirts). Chalchiuhtlicue was chosen by Quetzacoatl to rule the sky. Chalchiuhtlicue was the goddess of water, lakes and streams. Once again the fighting of the gods caused the destruction of the world, which was again destroyed by floods. No other god wanted the job

The Five suns is creation story of the Aztec based on the mythological account of space, time, universe, people, animals and the world they lived in, as they understood it. The myth explains life’s unknowable obscurities to the Mesoamerica Mexica and Azteca people and it deeply rooted in their culture. Per the Archaeologist Nicoletta Maestri, “they believed their world had been created and destroyed four times before, and the current age, the fifth sun, would also end in violence at the end of the calendric cycle.” The mythologies claims that human have the responsibility of making sense of their surrounding as well as live by the god’s rule who have made human existence possible by sacrificing their blood and bones. The story begins with the primary maternities couples named Tonacacihuatl and Tonacateuctli known as Ometeotl or the gods of duality. They created the nine level of the universe and instructed their four

The first chapter, The Birth of Philosophy among the Nahuas, describes the beginning of Aztec thought outside of what was the basic ideals and morals of this civilization. Within the first paragraph the author references the work of Alfonso Caso,stating that he “has recreated the essence of the Aztec concept of the universe, demonstrating that the various cosmic beliefs of the Nahuas revolved around the great solar myth which enthroned the Aztecs specifically as “the people of the sun.” Meaning he was able to explain the Aztec mythology and its connection to

They also engaged in ritual combat, known as flowery wars, to obtain further sacrificial victims. The war god’s taste for blood was not easily quenched. In the Aztec year Ten Rabbit (1502), at the coronation of Motecuhzoma II (the Spaniards could not pronounce his name correctly, so they called him Montezuma), thousands of people were sacrificed by having their still-beating hearts torn from their bodies. The Aztecs believed that they lived in the age of the Fifth Sun. Four times previously, they wrote, the earth and all the people who lived on it had been destroyed. They predicted that their own world would end in earthquakes and hunger. In the Aztec year Thirteen Flint, volcanoes erupted, sickness and hunger spread, wild beasts attacked children, and an eclipse of the sun darkened the sky. In time, the Aztecs learned that Thirteen Flint was called, by Europeans, 1492.

The Aztecs had many beliefs that were based on the end of the world and nature. The Aztec religion focused on keeping a balance in nature. They believed that one mistake could lead to a natural disaster or could cause the sun to stop rotating. Among the many hundreds of gods that the Aztecs adored, there was a particularly interesting god that stood out from the rest. This god was Quetzalcoatl, otherwise knows as the “Feathered Serpent”. According to legend Quetzalcoatl created all humans with his own blood. The Aztecs believed that they needed to repay Quetzalcoatl and all the gods for their sacrifice by performing rituals. In

Most agree though, that it offers a graphic representation of the Mexica cosmos’ (Palfrey). In The Aztecs, Smith sums up what is to be believed the thought of the Aztecs when they carved the calendar stone “The Aztec calendar stone conveyed the message that the Aztec empire covered the whole earth (territory in all four directions), and that it was founded upon the sacred principles of time, directionality, divine warfare, and the sanction of the gods” (Smith 270). Keeping the Aztec calendar is proof of ancient cultures mathematical and scientific achievements without the aid of modern technology. The study of the sun stone could lead to further advances in mathematics and acts as a road map to our celestial bodies from that era of our history.

Some of the many ingenious ideas used by the Aztecs were the calendar stone and the chimpanas. In Chimpana’s Agriculture, the author states,”...an ingenious system for irrigating agriculture called chimpanas. These floating islands approximately seventeen feet across and one hundred to three hundred thirty feet wide that rested in reed framed that were anchored to the

The selfless act the gods committed led to one of the major reasons for human sacrifices which was that since the gods gave up their own life for the creation of the new world, that the Aztecs had to somehow respect and honor their action. They did this by creating an eighteen month calendar, which dedicated each month to a certain god. The Aztecs used scared and solar calendars to tell time and when all the possible combinations had been used, usually every fifty-two years, the Aztecs would go through a twelve-day period before the cycle started again (Benson 506).

Notice the original settings for this tool were much faster than the settings shown above. While the original settings may be acceptable for lower detail jobs I found they produced somewhat sloppy results creating the finer details of this Aztec calendar mainly due to gantry shake during higher speed acceleration or deceleration. Also softwoods such as yellow pine are notorious for producing "fuzziness" when being routed, and these settings seemed to reduce this "fuzz" a great

When most people think of the Mayans, they think end of the world prediction in 2012. Everyone knows the movie 2012 which portrayed the end of the world predicted by the Mayan calendar. What many do not know is that the Mayans developed three separate calendars; the Long Count, the Tzolk’in, and the Haab, which were represented by glyphs or pictures that were used in their daily lives in many different ways. The Mayans kept time in a very different way than we do today. The Mayans may not have invented the calendar, but they certainly developed it further, and still use their version today.