Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/22

 straight, which express the following hours. Yet smaller and resting upon the following zone are seen eight asps between the rays described; they indicate, surely, a smaller subdivision of time. In total, the day of the aborigines was distributed into 16 hours of 90 minutes each.

The fourth zone or circle contains two hundred dots distributed in groups of five (each group in a little frame) which are commonly designated with the term of quintiduos (“quintettes”). In the asps already mentioned (six of which are entirely visible and two concealed in such a manner as induces us to assign the same elements to them) are eight quintiduos, giving a total of forty dots. We ought yet to add the ten circumscribed in the arrow of the naolin and the ten placed between the face and the claws of the Tonatiuh. These last are dots like the others; but the necessities of distribution of the relief do not permit their being arranged in an actually identical form. Altogether they sum up to two hundred and sixty numerals of equal kind, a reading already made by archaeologists.

Until now it has been assumed that the elements in question represent the tonalámatl or cecempohualli, fundamental computation of native chronology. Nevertheless, this is an error. Further than the fact that that appears inscribed in another part of the relief, the distribution of the 260 numerals in groups of five, and not of thirteen, dots demonstrates by itself alone that we are not here dealing with the sacred book composed fundamentally of thirteens. The dots in question denote years, not days as has been supposed; and if they appear distributed in fives it is because they allued to years of the planet Venus, that is to say, the synodical movements of that planet, five of which form a cycle in the calendar of the aborigines for reasons which we shall explain later.

The dots of the fourth circle, joined with the other elements of the same kind which may be read in the relief, represent then a period of 260 Venus years. Taking the synodical revolution of the planet as very close to 584 days, the total amounts to 151,840 days, or 416 solar years, great cycle of the aboriginal chronology, repeatedly figured in the monolith, as we shall see in the sequel. It is inferred that the Indians carried on simultaneously two calendars, that of the star of day and that of Venus, and by their combination they computed the course of time; in this method, with puerly astronomical elements, they formed their system of chronology.

Interrupted in its turn by the great and small rays, the fifth circle is formed of eight zones or glyphs which archaeologists have agreed in