History and Provenance

The stone sets out the Mexica reckoning of cosmic time: the present era, the Fifth Sun, occupies the centre framed by the four earlier suns that were each destroyed, presenting the current world as both the culmination and the most fragile of the ages. After its rediscovery in 1790 it was fixed to the wall of the cathedral, where it stayed for over a century before entering the national collection. It is now the central object of the Mexica hall of the National Museum of Anthropology and among the most reproduced images of Mexico.

Workers rediscovered the Aztec Sun Stone on 17 December 1790 during repairs to Mexico City's central plaza, the Zocalo, near the site of the colonial cathedral built over the ruins of the Mexica capital Tenochtitlan. The eighteenth-century scholar Antonio de Leon y Gama, writing soon after, was the first to offer a detailed interpretation of the stone's carved calendrical and cosmological imagery. The stone's carved central face, long popularly identified as the sun god Tonatiuh, has itself been the subject of a narrower scholarly disagreement, with some researchers instead proposing the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli or a composite, deliberately ambiguous image intended to carry more than one association at once, a debate that remains open alongside the broader calendar-versus-altar question.