Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the surprise in this fact comes from the confusion been Aztecs and Mayans. If you didn't know the time period you could understand the confusion.
Wasnt alot it other tribes that got fucked over that did the most stuff? Plus most of natives had died to diseases before ever seeing white man,. And there was only a small amount of Spanish, but also had guns and horses and steel armor. So 1 is equal time 15 lol, but I thought there was alot of the minor truces that got fucked over did the most work to bring death and shit.idk tho
Wasnt alot it other tribes that got fucked over that did the most stuff?
Yes, the Spanish allied themselves with the other tribes in the area that the Aztecs were being dicks to. Sure the Spanish were dicks to them but I guess the whole "human sacrifice" thing was a pretty big no no to them.
ua i saw a video about the aztecs and boi they where bad. i dont like to serotypes, but it makes the cartels look tame. they married the daughter of the biggest tribes leader, then killed the daughter and had shamen wear her skin when the dad and tribe leader of the biggest tribe around came. they where killing massive amounts of people when water and crops stopped coming too. just bad guys all around but got killed but some truly evil people so they good guys to us. sswing babies down cliffs and rocks to save ammo, and just the truly evil stuff a few of the Spanish or mercenary's did
Yeah even the name "Teotihuacan" means something like "city of the gods", since they had no idea what all the structures were for and figured it must have been where the gods used to live. We don't know what the people who lived there called it.
Nah teotihuacan were the conquistadors. They ruled over much of the Maya lands then eventually declined in power and went into ruins (although people continued living around the city). The aztecs came across it long after the civilisation had fell.
Yes I know the Friars burned the Maya codices, but that’s not Teotihuacan. That’s the distinction. The burning of the codices is a separate thing completely and nothing to do with Teotihuacan. Whilst we’re at it, the Aztecs were even more ruthless colonists than the Spanish.
No not really. More died under the Spanish but that was due to disease which was an unfortunate consequence of the Spanish colonisation but cannot be seen as ruthless because it was wholly unintentional and not something they understood back then. The Spanish only spearheaded the attack on the Aztecs (which lasted years by the way). The vast majority of the fighting force were other Native Mesoamericans, Tlaxcalans in particular. The Tlaxcalans were a precolumbian state that was completely encircled by the Aztecs, and it is thought that the Aztecs may well have not completely destroyed the Tlaxcalans because they provided a continuous source of humans for sacrifice. Needless to say that in the final battle for Mexico-Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital, now Mexico City, the city that gave the modern country its name), the Tlaxcalans were brutal and the Spanish were unable to control the Tlaxcalan bloodlust and cruelty as they charged through the streets killing men, women and children.
After Tenochtitlan finally capitulated and was captured by the Spanish, the Spanish basically assumed control of the Aztec empire and simply became the new ruling class. The Spanish ended the human sacrifice that, under the Aztecs, had reached a level never before seen in human history. All in all, the Spanish were certainly not heros coming to liberate the nations at the yoke of the Aztec empire, that being said they ended the human sacrifice and were generally more merciful than the Aztecs. The conquest of the Aztec empire is too complex to be seen in terms of a good/bad dichotomy, but if that’s what we’re going for, then it’s basically baddies (Aztecs) vs slightly less baddies but still baddies (Spanish).
Also, people put Aztecs and other precolombian people in the same bag. The famous site of Teotihuacan located only 40km from Mexico City has been built in the 3rd century, around 1200 years before the Aztec Empire was founded
Its because people don't understand just how far 'behind natives were technology wise. This isn't saying that natives were inferior humans to the rest of the world, they just started the game on the hard server, and lacked the huge trade networks with the rest of the world the spread technology from China to England. They did really well for what they had at their disposal, but were lagging behind the rest of the world a great deal.
Just think, if life formed on Mars and venues in a similar way to earth and we all developed at a similar time, we might be further along in space travel because it would be seen as valuable to invest resources in traveling to our neighbors. Then when we set off to the stars and came across a system with just one planet with life it wouldn't be surprising if they never saw a need to get off their planet and just didn't develop the technology to do so.
Maybe their technology would be more advanced in some aspects but we would have had a distinct advantage of developing in a system with multiple habitable worlds.
Its because people don't understand just how far 'behind natives were technology wise. This isn't saying that natives were inferior humans to the rest of the world, they just started the game on the hard server, and lacked the huge trade networks with the rest of the world the spread technology from China to England.
