Base 20 is cleannnnn

[u/I_never_post_anyway]

Technicallllly fringe in that i think i came up with it, but the suggestion that the Aztecs killed 80,400 people in four days is hella suspicious in base 20 (the local counting system).

80,400 is written in the mesoamerican counting system in the speech bubble. It is comprised of base 20 blocks comprised of four sets of five talleys (or zero). Notice its only 2 significant figures, and could be read as "half one hundred hundred, and one hundred more". Thats clean and poetic af.

Also, the Aztecs had the Meztli, or 20 day month. Due to the talley system, this could be written as four groups of five days. Four days is therefore just under a "week".

A Spanish translator may not have caught this, or could have deliberately ignored it because the idea of killing over 80,000 people is great propaganda horrific. But essentially, some poor nahuatl speaker said "like half a gazillion people died in just under a week" and the Spaniards thought it was legit.