﻿Gama on Calendar Stone. 



17 



on the following day. These middle intervals had no particular 

 name, neither did the hours of the day, and they designated only 

 the position the sun occupied in the heavens, when wishing to point 

 out the hour, saying. " Iz Teotl" ''there is the day," or the sun. 



The hours of the night they regulated by means of the stars. 

 These duties belonged to the ministers of the temple, who wore, 

 destined for this duty, certain instruments, like speaking trumpets, 

 with which they announced to the people the hours at which the 

 people should assemble for the sacrifices, and other ridiculous 

 ceremonials belonging to their nocturnal festivals. 



3. Each one of their months was composed of the aggregation of 

 twenty natural days, which they divided into four "Quindies." 

 On each division they celebrated " fairs" (or markets), which they 

 called Tianquiztli. Of eighteen of their months they formed the 

 common year, or the 360 useful days, to which they added five 

 days at the end of the last month, and they named them Nemon- 

 temi, which is equivalent to calling them vain or useless days, for 

 on these they neither worked nor engaged in any business, remain- 

 ing constantly unoccupied and in anxious fear that some calamity 

 would befall them ; believing, in the madness of their superstitions, 

 that, on the last of those five days, the world would be destroyed. 



They reckoned this time as unfortunate to those creatures that 

 were born on these "Quindies," and they always designated them 

 as unfortunates by the names they gave them, since to males they 

 gave the name of "Nemo quichtli" and to females, il Neo cihuatl" 

 which signified unhappy man or woman. 



Notwithstanding these five days were accounted as useless for 

 every species of labor or political occupation, they held them in 

 great esteem, adding them to form the complement of their civil 

 year of 365 days, in the same way as the Egyptians, who, in order 

 to adjust their year to an equal number of days, added to the end 

 of their last month other five days which they called Epagomenai. 



4. They represented the eighteen months of the year in the form 

 of a circle, with the same number of divisions, or squares, in which 

 they carved the respective symbols by which they designated each 

 one of the said months. They called this kind of wheel Xiuhtla- 

 pohualli, or the sun. In the same circular form they represented 



