The five counts
Why there is no single date, and how to choose yours
What it covers
The five correlations in circulation, what each one anchors on, and what to weigh if you have to pick one.
The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why
What you have read above is this project's own summary of the five counts. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.
We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.
In Spanish the entry carries:
- Por qué son cinco
- Por qué tu signo cambia
- Cuál es la correcta
- Cuándo empieza el año
Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.
How to cite this page
Alma Mexica, «The five counts», The documents. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/document/en-claro-las-cuentas/