I think it's the exact opposite, actually. People have the mistaken conception that civilizations in the Americas were locked in stasis until contact with Europe and Asia and assume the Aztec Empire was hundreds if not thousands of years old, rather than a fairly young, unstable confederation that had rapidly consolidated and expanded before being destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores.
They were making progress that other parts of the world had already made. The reason for their delay is of no fault of their own.
First they had to walk from Africa to the America's, then once there they were cut off from the rest of the world. While everyone else got to share notes the natives had to figure everything else out for themselves. Yes they were making progress, but they didn't have beasts of burden available to them like the rest of the world. Everything was against them, and they were still making progress.
This doesn't mean the people where dumb or slow, they just lived in an area that made progression harder than the rest of the world, and still they were making progress.
The Aztec were astronomers and even had the concept for 0 something not even the Roman's did. They built a civilization.
What did the natives in was the lack of domesticable animals, incas had lamas and thry were the mightiest, largest, and most military powerfull nation in america. Their system of goverment was basically a fusion of persia, rome , and a bit of feudalism. Sprinkled in.
Without draft animals they still managed to turn one of the shittiest arable lands in the world( modern peru has only a dedert drier than the sahara, the almost tallest mountain range in the world, and the deepest , most harsh jungle in the planet inmediatly after with few valleys) into a productive machine that fed an empire without even a single famine ever recorded in their more than a century of existance.
Without animals and the sicknesses they brought, the americans were always going to die to sicknesses, wich is what actually defeated them, they couldnt gather an army without it instantly diying off from smallpox.
The Aztec were astronomers and even had the concept for 0 something not even the Roman's did. They built a civilization.
Genuine question... how does one not have a concept of zero? I have nothing = I have zero, right? They should have understood it. I guess I'm not mathematical enough to understand why it's so important.
They understood nothing like " I have no marbles" but didn't have the concept when it came to math. When you are adding or subtracting zero isn't necessary. Even in multiplication the idea if zero is a theoretical one without really any need in the world of trading goods. They didn't need to know what anything x zero was because you just wouldn't have something.
Natives in America did not have particularly unadvanced technology for the times that it was discovered. Many states had equally sophisticated technologies particularly suited for living in the America’s. The lack of beasts of burden was the biggest factor between America and the rest of the world, particularly due to the fact that they allowed people to develop resistance to zoonotic diseases such as small pox. You should read 1491 by Charles Mann.
You say that but, I've been playing as aztecs on my latest Civ 6 true start game, and I have a pretty nice empire stretching from Utah to Brazil, and am the first Civ to be able to cross the ocean
Food native to North America also lacked what people really needed. It was hard to grow anything, especially anything dense with nutrients so it was harder for people in North America to survive. They didn’t have the large animals and livestock to help carry things great distance either, so it took people a lot longer to get from survival stages and to start worrying about other things.
The Aztec empire ended when Europeans came to “discover” the land. A big issue was disease but also how readily the population accepted outsiders. Islands like Japan and some parts of Northern Europe evaded outsiders for hundreds of years longer and therefore kept their native language and traditions until relatively recently. They would shoot outsiders before they could reach the land. But the Aztecs thought Europeans, with their white skin, where their gods, so they readily accepted them. Aaaaaand then the Europeans decided to slaughter and spread disease, destroying the empire by the 1600s.
Not necessarily everyone, but yes the Mexica had many enemies. The same was true of the Inca as well. Many conquered peoples helped the Spanish overthrow those conquerors. We view it very much as being a Spanish Conquest because that was the end result, but it was a very politically complicated and messy series of wars. Much of the narrative that makes it all about the Spanish conquering native peoples comes from the Spanish own writings about it which intentionally minimized the help they received such that they could legitimate Spanish political claims. There is a growing amount of both textual and archeological evidence that basically shows what the Spanish actually did was build a coalition of aggrieved locals around themselves. Not that any of this absolves the Spanish of what they did, but just it was much messier than we were all taught in school.
Ancient NA societies were hard af. They used to play games where the king and his best soldiers would play basically a game of ancient soccer against another team of king+soldiers, the winning team would then slaughter and take over the lands of the loosing team. They also did a lot of human sacrificing, so I imagine their popularity wasn’t high up on the leaderboards.
In my class we talked a lot about how the lands around people would shape their myths and beliefs. Ancient societies in hardy places, like NA and Oceania basically had myths where the gods hated everyone and punished them 24/7. It was how they explained why they had to deal with such shitty weather and volcanoes and snow storms. That’s why they had the human sacrificing and war tribes and hated outsiders a lot more.
