Word: coyolxauhqui
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...heart the intersection of Argentina and Guatemala streets, they discovered an oval stone eleven feet in diameter, covered with carvings. Archaeologists quickly identified the relief as a representation of an important Aztec myth. The central image on the stone was the dismembered torso of Huitzilopochtli's evil sister, Coyolxauhqui. According to legend, she had plotted with her many brothers to kill their mother just as she was about to give birth to Huitzilopochtli. Instead, Huitzilopochtli sprang from the womb fully grown and armed, decapitated his matricidal sister and chased off his brothers. Some anthropologists read the myth...
...second, completed in 1390, a date derived from a plaque inscribed with carvings from the 52-year Aztec calendar. Even the bases of the shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc remain intact, including a strikingly modern motif of parallel lines that may represent rain. By contrast, the large Coyolxauhqui stone was made about a century later, during the reign of Moctezuma I, grandfather of Cortés' victim...
Uncovering Coyolxauhqui...
What the workmen found was not gold, but a treasure nonetheless. It has now been identified as a huge pre-Columbian bas-relief of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui. Probably sculpted in the early 15th century, the circular stone, 3.3 meters (11 ft.) across and weighing some 20 tons, has relief images of the dismembered goddess's limbs, torso and head scattered all over its surface. The carnage depicts a well-known episode from Aztec mythology. When the mother of the gods was pregnant for the last time, so the story goes, her other offspring-the moon, planets...
Goddess & Snakes. Ultimately, of course, a museum can only be as great as its contents. Mexico's century-old collection is one of the world's most comprehensive records of antiquity. Of more than 100,000 relics, two of the finest are the Coyolxauhqui, a 1,543-lb. moon goddess of jadeite whose grinning face is fringed with golden rattlesnakes, and a Western Hemisphere familiar, the 25-ton stone disk whose signs and symbols marked the hours and seasons and mapped the Aztec universe...
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