Axayacatl
Axayacatl was the sixth tlatoani of the altepetl of Tenochtitlan and ruler of the Aztec Triple Alliance. Axayacatl was her cousin, prince Tezozomoc, he was a grandson of Itzcoatl. He was a descendant of the king Cuauhtototzin, he was a successor of Moctezuma and his brothers were Emperors Tizoc and Ahuitzotl and his sister was the Queen Chalchiuhnenetzin. He was father of Emperors Moctezuma II and Cuitláhuac. During his youth, his military prowess gained him the favor influential figures such as Nezahualcoyotl and Tlacaelel I, thus, upon the death of Moctezuma I in 1469, he was chosen to ascend to the throne, much to the displeasure of his two older brothers and Ahuitzotl, it is important that the Great Sun Stone known as the Aztec Calendar, was carved under his leadership. In the year 1475 there was a major earthquake. Using as a pretext the insulting behavior of a few Tlatelolcan citizens, Axayacatl invaded his neighbor, killed its ruler and replaced him with a military governor; the Tlatelolcans lost any voice in forming Aztec policy.
Axayacatl dedicated his twelve-year reign to consolidating his militaristic repute: he led successful campaigns against the neighboring altepetl of Tlatelolco in 1473 and the Matlatzinca of the Toluca Valley in 1474, but was defeated by the Tarascans of Michoacán in 1476. Despite some subsequent minor triumphs, Axayacatl's defeat at the hands of the Tarascans irreversibly marred his image, as it constituted the only major defeat suffered by the Aztecs up to that moment. In spite of his young age, he fell gravely ill in 1480, passing away a mere year in 1481, whereupon he was succeeded by his brother Tizoc; the Obsidian and Blood series by Aliette de Bodard are set in the last year of the reign of Axayacatl and the first years of the reign of Tizoc, with their youngest brother Ahuitzotl appearing as a primary character. List of Tenochtitlan rulers Davies, Nigel; the Aztecs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Davies, Nigel; the Aztec Empire: The Toltec Resurgence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hassig, Ross. Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-2121-1. Townsend, Richard F.. The Aztecs. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28132-7. Weaver, Muriel Porter; the Aztecs and Their Predecessors: Archaeology of Mesoamerica. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-01-263999-0. Texts on Wikisource: "Axayacatl". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. "Axayacatl". New International Encyclopedia. 1905. "Axayacatl". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900. "Axayacatl". The American Cyclopædia. 1879
Cuauhtémoc
Cuauhtémoc was the Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan from 1520 to 1521, making him the last Aztec Emperor. The name Cuauhtemōc means "one who has descended like an eagle", is rendered in English as "Descending Eagle", as in the moment when an eagle folds its wings and plummets down to strike its prey; this is a name that implies determination. Cuauhtémoc took power in 1520 as successor of Cuitláhuac and was a cousin of the late emperor Moctezuma II, his young wife, known as Isabel Moctezuma, was one of Moctezuma's daughters. He ascended to the throne when he was around 25 years old, while Tenochtitlan was being besieged by the Spanish and devastated by an epidemic of smallpox brought to the New World by the invaders. After the killings in the Great Temple, there were few Aztec captains available to take the position. Cuauhtemoc's date of birth is unknown, as he does not enter the historical record until he became emperor, he was the eldest legitimate son of Emperor Ahuitzotl and may well have attended the last New Fire ceremony, marking the beginning of a new 52-year cycle in the Aztec calendar.
Like the rest of Cuauhtemoc's early biography, inferred from knowledge of his age, the events and life path of someone of his rank. Following education in the calmecac, the school for elite boys, his military service, he was named ruler of Tlatelolco, with the title cuauhtlatoani in 1515. To have reached this position of rulership, Cuauhtemoc had to be a male of high birth and a warrior who had captured enemies for sacrifice; when Cuauhtemoc was elected tlatoani in 1520, Tenochtitlan had been rocked by the invasion of the Spanish and their indigenous allies, the death of Moctezuma II, the death of Moctezuma's brother Cuitlahuac, who succeeded him as ruler, but died of smallpox shortly afterwards. In keeping with traditional practice, the most able candidate among the high noblemen was chosen by vote of the highest noblemen, Cuauhtemoc assumed the rulership. Although under Cuitlahuac Tenochtitlan began mounting a defense against the invaders, it was isolated militarily and faced the crisis alone, as the numbers of Spanish allies increased with the desertion of many polities under its control.