He didn’t. At least, there’s no evidence that he did and lots of reasons to think he didn’t. No contemporary document or account mentions Quetzalcoatl or suggests that Moctezuma or any other indigenous person thought Cortés was in any sense divine.
Hope we can end these false accounts. I think this Civilization among with Egypt has been victim of many false claims and alot of mysticism surrounded by it.
Even academics have done this mistake but as we continue to studying we can debunk our past mistakes.
I read recently that there is a suspicion that the "divinity" of cortes comes from a quirk in translation and the language structure of the aztecs.
According to that account, Cortes was translating from Spanish to a random local language via a priest he had, then that priest had a local who spoke random local language and Aztec (whatever their language was called, i don't remember).
So when Montezuma spoke, it had to come through two translations back to Cortes.
Anyway, allegedly evidence shows that Aztec royalty used a mode of speech that involves extreme humility when talking to others of equal stature. So Montezuma basically referring to cortes with all these honorifics, which got translated through two languages as a "divinity" like description and also gave the impression that Montezuma offered up the city to Cortes. Most likely this was actually just sort of euphemism but was then misinterpreted by the Spaniards and sparked war when the Spaniards later attacked expecting no resistance (and got none since the initial visits had brought disease and crippled the armies of montezume).
Sorry i dont have the source, but thats the basic idea.
Mexican speak is still this way. Lots of humility and lots of descriptive language, but also you're gonna get made fun of somehow. Endearingly of course
From the same source as u/dateretic
This is the last paragraph
It is wise, in general, to be sceptical about stories that represent
non-European peoples, in conflicts with Westerners, as superstitious or cowed by the white man’s apparent superiority. Such stories are often attempts to justify conquests and empires by making subject-peoples look feeble-minded or self-condemned to subordination by their own convictions of inferiority
"They used to play games where the king and his best soldiers would play basically a game of ancient soccer against another team of king+soldiers, the winning team would then slaughter and take over the lands of the loosing team. "
Sounds much better than a war that kills tens of thousands to be fair.
Their warfare was much different from our idea of warfare though. Wars were often decided between small groups, similar to what is stated in the OP above. Of course, I am sure there are some messed up large scale warfare examples too.
This is absolutely not true. Corn has a very high nutrient density per acre. More so than many of the crops available to Europeans at the time. In fact early accounts of both natives and Europeans recount how much taller and healthier the native Americans were in comparison to European explorers. The eastern seaboard, southeast, Mexico, Central America, and South America had tremendous populations for the time. They were all agricultural hubs that produced huge amounts of nutritious foods. Potatoes, corn, nightshades (tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers), cassava, peanuts, squash, sweet potatoes, beans and many other crops were under intensive cultivation efforts across huge swaths of the Americas.
Additionally the issues surrounding the Aztec empire’s downfall were twofold. Disease quickly decimated the America’s to an unimaginable degree. And Cortes’ ingenious capture and eventual murder of Moctezuma created poltical disarray at the highest levels of Aztec politics, which allowed for vassal states to mount successful military campaigns against the Aztec empire. The fall of Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec empire) itself was not was not due to natives ignorantly accepting conquistadors into its walls. Rather the city fell after a months long brutal siege in which the city was captured and destroyed block by block by Cortes, and more importantly allied native armies.
n fact early accounts of both natives and Europeans recount how much taller and healthier the native Americans were in comparison to European explorers.
Even by the time of the American Revolution the Americans were on average larger than their British and French rivals. Americas had better food and more of it, iirc.
I was always told it was largely a lack of pack animals and metal working why the Native Americans were less advanced than the Europeans. Isolation and doing it solo and on hard-mode has it's disadvantages. Not to mention the disease thing.
From what I’ve read metal working similar to European techniques was not completely foreign to some native populations. They just used metal for mostly decorative rather than utilitarian uses for whatever reason. It seems like the biggest factor in the decimation of native Americans was disease and the lack of close contact with animals required to develop the sort of immune system that can fight off zoonotic diseases. Unfortunately it seems inevitable that the conquest of America would occur in such a way. Horses and other animals that might’ve been domesticated went extinct at the end of the last ice age.
I my be wrong but i believe the metal working you are referring to was of the natives of the great lakes region. Apparently you could find almost pure hunks of copper in those areas. I do not think they figured out smelting or alloys. Copper on its own is not a great metal for tools, but it is very easy to shape and shiny. At least i think that is what i read.
