Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/67

 Gama states that in the day Ce técpatl the Indians celebrated one of their principal festivals, consecrating it to the flint knife (técpatl) itself, defined under the name Teotécpatl, this being joined with the festival of fire. This is not opposed to our reading of the monolith, we have said that a part of the hypothesis of the savant remains intact.

We do not believe it inopportune to reproduce here some paragraphs from our Study De Sahagún a Del Paso y Troncoso, which condenses the principal ideas of the interpretation of Gama:

So far as concerns the figures which immediately surround the face of the sun, he interprets them as the nahui ollin, or the four movements of the orb between the solstices and the equinoxes (as well as of its two passages through the zenith of the city); the figures themselves indicating the dates of the Aztec year in which the phenomena occur (Ce quiáhuitl, Ome azomatli, Nahui océlotl, and Nahui quiáhuitl); and particularly the symbols inclosed in the four rectangles he interprets as the four cosmogonic ages or periods in the life of the human species. The monolith gives these indications of the movements of the orb, the year 13-ácatl, engraved in the quadrangle at the top of the stone, because this year falls at about the middle of the Aztec cycle of 52 years, when “there takes place with sufficient approximation the arrival of the sun at its equinoctial, at the solstitial points, and at the vertex or zenith of the city, the twice in the year when it passes that point, on the dates which are indicated upon the stone, and consequently the time fixed for celebrating their festivities." In order that such a result should he secured, the stone must be supposed placed vertically upon as horizontal plane (as now it is found) and with the sculptured surface looking toward the south; moreover, exactly directed from east to west. In this position the monolith registered the movements of the sun during a portion of the year, or be it in the period during which the orb advances from the equinoctial to one of the tropics, which assumes that there was another similar stone (Game believed it buried) in which should be figured the dates of the remaining festivals, comprised during the space of time which the sun tarried in coursing through the other part of the ecliptic. At the same time the savant believed that the stone was a solar timepiece, which by means of gnomons indicated the hours of the day, some threads stretched between thee gnomons serving to indicate the days of the solstices and the equinoxes, since at the time of the latter the shadows would be parallel and at the summer solstice they would he confounded, while at the winter solstice the shadow of the upper thread would fall above the stone or in the line where the vertical plane of the monument cut the ground. These gnomons were placed in the eight sockets, which, in fact, appear near the border of the cylinder.