Cuauhtémoc called for reinforcements from the countryside to aid the defense of Tenochtitlán, after eighty days of warfare against the Spanish. Of all the Nahuas, only Tlatelolcas remained loyal, the surviving Tenochcas looked for refuge in Tlatelolco, where women took part in the battle. Cuauhtémoc was captured on August 13, 1521, while fleeing Tenochtitlán by crossing Lake Texcoco with his wife and friends, he surrendered to Hernán Cortés along with the surviving pipiltin and, according to Spanish sources, he asked Cortés to take his knife and "strike me dead immediately". According to the same Spanish accounts, Cortés treated his foe magnanimously. "You have defended your capital like a brave warrior," he declared. "A Spaniard knows how to respect valor in an enemy."At Cuauhtémoc's request, Cortés allowed the defeated Mexica to depart the city unmolested. Subsequently, when the booty found did not measure up to the Spaniards' expectations, Cuauhtémoc was subjected to "torture by fire", whereby the soles of his bare feet were broiled over red-hot coals, in an unsuccessful attempt to discover its whereabouts.
On the statue to Cuauhtemoc, on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, there is a bas relief showing the Spaniards' torture of the emperor. Some gold was recovered but far less than Cortés and his men expected. Cuauhtémoc continued to hold his position under the Spanish, keeping the title of tlatoani, but he was no longer the sovereign ruler, he ordered the construction of a renaissance-style two-storied stone palace in Tlatelolco, in which he settled after the destruction of Mexico City. In 1525, Cortés took Cuauhtémoc and several other indigenous nobles on his expedition to Honduras, as he feared that Cuauhtémoc could have led an insurrection in his absence. While the expedition was stopped in the Chontal Maya capital of Itzamkanac, known as Acalan in Nahuatl, Cortés had Cuauhtémoc executed for conspiring to kill him and the other Spaniards. There are a number of discrepancies in the various accounts of the event. According to Cortés himself, on 27 February 1525, he learned from a citizen of Tenochtitlan, that Cuauhtémoc and Tetlepanquetzal, the ruler of Tlacopan, were plotting his death.
Cortés interrogated them until each confessed and had Cuauhtémoc and another lord, hanged. Cortés wrote that the other lords would be too frightened to plot against him again, as they believed he had uncovered the plan through magic powers. Cortés's account is supported by the historian Francisco López de Gómara. According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador serving under Cortés who recorded his experiences in his book The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the supposed plot was revealed by two men, named Tapia and Juan Velásquez. Díaz portrays the executions as unjust and based on no evidence, he admits to having liked Cuauhtémoc personally, he records Cuauhtémoc giving the following speech to Cortés through his interpreter Malinche: Oh Malinzin! Now I understand your false promises and the kind of death you have had in store for me. For you are killing me unjustly. May God demand justice from you, as it was taken from me when I entrusted
Ethnic groups in Europe
The indigenous peoples of Europe are the focus of European ethnology, the field of anthropology related to the various indigenous groups that reside in the nations of Europe. According to German monograph Minderheitenrechte in Europa co-edited by Pan and Pfeil there are 87 distinct peoples of Europe, of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities; the total number of national or linguistic minority populations in Europe is estimated at 105 million people, or 14% of 770 million Europeans. There are no universally accepted and precise definitions of the terms "ethnic group" and "nationality". In the context of European ethnography in particular, the terms ethnic group, people and ethno-linguistic group, are used as synonymous, although preference may vary in usage with respect to the situation specific to the individual countries of Europe. There are eight European ethno-linguistic groups with more than 30 million members residing in Europe.
These eight groups between themselves account for some 465 million or about 65% of European population: Russians, French, Italians, Spaniards, Poles. Smaller ethno-linguistic groups with more than 10 million people residing in Europe include: Romanians, Turks, Swedes, Czechs, Serbs. About 20–25 million residents are members of diasporas of non-European origin; the population of the European Union, with some five hundred million residents, accounts for two thirds of the European population. Both Spain and the United Kingdom are special cases, in that the designation of nationality and British, may controversially take ethnic aspects, subsuming various regional ethnic groups, see nationalisms and regionalisms of Spain and native populations of the United Kingdom. Switzerland is a similar case, but the linguistic subgroups of the Swiss are discussed in terms of both ethnicity and language affiliations. Of the total population of Europe of some 740 million, close to 90% fall within three large branches of Indo-European languages, these being.
