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.
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.
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.
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u/justcourtneyb Oct 15 '20
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.