| Object Name: | Stone of the sun, Aztec Calendar |
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| Creation Date: | 1325-1521 A. D. | |
| Culture: | Aztec, Post-Classic | |
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| The Stone of the Sun is a monument at once simple and complex. Whereas the early Mexica monuments represented figures without glyphs, Calendar stone consists of almost nothing else. On the stone are represented certain ideas of time and space that were widely accepted in Mesoamerica many centuries before Aztecs, yet this work remains a unique Mexica achievement. One must ask why the Mexica erected a colossal monument ten feet in diameter depicting the cosmos when other cultures who shared these ideas never created anything like it. The stone of the sun is a masterpiece of intricate design and iconography (Beyer, 1922). Small-scale motifs in rectangular compartments that are arranged in concentric circles give it the structured look of a mandala: the background is cut deeper to create two bands of shadows that separate the central ring from the outer ring. The disk is divived both by radius and by axis. The central ring consists of the X-shaped glyph 4 Movement, with the face of the deity in the center and his claws in the flanking circles. Four glyphs in the four rectangular cartouches represent the dates of destruction of the previous worlds. The next ring contains the twenty symbols of the ritual calendar, arranged counterclockwise starting at the top. Beyond is a narrow ring with four sets of squares, each containing five dots—glyphs for preciousness or turquoise. An ornate solar band with four major and four minor triangular rays projects to the outer ring, where two fire or turquoise serpents encircle the stone, their tails at the top and their heads meeting below. These monsters’ open mouth emit two profile heads with skeletal jaws. The border of the cylindrical edge has a night sky with stars and planets. The central face of the Stone of the sun has long been identified as Tonatiuh, the sun god of the daytime sky, and the monument is sometimes called a giant sun stone. In fact, the face of the central deity with the claws hands and sacrificial knife for a tongue is that of the earth monster, Tlaltecuhtli. Since the destroyer of the last world is to be the earth itself, this image is more appropriate than the face of Tonatiuh. Alternatively, it may represent the night sun in the underworld (Klein, 1976). In regard to this opinion, I think that the image represents a conflation of both, Huitzilopochtli-Tonatiuh and Tlaltecuhtli. The Aztec artists who designed the Stone of the sun conceived a daring combination of the two images: the sun disk and the earth monster. These images play major roles in Aztec iconography separately to signify an opposition of light and dark, life and death. The sun disk usually appears on the inside of sacrifical vessels, the outside bottom. | ||