Romance, including. Germanic, including. Afrikaans, a daughter language of Dutch, is spoken by some South African and Namibian migrant populations. Three stand-alone Indo-European languages do not fall within larger sub-groups and are not related to those larger language families. Besides the Indo-European languages, there are other language families on the European continent which are wholly unrelated to Indo-European: Uralic languages, including. Turkic languages, including. Semitic languages, including. Kartvelian languages, including Georgian, Zan and Laz. Northwest Caucasian languages. Northeast Caucasian languages. Language isolates. Mongolic languages exist in the form of Kalmyk spoken in the Caucasus region of Russia; the Basques have been found to descend from the population of the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age directly. The Indo-European groups of Europe are assumed to have developed in situ by admixture of Bronze Age, proto-Indo-European groups with earlier Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, after migrating to most of Europe from the Pontic steppe.
The Finnic peoples are assumed to be descended from Proto-Uralic populations further to the east, nearer to the Ural Mountains, that had migrated to their historical homelands in Europe by about 3,000 years ago. Reconstructed languages of Iron Age Europe include Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic, all of these Indo-European languages of the centum group, Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic, of the satem group. A group of Tyrrhenian languages appears to have included Etruscan, Rhaetian and Camunic. A pre-Roman stage of Proto-Basqu
Mexico City Metro
The Mexico City Metro called Sistema de Transporte Colectivo shortened to STC, is a rapid transit system that serves the metropolitan area of Mexico City, including some municipalities in Mexico State. It is the second largest metro system in North America after the New York City Subway. In 2016, the system served 1.662 billion passengers, placing it as the ninth highest ridership in the world. The inaugural STC Metro line was 12.7 kilometres long, serving 16 stations, opened to the public on 4 September 1969. The system has expanded since in a series of fits and starts; as of 2015, the system has 12 lines, serving 195 stations, 226.49 kilometres of route. Ten of the lines are rubber-tyred; the system survived the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. Of the STC Metro's 195 stations, 24 serve two or more lines. Many stations are named for places, or events in Mexican history, it has 115 underground stations. All lines operate from 5 a.m. to midnight. At the end of 2007, the Federal District government announced the construction of the most recent STC Metro line, Line 12, built to run 26 kilometres towards the southeastern part of the city, connecting with Lines 7, 3, 2 and 8.
This line opened on 30 October 2012. The Metro has figured in Mexico's cultural history, as the inspiration for a musical composition for strings, "Metro Chabacano" and the 1982 Rodrigo "Rockdrigo" González's 1982 song, "Metro Balderas", it has been a site for the 1990 Hollywood movie Total Recall. Public intellectual Carlos Monsiváis has commented on the cultural importance of the Metro, "a space for collective expression, where diverse social sectors are compelled to mingle every day". By the second half of the twentieth century, Mexico City had serious public transport issues, with congested main roads and highways in the downtown zone, where 40 percent of the daily trips in the city were concentrated. 65 of the 91 lines of bus and electric transport served this area. With four thousand units in addition to 150,000 personal automobiles peak hours, the average speed was less than walking pace; the principal promoter of the construction of the Mexico City Metro was engineer Bernardo Quintana, in charge of the construction company Ingenieros Civiles y Asociados.
He carried out a series of studies that resulted in a draft plan which would lead to the construction of the Mexico City Metro. This plan was shown to different authorities of Mexico City but it was not made official until 29 April 1967, when the Government Gazette published the presidential decree that created a public decentralized organism, the Sistema de Transporte Colectivo, with the proposal to build and run a rapid transit of subterranean course for the public transport of Mexico City. On 19 June 1967, in the crossroad of Chapultepec Avenue with Avenida Bucareli, the inauguration ceremony for the Mexico City Metro took place. Two years on 4 September 1969, an orange train made the inaugural trip between stations Zaragoza and Insurgentes, thus beginning daily operation up to today; the first stage of construction comprised the construction and inauguration of lines 1, 2 and 3. This stage involved engineers, mechanics, civil engineers, chemists and sanitation workers, electricians and biologists.
Between 1,200 and 4,000 specialists and 48,000 workers participated, building at least one kilometer of track per month, the fastest rate of construction for a subway. During this stage of construction workers uncovered two archaeological ruins, one Aztec idol, the bones of a mammoth. By the end of the first stage, namely on 10 June 1972, the STC Metro had 48 stations and a total length of 41.41 kilometres: Line 1 ran from Observatorio to Zaragoza, Line 2 from Tacuba into the southwestern Tasqueña and line 3 from Tlatelolco to Hospital General in the south, providing quick access to the General Hospital of Mexico. No further progress was reached during President Luis Echeverría's government, but during José López Portillo's administration, a second stage began; the Comisión Ejecutiva del Metro was created in order to be in charge of expanding the STC Metro within the metropolitan area of Mexico City. Works began with the expansion of Line 3 towards the north from Tlatelolco to La Raza in 1978 and to the current terminal Indios Verdes in 1979, towards the south from Hospital General to Centro Médico in 1980 and to Zapata months later.
