Aztec Sun Stone

One of the most famous and important surviving artifacts from the Aztec Empire reveals how they expected the apocalypse to go down – but also the rather sneaky way they figured out to avoid it.

If there’s only one thing you know about classical Mesoamerican apocalypse myths, it’s probably this: that the world ended in 2012, and the Mayas predicted it.

Of course, as archaeologists (and, you know, calendar owners throughout the last decade) were quick to point out, that was never true – the Maya didn’t even really have an end-of-the-world myth. A few thousand miles North, however, and there was another civilization that definitely did worry about the impending apocalypse: the Aztecs.

So worried were they, in fact, that they regularly offered up human lives in the hopes of staving off The End for another year. At least, that’s what Susan Milbrath, a Latin American art and archaeology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, reads in the gigantic relic known as the Sun Stone: a 24-ton, circular, basalt calendar stone which, she believes, we’ve been misunderstanding for centuries.

While experts have long thought that the central image in the Stone shows Tonatiuh, the Aztec sun deity, Milbrath’s 2017 paper on its eclipse imagery suggests the depiction may be more nuanced. Rather than simply portraying the face of the heart-devouring god, she interpreted the image as showing their death during an eclipse – an event that the civilization believed would lead to a global and earth-shaking apocalypse.  READ MORE...