Aztec Calendar

The Aztec calendar is perhaps the best known Mesoamerican calendar today due to the famous Aztec monument in Mexico, the Piedra del Sol which means the Stone of the Sun. The text under Aztec calendar offers a new solution to it, including its starting point (October 23, 4004 BCE).

The Aztec calendar

This below was taken from Z.A. Simon (1984: 9-31) by permission, in a condensed form. Some of it is disputed by mainstream scholars of ancient Mesoamerica.

1) Proof of the nonexistence of intercalary days in the Aztec calendar, verifying Professor Michael Coe's theory.

2) Establishment of an exact starting date of the calendar (day, month, and year), which was unknown until 1984.

3) Solution of the contradictory interpretations of the ancient chroniclers: Sahagún and Diego Durán.

4) Mathematical proven evidence of the pre-Columbian contacts between the Mesoamerican and some West-European cultures.

Most of our largest libraries have a few dozen books on the history of Mexico, but these books usually interpret the Aztec calendar very briefly. Besides this, they often emphasize only those scientific achievements that are important for their authors. The wide range of different opinions can be illustrated by one example. A well-known expert on Mexican culture remembers Antonio de León y Gama (1736-1802), who has been called the first Mexican archaeologist. He states that the most important of León y Gama's books on archaeology is the "Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos piedras." The sculptures of the title are two famous monoliths. Bernal adds that one of them is the Stone of the Sun, and falls into the error of attributing to the stone a calendrical significance, though he never claims that it was used as a calendar. In this situation, despite the correct but brief information of the encyclopeadias, the reader might get easily confused.

In addition to this, some sources introduced certain new terms without proper consistency. Other denominations were superseded, including a few calendrical miscalculations of amateur writers. Due to the apparent lack of coherence, the new results of some interesting papers have been neglected or ignored by the editors of many popular books. Therefore, a detailed description of the Mexican (Aztec) calendar is necessary for a complete understanding of the question. Therefore we will give that description before examining what experts have said about the problems. It will be concluded with the author's solution and its implications.

It is well-known that the Mayas and Aztecs had a highly developed calendar system. The two basic time cycles that governed Mesoamerican life were the solar calendar and the ritual calendar. In other words, the Mexican calendar is twofold, and comprises a ritual calendar, with a round of 260 days, which was employed in divination and in fixing "movable feasts"; and a solar year, with a round of 365 days, according to which the seasonal feasts were held (Muser, 1978:17 and Joyce, 1970:59).

The solar calendar of 365 days, called the Vague Year (or Civil Year), was composed of 18 months of 20 days each, with a period of 5 days added at the end. The 360-day period was called "xíhuitl" by Aztecs, and "haab" or "tun" by the Maya. The final unlucky days were called "Nemontemi" in Nahuath, and "Uayeb" in Mayan.

Each month had its own special name, and the days were numbered from zero to nineteen. The days of the last month, Uayeb, were numbered from zero to four. In this calendar the Maya counted the days starting from zero rather than from one (Ivanoff, 1971: 87).

This solar calendar was inseparable from the Sacred Round, or Sacred Almanac. The priests used this ritual calendar of 260 days, called [Tonalpohualli]]by the Aztecs and tzolkin by the Maya, primarily for divinatory purposes. The concurrent permutation of the solar and ritual calendars produced the Calendar Round. An exclusively lowland Classic Maya calendar achievement was the Long Count, which permitted an infinite computation of time, backward or forward, from an established starting point (Muser, 1978: 17). By the passing centuries, this simplified system may have became dominant, but we want to know its original form.

As we have already mentioned, in both solar and ritual calendars, time elapsed in parallel fashion, simultaneously and continuously. Peter Tompkins (1976: 290) states that each day of the tzolkin was governed by a deity who was thought to influence that day for good or evil, each separate day being regarded by the Maya as an individual god, whose glyph was a stylized portrait of his attributes. The numbers 1 to 13 were also personized as the heads of the gods they represented.

The use of this 260-day calendar was in no way arbitrary. The Mesoamericans possessed the correct knowledge that 260 x 18 was the same as 360 x 13, that 260 x 7 was the same as 364 x 5, that 260 x 73 was the same as 365 x 52, and that 260 x 1461 (like the Egyptian Sothic cycle!) was the same as 365.25 x 1040. Tompkins adds that to these calendars, which all fell into the 260-day pattern, were added more refinements, in order to calculate the synodic returns of the moon and the planets.

In Mesoamerica the planet Venus looms in the dawn sky with extraordinary brilliance. Both the Maya and