Construction of lines 4 and 5 was completed on 26 May -- 30 August 1982, respectively. Line 4 was the first STC Metro line built as an elevated track, owing to the lower density of big buildings; this construction stage took place from the beginning of 1983 through the end of 1985. Lines 1, 2 and 3 were expanded to their current lengths, new lines 6 and 7 were built; the length of the network was increased by 35.29 kilometres and the number of stations to 105. Line 3 route was expanded from Zapata station to Universidad station on 30 August 1983. Lin
Aztecs
The Aztecs were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec peoples included different ethnic groups of central Mexico those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Aztec culture was organized into city-states, some of which joined to form alliances, political confederations, or empires; the Aztec empire was a confederation of three city-states established in 1427, city-state of the Mexica or Tenochca. Although the term Aztecs is narrowly restricted to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, it is broadly used to refer to Nahua polities or peoples of central Mexico in the prehispanic era, as well as the Spanish colonial era; the definitions of Aztec and Aztecs have long been the topic of scholarly discussion since German scientist Alexander von Humboldt established its common usage in the early nineteenth century. Most ethnic groups of central Mexico in the post-classic period shared basic cultural traits of Mesoamerica, so many of the traits that characterize Aztec culture cannot be said to be exclusive to the Aztecs.
For the same reason, the notion of "Aztec civilization" is best understood as a particular horizon of a general Mesoamerican civilization. The culture of central Mexico includes maize cultivation, the social division between nobility and commoners, a pantheon, the calendric system of a xiuhpohualli of 365 days intercalated with a tonalpohualli of 260 days. Particular to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan was the patron God Huitzilopochtli, twin pyramids, the ceramic ware known as Aztec I to IV. From the 13th century, the Valley of Mexico was the heart of dense population and the rise of city-states; the Mexica were late-comers to the Valley of Mexico, founded the city-state of Tenochtitlan on unpromising islets in Lake Texcoco becoming the dominant power of the Aztec Triple Alliance or Aztec Empire. It was a tributary empire that expanded its political hegemony far beyond the Valley of Mexico, conquering other city states throughout Mesoamerica in the late post-classic period, it originated in 1427 as an alliance between the city-states Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan.
Soon Texcoco and Tlacopan were relegated to junior partnership in the alliance, with Tenochtitlan the dominant power. The empire extended its reach by a combination of trade and military conquest, it was never a true territorial empire controlling a territory by large military garrisons in conquered provinces, but rather dominated its client city-states by installing friendly rulers in conquered territories, by constructing marriage alliances between the ruling dynasties, by extending an imperial ideology to its client city-states. Client city-states paid tribute to the Aztec emperor, the Huey Tlatoani, in an economic strategy limiting communication and trade between outlying polities, making them dependent on the imperial center for the acquisition of luxury goods; the political clout of the empire reached far south into Mesoamerica conquering polities as far south as Chiapas and Guatemala and spanning Mesoamerica from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. The empire reached its maximal extent in 1519, just prior to the arrival of a small group of Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés.
Cortés allied with city-states opposed to the Mexica the Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalteca as well as other central Mexican polities, including Texcoco, its former ally in the Triple Alliance. After the fall of Tenochtitlan on August 13, 1521 and the capture of the emperor Cuauhtemoc, the Spanish founded Mexico City on the ruins of Tenochtitlan. From there they proceeded with the process of conquest and incorporation of Mesoamerican peoples into the Spanish Empire. With the destruction of the superstructure of the Aztec Empire in 1521, the Spanish utilized the city-states on which the Aztec Empire had been built, to rule the indigenous populations via their local nobles; those nobles pledged loyalty to the Spanish crown and converted, at least nominally, to Christianity, in return were recognized as nobles by the Spanish crown. Nobles acted as intermediaries to convey tribute and mobilize labor for their new overlords, facilitating the establishment of Spanish colonial rule. Aztec culture and history is known through archaeological evidence found in excavations such as that of the renowned Templo Mayor in Mexico City.
