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Today's Maya date is: 13.0.8.3.16 - 2957 days into the new cycle!
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Fruit harvest?
Especially since this image, from Book XI of the Florentine Codex, appears at the end of a long section on medicinal herbs, we could easily be forgiven for assuming this is a common-or-garden scene of a Mexica (Aztec) farmer harvesting a large fruit or vegetable of some kind. Far from it...! (Written by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
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| Aztec ‘rain gold’ - quiauhteocuitlatl - a rare pallasite meterorite (Click on image to enlarge) |
What he’s digging up is in fact quiauhteocuitlatl - ‘rain gold’ - a rare stony-iron meteorite known to contain stunningly beautiful black-and-yellow olivine crystals. Such precious stones were associated by the Mexica with lightning and the stones cast down by the tlaloque (rain deities). Learn more about this from our new feature in the AZTEFACTS section...
Images from the Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence) scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.
This article was uploaded to the Mexicolore website on Feb 16th 2015
“Rare ‘rain-gold’” (AZTEFACTS)