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The xiuhpōhualli (Nahuatl pronunciation: [ʃiʍpoːˈwalːi], from xihuitl (“year”) + pōhualli (“count”)) is a 365-day calendar used by the Aztecs and other pre-Columbian Nahua peoples in central Mexico.
The Aztec sun stone and a depiction of its base. The Aztec or Mexica calendar is the calendrical system used by the Aztecs as well as other Pre-Columbian peoples of central Mexico.
The 365-day xiuhpohualli consisted of 18 twenty-day "months" (or veintenas), plus an additional 5 days at the end of the year. Some descriptions of the Aztec calendar state that it also included a leap day which allowed the calendar cycle to remain aligned with the same agrarian cycles year after year.
The aspects of the prototype preserved in the Codex Ixtlilxochitl present the solar Xiuhpohualli calendar, which is a 365-day calendar consisting of 18 months of 20 days called veintenas in Spanish or mētztli in Nahuatl, as well as each month's associated feast.
The Aztecs referred to the 365 and 260-day cycles as xiuhpohualli (year count) and tonalpohualli (day count) respectively. The veintena was called metztli (moon), and the five unlucky days at the end of the solar year were called nemontemi.
Tonalpōhualli calendar representation. The term for the Aztec day signs, tōnalpōhualli, comes from the root word Tona which means to give light or heat. [2] Tōnalpōhualli refers to the count of the days, made up of 20 day signs and a 260 day cycle.
The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is divided into three sections. The first section, spanning the first seven pages, describes the 365-day solar calendar, called the xiuhpohualli. The second section, spanning pages 8 to 24, is a tonalamatl, describing the 260-day tonalpohualli calendar. The third section is a history, itself divided into two ...
The term is most frequently used with respect to the 365-day Aztec calendar, the xiuhpohualli, although 20-day periods are also used in the 365-day Maya calendar (the Mayan tun), as well as by other Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Zapotec and Mixtec.