Important for knowledge of post-conquest Nahuas was the training of indigenous scribes to write alphabetic texts in Nahuatl for local purposes under Spanish colonial rule. At its height, Aztec culture had rich and complex mythological and religious traditions, as well as achieving remarkable architectural and artistic accomplishments; the Nahuatl words and mean "people from Aztlan," a mythical place of origin for several ethnic groups in central Mexico. The term was not used as an endonym by Aztecs themselves, but it is
Asteroid
Asteroids are minor planets of the inner Solar System. Larger asteroids have been called planetoids; these terms have been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not resemble a planet-like disc and was not observed to have characteristics of an active comet such as a tail. As minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered they were found to have volatile-rich surfaces similar to comets; as a result, they were distinguished from objects found in the main asteroid belt. In this article, the term "asteroid" refers to the minor planets of the inner Solar System including those co-orbital with Jupiter. There exist millions of asteroids, many thought to be the shattered remnants of planetesimals, bodies within the young Sun's solar nebula that never grew large enough to become planets; the vast majority of known asteroids orbit within the main asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, or are co-orbital with Jupiter. However, other orbital families exist with significant populations, including the near-Earth objects.
Individual asteroids are classified by their characteristic spectra, with the majority falling into three main groups: C-type, M-type, S-type. These were named after and are identified with carbon-rich and silicate compositions, respectively; the sizes of asteroids varies greatly. Asteroids are differentiated from meteoroids. In the case of comets, the difference is one of composition: while asteroids are composed of mineral and rock, comets are composed of dust and ice. Furthermore, asteroids formed closer to the sun; the difference between asteroids and meteoroids is one of size: meteoroids have a diameter of one meter or less, whereas asteroids have a diameter of greater than one meter. Meteoroids can be composed of either cometary or asteroidal materials. Only one asteroid, 4 Vesta, which has a reflective surface, is visible to the naked eye, this only in dark skies when it is favorably positioned. Small asteroids passing close to Earth may be visible to the naked eye for a short time; as of October 2017, the Minor Planet Center had data on 745,000 objects in the inner and outer Solar System, of which 504,000 had enough information to be given numbered designations.
The United Nations declared 30 June as International Asteroid Day to educate the public about asteroids. The date of International Asteroid Day commemorates the anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid impact over Siberia, Russian Federation, on 30 June 1908. In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported "It's 100 percent certain we'll be hit, but we're not 100 percent sure when." In 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet. In June 2018, the US National Science and Technology Council warned that America is unprepared for an asteroid impact event, has developed and released the "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy Action Plan" to better prepare. According to expert testimony in the United States Congress in 2013, NASA would require at least five years of preparation before a mission to intercept an asteroid could be launched; the first asteroid to be discovered, was considered to be a new planet.
This was followed by the discovery of other similar bodies, with the equipment of the time, appeared to be points of light, like stars, showing little or no planetary disc, though distinguishable from stars due to their apparent motions. This prompted the astronomer Sir William Herschel to propose the term "asteroid", coined in Greek as ἀστεροειδής, or asteroeidēs, meaning'star-like, star-shaped', derived from the Ancient Greek ἀστήρ astēr'star, planet'. In the early second half of the nineteenth century, the terms "asteroid" and "planet" were still used interchangeably. Overview of discovery timeline: 10 by 1849 1 Ceres, 1801 2 Pallas – 1802 3 Juno – 1804 4 Vesta – 1807 5 Astraea – 1845 in 1846, planet Neptune was discovered 6 Hebe – July 1847 7 Iris – August 1847 8 Flora – October 1847 9 Metis – 25 April 1848 10 Hygiea – 12 April 1849 tenth asteroid discovered 100 asteroids by 1868 1,000 by 1921 10,000 by 1989 100,000 by 2005 ~700,000 by 2015 Asteroid discovery methods have improved over the past two centuries.
