The Pleiades (Tianquiztli) are portrayed in the upper left
of the document. The other symbols represent other constellations, a meteor or shooting star, the sun, the moon, the eclipses. The image is from the Primeros Memoriales, a sixteenth-century colonial manuscript
compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun.
Click on image for full size
Image courtesy of the book 'Moctezuma's Mexico' by David Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. University Press of Colorado, 1992.
Tianquiztli
The Pleiades were known to the Aztecs as Tianquiztli which means "marketplace."
The Aztecs were great observers of the
Sun,
moon, and
planets.
Time was measured according to the movement of the stars and the Sun. Their calendar was
based on cycles of fifty-two years. They watched the Pleiades carefully move in
the sky to ensure that the world would not end.
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