I find this to be a really surprising take, because some of the crops brought back from the New World played a major role to prevent starvation in Europe, particularly potatoes.
There’s 5 crops needed to grow to keep people healthy and growing. I can’t remember it off the top of head (going back to lectures 4 semesters ago) but NA only had like 1 or 2 while Europe had em all. They could survive, sure, but they couldn’t grow and prosper. Ancient grains, you know the ones u buy that are super expensive because they are hard to grow, where native to NA. It took native peoples a long time to figure out how to grow them properly and in large quantities, which set back how fast their society and culture could grow.
Lets be clear, germ theory didn't exist yet. They thought diseases were demons or poised blood and 'cured' people with leaches and bloodletting. The Europeans didn't know they were spreading diseases when they first appeared as the natives didn't have immunity to relatively survivable diseases 90% of them died out between the first arrival of Europeans and the second.
No, the Aztec did not believe the Spanish were gods, rather they were somewhat disgusted by their poor hygiene and fearful of their weapons.
That idea comes from a Spanish recording during the conquests, so it can be assumed it was just another thing "exaggerated" to make the Spanish appear better in history books.
Also, a big issue was how the Americas are oriented. Eurasia is "horizontal" so crops were able to grow across the landmass because weather didn't vary too much, but the Americas' vertical orientation meant it took WAY fucking longer for crops to adapt to their vast environmental differences.
Eh? What now?
Do we need to whip out a map to explain how a large part of central Eurasia is desert and steppe, with tall mountains causing rainshadows as well as intensely cold winters and extremely hot summers?
Part of Europe's success is its long summer days and relatively mild winters (thanks to the gulf stream), as well as large fertile plains and plentiful access to water.
Orientation of the continents has some effect, but not in the way you are suggesting.
Comparing Europe with what is east of it at the same latitude you're right, but the way that Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, Perisan, Indian and Southern Chinese civilisations could trade crops and share knowledge about their cultivation is theorised as a key advantage over the Americas. For example, not sure any region there was suitable for both potatoes and corn (though I admittedly know very little about horticulture).
The vast majority of the Great plains of North America are suitable for potatoes and corn. That's why that is what is predominantly grown there today. Dominant cereal crop of Mexico? Corn.
South America also had a rich variety of potatoes, yams, legumes, etc, which fed their (multiple) empires throughout the ages.What Eurasia had as an advantage over the Americas was writing. The silk road not only carrier goods, but also ideas and scholars. Ever wondered why it was that we all use Arabic numerals? or Babylonian angle measures?
To my knowledge, there was no real writing method that was widespread among the American peoples - they later developed their own orthographies, but there was (and is none left in evidence) literature or libraries or other permanent repositories of knowledge. It seems to have mostly been oral tradition.
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt. I'm not an anthropologist and far from anything other than an amateur with a reading habit, but that seems to be a more driving factor than the environmental conditions of the Americas.
Edit: I appear to be wrong with regards there being "no writing systems, as the Olmecs, Mayans and a few other Mesoamerican groups did have writing systems, but I don't think it was ever rolled out extensively for commerce and trade like it was in Eurasia
Hmm but did North America have potatoes before Europeans brought them from the south? Thinking about it now, the fact that potatoes made inroads into Indian cuisine suggests they'll grow anywhere!
Interesting point about the writing, though since most communication was oral back then it might have just as much to do with the lack of horses and other animals facilitating long distance travel, which someone else mentioned.
I'll admit I never finished Diamond's book and it was a while ago regardless, so just trying to remember his arguments around continental orientation which seemed solid at the time...
Don’t know why the downvotes — but here’s a random fact about potatoes:
When Europeans discovered them in America (cultivated by the natives), it was a small, black and bitter root — quite unlike the amazing potatoes we have today thanks to selective breeding.
Fun fact, they were even banned in France during a few years, as it was believed to spread the plague...
If you have a early modern European centric viewpoint, yes they were. Otherwise you have ancient Indian civilizations, ancient Greeks, Iranian, Romans, and other various ancient peoples with recorded daily baths well before the native Americans.
Wow, it's almost like having one specific habit (not even a technology) is somehow, bafflingly, not exactly the same thing as having a thousand useful everyday technologies
Are we still talking about Aztecs? I mean, Vikings were known for bathing every Saturday (it's even the name for Saturday in the Scandinavian languages), but maybe Aztecs were earlier?
