the secret of the firmament! No more fitting means existed than to sculpture it in indestructible material, which should preserve the marvelous secret for following ages.
If the relief of the museum is that commemorative monument, we must admit that its glyphs, so long mysterious, were the work of a master-workman and the conception of a mind which in genius does not yield before Hipparchus, nor Kepler, nor Newton, nor Arago. Thus Bullock was impelled to declare: "...The stone is a conspicuous proof of the perfection to which those races had attained in certain sciences: even in the most enlightened cities of the present day, there are few persons who would be capable of executing such a work."
Slow has been our analysis, and we have succeeded in making the decipherment only step by step, strengthened with the most important codices and confirmed by the most notable monuments, as we shall see later on. But to the eyes of the Mexicans of Tenochtitlan, who placed the relief in a prominent part of their temple, whether they worked it themselves or received it already made, the reading was easy and significant in the extreme. Translating it, so far as is possible, its form would be more or less as follows:
In the year 4992 the third age of the world came to an end; with four more great rounds, four ages. At its termination Tonatiuh and Quetzalcóatl met in the heavens, and in the tonalámatl it was Ce cipactli, the first of the count. It was the end of the year 13-ácatl. One hundred and four years Iater the Toltec savants founded their city and elected a king, and the old men, the astronomers, and the principal diviners having assembled said: We are about to commence again the count of time. And they did so with the commencement of the following year, Ce técpatl, which was the 5,097th year from the creation. And they added that this age would have to end through terrestrial calamities, after 4X416 years, since the preceding ages had come to end through the force of water, of air, and of fire, because so the two lords of heaven, who come together every 8 and 104 years, will it. And they decided to record it in a monument, strong and eternal as time, that it should be preserved in the history of the world.
Strange coincidence! Four hundred and sixteen years after the foundation in 1116, the flourishing empire of the Toltecs is destroyed! This is not a date which we arbitrarily suppose: Torquemada, placing the last monarch Achauatzin at that time, and Veytia give the testimony; the learned Orozco y Berra states it; Chavero resolutely accepts it. The Anales de Cuauhtitlan vary by just 52 years, which, even if it
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