(blues piano music)
- [Voiceover] We're in the National Anthropology Museum
in Mexico City, looking at
what is perhaps their most famous object,
sometimes called The Calendar Stone,
but more accurately called The Sun Stone.
- [Voiceover] It's become the modern-day emblem
of Mexican culture.
- [Voiceover] It looks like a sun.
It's got a circular shape.
It has rays emanating out.
But in actuality, when you look closely
it's an incredibly complicated object.
- [Voiceover] This would have been originally painted,
which would have helped pick out the motifs
that you're seeing here.
- [Voiceover] And it wouldn't have been up on the wall.
- [Voiceover] No, it most likely
would have been placed horizontally on the ground.
And as you see it was unfinished,
cause there are protrusions of uncarved rock
that we see on the top and to the left.
- [Voiceover] So in the center, let's start there.
I see a rather gruesome looking face with deep-set eyes
and a wide mouth, and on either side,
hanging down, what look like ear ornaments.
- [Voiceover] He's wearing ear spools,
and within that open mouth
you see the tongue protruding out.
That's actually a anthropomorphized sacrificial blade.
- [Voiceover] The ear spools were decorations
that Aztec elite would wear.
So who is that?
- [Voiceover] So this figure, this face,
and if you look to the sides, you also see
that he has clawed hands
and he's holding something, possibly human hearts.
There have been various interpretations
of who this individual actually is,
and most people identify him as the sun god, Tonatiuh,
which is the Nahuatl word for the sun god.
- [Voiceover] And Nahuatl is the name
of the language spoken by the Nahua people, or the Aztecs.
- [Voiceover] The Aztecs were part
of this larger ethnic group of the Nahua.
- [Voiceover] So what this records,
with this figure in the center, what the disc itself records
is this origin of the cosmos as the Aztecs saw it.
- [Voiceover] The stone relates to one
of the main Aztec myths,
essentially the creation of the various eras,
or as they called them, suns.
So what we're seeing here is a record,
a cataclysmic history of previous eras,
and then the current era, under which we live.
- [Voiceover] So the current era is actually the fifth era,
according to this system.
- [Voiceover] The fifth sun.
- [Voiceover] And yet the name of the fifth sun,
the fifth era, is "Four Movement,"
and we actually see that
in the four square lobes
that surround that center figure.
- [Voiceover] That particular shape
that it's forming is a sign for Ollin,
which in Nahuatl means movement,
and we also see these four dots
surrounding this central figure,
which gives us the name Four Movement,
which is the title of the fifth sun,
or the fifth era that we're living in right now.
- [Voiceover] And then, inside those squares
or rectangular shapes that mean four movement,
we see the names of the previous four suns.
- [Voiceover] Exactly.
So if we go from the top right and go counter-clockwise,
the four eras are 4-Jaguar, 4-Wind,
4-Tlaloc, and then
4-Chalchiuhtlicue.
The idea is that in the first era,
it's death by jaguar, devoured by jaguars.
In the second era, death by high winds.
In the third era, death by rains of fire.
And in the fourth era, death by water.
The idea with the fifth sun is it's prophesizing
that this current world in which we live
is going to be death by earthquakes.
- [Voiceover] The city where we are and where this is from,
the Aztec capital, is surrounded
by volcanoes and a fault line.
- [Voiceover] You have devastating earthquakes
that happen here.
Earthquakes were terrifying and so this is prophesizing
how our current world is going to end.
- [Voiceover] We have this idea of sacrifice
in the center with that face,
and then we have this idea in Aztec mythology
that this era that we're in was formed
by two gods agreeing to sacrifice themselves.
- [Voiceover] The sun is brought into creation
by the gods sacrificing themselves,
but at first, it was static, it couldn't move,
and so then another god had to sacrifice himself
in order to put the sun in motion.
Then the idea is that because the gods
have killed themselves willingly,
that we as humans need to be feeding them through offerings,
and that could include things like animal sacrifice,
piercing of our body to give blood, or human sacrifice.
- [Voiceover] We have, now, 20 glyphs or symbols,
the 20 days, this basic unit of the Aztec calendar.
- [Voiceover] And, outside of that band of calendrical dates
we see the rays of the sun radiating outwards
and you see that the largest ones are pointed
in the four cardinal directions.
- [Voiceover] North, South, East, West.
- [Voiceover] And their cosmos, or their universe
was thought to be divided into four quadrants
associated with these four cardinal directions.
- [Voiceover] And Tenochtitlan, the city,
the capital of the Aztec Empire was divided also into four.
- [Voiceover] Replicating that cosmological
diagram of sorts.
- [Voiceover] If we look closely at the outside band,
we can see two serpents whose heads meet
at the bottom center,
and from whose mouths emerge two faces.
- [Voiceover] These are called fire serpents or,
in Nahuatl, Xiuhcoatl.
They're associated with time, with the solar calendar,
and, in some sources, as carrying sun across the sky.
- [Voiceover] So they, in a way, make time happen.
- [Voiceover] Exactly.
In terms of how we date this monument,
there are a couple of other glyphs here
that I just want to point out.
Next to the date of 4-Wind,
if we're going counter-clockwise,
the royal insignia of Moctezuma II,
and so we typically date this monument
to the reign of that Aztec ruler.
And across from the insignia of Moctezuma II,
right next to that jaguar head for the date 4-Jaguar,
we see a flint knife, one of the sacrificial blades,
and next to it we see a single dot,
which reads as a date glyph for 1 Flint.
1 Flint could be read in two different ways.
Some people associate that particular date
with the beginning of the era of the fifth sun.
- [Voiceover] So what we have is a sense of the structure
and order of the universe for the Aztecs.
- [Voiceover] This is an object that is very present
in our contemporary moment,
because it's become so well-known,
and yet, most people, they're not aware
of the really complicated messages being conveyed.
(blues piano music)