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Since their months were made of no more than twenty days, these were all the days contained in a month, because they were not guided by the moon but by the days; therefore, the year had eighteen months. The days of the year were counted twenty by twenty.
These 'extra' days are thought to be unlucky. The year was broken into 18 periods of twenty days each, sometimes compared to the Julian month. The Nahuatl word for moon is metztli but whatever name was used for these periods is unknown. Through Spanish usage, the 20-day period of the Aztec calendar has become commonly known as a veintena.
Days were not named. The months had two or three divisions depending on the phase of the moon. Twelve months of 30 days were named for festivals or activities of the pastoral year. A 13th month was added every six years to keep the calendar synchronized with the seasons.
In the post-classic Aztec calendar the periods of 13 days called a trecena in Spanish (no indigenous word for this period is known) were also important. The days of a trecena were usually numbered from 1 to 13. There were some exceptions, such as in the Tlapanec area where they were counted from 2 to 14. [14]
The Haabʼ was made up of eighteen months of twenty days each plus a period of five days ("nameless days") at the end of the year known as Wayeb' (or Uayeb in 16th-century orthography). The five days of Wayebʼ were thought to be a dangerous time. Foster (2002) writes, "During Wayeb, portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld dissolved.
The Latin month names were in predominant use throughout the medieval period, although the Summarium Heinrici, an 11th century pedagogical compendium, in chapter II.15 (De temporibus et mensibus et annis) advocates the use of the German month names rather than the more widespread Latin ones. [13]
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The months were kept in alignment with the moon, however, by counting the new moon as the last day of the first month and simultaneously the first day of the next month. [4] The system is usually said to have left the remaining two to three months of the year as an unorganized "winter", since they were irrelevant to the farming cycle. [ 4 ]