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To correct Swamp Yankees answer, Aztecs were not "like" Mayans, they were Mayans. If your goal is to look at ancient civilizations and just insult them or consider them inferior because their customs are denounced by your own civilization, you will have a hard time understanding history. Injecting subjective, modern-day judgements on ancient civilizations like calling them "bloodthirsty" is just bad-mouthing ancient civilizations and not objective historically. While individually, the everyday people were probably just typical people for the most part, as a group, they are easily one of the most internally violent and bloodthirsty cultures to have ever existed beyond the tribal level. So, yes, the Aztecs were a violent society. They could be whipped up into a bloodthirsty frenzy being motivated by self-preservation and group psychological dynamics. The common people lived in constant fear that they would be next up upon the pyramid of death. While there is some debate over the scope, even the low estimates far outstrip what the Europeans or Asians ever did during the same time periods.Ĭulturally, it was a culture of fear, the common result of an authoritarianism. The truth of the matter is that the Aztecs weren't rivaled in the deliberate wholesale killing of civilians until the 20th century by the Nazis. The Aztecs were both quite civilized and quite brutal. Some of this romanticization and obfuscation was in reaction to earlier historians who regarded Aztecs as uncivilized savages, which was also false. This "noble savage" or "romantic racism" train of thought attempts to obscure and downplay the brutality found in certain, non-European, cultures, such as the Aztecs. They'll attempt to equate things like the Spanish Inquisition (if they're on the anti-religious political left) or modern day abortion (if they're on the religious political right) with the human sacrifice practiced by the Aztecs. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire.įirst of all, there is an attempt by some current historians to use cultural/moral relativism when it comes to Europeans and Mesoamerican cultures in this time period. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth of the Mexica empire.
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Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. On page 134:īetween 15, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. While some of these executions were of murderers and other scoundrels, a lot of them were for petty political and religious reasons - exactly the sort of thing that gets you nominated for this year's sacrifice in Tenochtitlan. Mann points out in his book 1491, pre-modern European cultures were just as bloodthirsty, per capita, as the mesoamerican cultures: they called them executions rather than sacrifices. (Showing once again, it's better the devil you know than the one you don't.) It got so bad, the client states of the Three Part Alliance, who had to supply the bulk of the sacrifices, despite massive depopulation due to disease, basically revolted as soon as Cortez showed up. No apocalyptic justifications apply, they just killed a bunch of people for their religious rites. Human Sacrifice, and lots of it, were common in pre-columbian Mesoamerican cultures: not just the Aztecs, but the Mayans and a bunch of others, too. It goes into many important details, as well. A mix of augury and science.Įdit: this excellent paper, on ixiptla and Toxcatl, was published by Izabela Wilkosz. In my paper, I present evidence that the priestly classes saw the sacrificial practice as a way to glean necessary insights about the future of the civilization. The way that songs were written, and evolved over time, about these ixiptla, we can infer that people took this practices as vital, if not serious, part of the cycle of life. Certainly, it is known that these people (ixiptla) were drugged. Whether this was a way to 'clear out undesirables' is not yet clear. No one charged toward it.īeing chosen for one of the lesser Divine Powers was probably even less attractive, to the individual. The Aztecs saw that representing yourself as one of these Divine Powers ("teotl") was a 'holy' thing - but only those representing the 'big 4' divinities had the national stage, and even then the selection process was something of a random lot. I wrote a paper related this topic, for peer review.īasically, the general story (maybe "propaganda") of state ritual sacrifice was that those sacrificed were becoming god-like, and so were elevated to the holiest status achievable - perhaps (in a distant way) like suicide bombers today.