In the last years of the 18th century, Baron Franz Xaver von Zach organized a group of 24 astronomers to search the sky for the missing planet predicted at about 2.8 AU from the Sun by the Titius-Bode law because of the discovery, by Sir William Herschel in 1781, of the planet Uranus at the distance predicted by the law. This task required that hand-drawn sky charts be prepared for all stars in the zodiacal band down to an agreed-upon limit of faintness. On subsequent nights, the sky would be charted again and any moving object would be spotted; the expected motion of the missing planet was about 30 seconds of arc per hour discernible by observers. The first object, was not discovered by a member of the group, but rather by accident in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, director of the observatory of Palermo in Sicily, he discovered a new star-like object in Taurus and followed the displacement of this object during several nights. That year, Carl Friedrich Gauss used these observations to calculate the orbit of this unknown object, found to be between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
Piazzi named it after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Three other asteroids (2 Pallas, 3 Juno, 4 Ves
Aztec calendar
The Aztec or Mexica calendar is the calendar system, used by the Aztecs as well as other Pre-Columbian peoples of central Mexico. It is one of the Mesoamerican calendars, sharing the basic structure of calendars from throughout ancient Mesoamerica; the calendar consisted of a 365-day calendar cycle called xiuhpōhualli and a 260-day ritual cycle called tōnalpōhualli. These two cycles together formed a 52-year "century," sometimes called the "calendar round"; the xiuhpōhualli is considered to be the agricultural calendar, since it is based on the sun, the tōnalpōhualli is considered to be the sacred calendar... The tōnalpōhualli consists of a cycle of 260 days, each day signified by a combination of a number from 1 to 13, one of the twenty day signs. With each new day, both the number and day sign would be incremented: 1 Crocodile is followed by 2 Wind, 3 House, 4 Lizard, so forth up to 13 Reed, after which the cycle of numbers would restart resulting in 1 Jaguar, 2 Eagle, so on, as the days following 13 Reed.
This cycle of number and day signs would continue until the 20th week, which would start on 1 Rabbit, end on 13 Flower. It would take a full 260 days for the two cycles to realign and repeat the sequence back on 1 Crocodile; the set of day signs used in central Mexico is identical to that used by Mixtecs, to a lesser degree similar to those of other Mesoamerican calendars. Each of the day signs bears an association with one of the four cardinal directions. There is some variation in the way the day signs were carved; those here were taken from the Codex Magliabechiano. Wind and Rain are represented by images of Ehēcatl and Tlāloc respectively. Other marks on the stone showed the current world and the worlds before this one; each world was called a sun, each sun had its own species of inhabitants. The Aztecs believed that they were in the Fifth Sun and like all of the suns before them they would eventually perish due to their own imperfections; every 52 years was marked out because they believed that 52 years was a life cycle and at the end of any given life cycle the gods could take away all that they have and destroy the world.
The 260 days of the sacred calendar were grouped into twenty periods of 13 days each. Scholars refer to these thirteen-day "weeks" as trecenas, using a Spanish term derived from trece "thirteen"; the original Nahuatl term is not known. Each trecena is named according to the calendar date of the first day of the 13 days in that trecena. In addition, each of the twenty trecenas in the 260-day cycle had its own tutelary deity: In ancient times the year was composed of eighteen months, thus it was observed by the native people. Since their months were made of no more than twenty days, these were all the days contained in a month, because they were not guided by the moon but by the days; the days of the year were counted twenty by twenty. Xiuhpōhualli is the Aztec year count. One year consists of 5 nameless. These'extra' days are thought to be unlucky; the year was broken into 18 periods of twenty days each, sometimes compared to the Julian month. The Nahuatl word for moon is metztli but whatever name was used for these periods is unknown.
Through Spanish usage, the 20-day period of the Aztec calendar has become known as a veintena. Each 20-day period started on Cipactli; the eighteen veintena are listed below. The dates are from early eyewitnesses. Bernardino de Sahagún's date precedes the observations of Diego Durán by several decades and is believed to be more recent to the surrender. Both are shown to emphasize the fact that the beginning of the Native new year became non-uniform as a result of an absence of the unifying force of Tenochtitlan after the Mexica defeat; the ancient Mexicans counted their years by means of four signs combined with thirteen numbers, obtaining periods of 52 years, which are known as Xiuhmolpilli, a popular but incorrect name. We can see below the table with the current years: For many centuries scholars had tried to reconstruct the Calendar; the latest and more accepted version was proposed by Professor Rafael Tena of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, based on the studies of Sahagún and Alfonso Caso of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
His correlation confirms that the first day of the Mexica year was February 13 of the old Julian calendar or February 23 of the current Gregorian calendar. Using the same count, it has been verified the date of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, the end of the year and a cycle or "Tie of the Years," and the New Fire Ceremony, day-sign 1 Tecpatl of the year 2 Acatl, corresponding to the date February 22. Maya calendar Mesoamerican calendars Aztec New Year Muisca calendar The Aztec Calendar - Ancient History Encyclopedia Detailed description of the temalacatl from Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropología Aztec Calendar and Percussion Instrument Daily Aztec Calendar
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