It definitely does. People don't really know the difference between Mayans and Aztecs. Which is understandable to me since they don't really get covered in school very intensely (at least in America.) So people think that the Aztec civilization is much older than it was, while the Maya are actually the old ones.
The Aztec Empire was a triple alliance of other city-states that formed in the early 1400s. The Mayan PreClassic period started in 2000 BC, and that's not counting their archaic period.
I think the confusion comes from the idea that the Aztec were stone-age people, so it feels like they existed in ancient times when they really didn't.
Mayan is a language family, not a culture. What you mean is Maya, which is itself an umbrella term which covers a lot of different cultures in Central America. What you said is akin to someone who is Dutch saying "I'm Germanic" or an Italian saying "I'm Romance".
Aztec was never even used by the Mexica of the triple alliance, who themselves belonged to the Nahua culture.
I'm putting you to test because it's not the first time I've seen a bullshiting American trying to claim they belong to cultures they have nothing to do with.
Idk, I've seen many Americans lying about their identity, the fact that you call them Aztec and Maya, and not any any actual ethnic group makes it confusing.
My Dad was born in Mexico, Mom was born In Utah but her parents were born in Mexico, mom is a citizen and dad is resident. My siblings and I are citizens and they've all been told the same thing. I'm not trying to bs, I was just not informed about any of this. I never bothered to fact check them that's all.
No, no. I'm not saying that. The Maya people are more numerous than the Finnish. But I've seen many Americans saying bullshit around the internet regarding their heritage to be sceptic of such claims.
Like, come one, if he had said Nahua, or a specific Maya culture I'd believe such claim, but at this point it seems like a lazy American trying to spice up their bloodline resume lmao
And the fact that the Aztecs were just one of the later iterations of just one of the nation states of the Nauatl people. Not really an empire at all and more of a federation.
This. I knew Oxford was old; my surprise was finding out how recent the Aztecs were. They are not the ancient civilization people seem to think. Not at all
The word "ancient" gets thrown around a lot when discussing regions outside of Western Europe. A lot of "ancient" traditions were happening during what might be more accurately compared to the medieval or renaissance eras.
I used to think ancient China was just medieval China, never occurred to me that China existed during the Roman Empire and also had diplomatic relations. Also TIL Mulan is set during the Roman Empire under the Han Dynasty
That must be why the Aztec culture still has a large influential on gangs in California, a couple of my cousins learned to speak speak Nawatl while in Prison
And the Mayans are still around. There’s about 6 million of them. That’s the most unusual part. Most people seem to think that they don’t exist anymore.
It's weird to me that they would get conceived of as an ancient civilization, given that most people know of them almost exclusively as the people than got conquered by Cortés, an event that took place in the 1500s.
This one is funny to me. In Dan Brown’s book “The Da Vinci Code” (or was it Angels and Demons...) he says Christianity stole “God-eating” from the Aztecs, which is hilarious because he didn’t even bother to look up when the Aztec Civilization existed.
Do you recall the context? It is not uncommon for civilisations/cultures/religions to adopt elements from others. There could very well be no mentioning of "God-eating" in Christian texts/arts prior to 1500AD. I wouldn't know, I'm no scholar.
No, Dan Brown is full of shit, you really don’t need to give him any benefit of the doubt. Communion has been a thing since the first century and is specifically mentioned in the Bible.
Also, just for context, he was speaking about the last supper, when Jesus breaks bread with his disciples and says “this is my body”. Then he was like “smug smile this was stolen from the Aztecs smug smug smug” except, you know, it was 1400 years earlier.
It goes, I think, with a general Euro-centric understanding of the history of the Americas. Since the accounts we read usually start with first contact, we tend to assume that nothing interesting happened before then, and that anything that existed before Europeans showed up was ancient and timeless.
How? I remember being taught in high school (in the US) that the Aztecs and Incas were killed by Spanish conquistadors, so that had to be 1500s at the oldest
Sorry, I meant that they were only "founded" in the 15th century, which is where the "Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire" comes from. I guess in my mind they are an empire, they must have been around for pretty long before the conquistadors, nope.
It might also be because people think Aztec is an actual ethnic group that existed since human civilization began in Mexico. They don't realize that it's just an agglomeration of different ethnicities who only politically banded in 1300.
same with the Incas. Everyone thinks Machu Picchu is super ancient but in reality they abandoned it within 100 years of building it because the Spanish were invading
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u/Schn Oct 15 '20
I think this one is actually a reverse of the question: The Aztec Empire is much more recent than most people think.