The most famous physical record of the Five Suns scheme is the so-called Aztec Calendar Stone, or Piedra del Sol, a monumental basalt disk carved around 1479 CE and rediscovered in 1790 beneath Mexico City's main square. Its central face bears the glyph Nahui-Ollin surrounded by the day-signs marking the ends of the four prior ages, though scholars continue to debate exactly how the stone's imagery should be read as calendrical or narrative content.
The fullest written versions of the myth were recorded after the Spanish conquest, chiefly in the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, compiled with Nahua informants through interviews and pictorial sources during the sixteenth century. Because it was set down decades after conquest, from older oral and pictographic tradition filtered through colonial-era collaboration, scholars weigh it carefully as evidence for pre-conquest belief rather than as an unmediated transcript.
The scheme did more than narrate the past: it explained and justified the Mexica state's demand for continual human sacrifice, since the Fifth Sun was held to be inherently unstable, moving only because the gods had given their own blood at Teotihuacan. The number and order of the prior suns vary somewhat between surviving sources, which this entry treats as evidence of a living, regionally inflected tradition rather than a single fixed text.