The cycle of 260 days was actually made up of two separate time counts, reproducing in microcosm the working of the Calendar Round. The names of a series of twenty symbolically significant icons were counted off using the numbers one through thirteen. When the fourteenth icon was reached, the number count began again, with the number one. The Aztecs treated each set of thirteen numbered days as a unit, which the Spanish called the trecena, rather like a thirteen day week. This was the cycle in which birth dates were recorded and divination based on the combination of number and icon was projected at birth.
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