Teaching Aztecs to an 11yr old

Tell them the aztecs invented peanut butter while you make lunch you overpaid babysitter.

Or give them popcorn and tell them the Aztecs ate it that too. Or better yet make the Chocolate drink.

Thank you. Can I stretch this out by covering the differences between the 3 major mesoamerican civilisations or were they all basically the same?

Why? Seriously, why? Why does everyone find this garbage culture interesting? They were bloodthirsty savages and it's excellent that the Spanish crushed them.

Just show the kid cartel beheading videos.

>"You see Johnny, the Aztecs were exactly like this, except they dressed in faggot feathers and instead of coke they killed and mutilated for their gods."

That's basically it.

t. knows nothing of the aztecs, incas or maya

If the kid is a boy, he will love to hear about the sacrifices and fucked up shit aztecs did.

The Aztecs killed a higher proportion of their own people than the Khmer Rouge did of theirs, they absolutely were bloodthirsty savages who deserved the annihilation they got

Khmer Rouge has nothing to do with the Aztecs retard.

You might want to re-think teaching anyone anything about history

>I don't know anything about mesoamerican history, the post

Actually Amerindians had a higher development rate compared to europeans.

The only history worth teaching is European history.

Aztec "history" is just providing random unconnected information about savages from the past.

No, I just don't want to worship brown people because they're brown.

I don't want to, because it disgusts me. We're talking about a culture that practiced ritual killing on an industrial scale, and thus fuck whatever "accomplishments" they might've had. They were sick.

In essence, I'll say it again - the Aztecs of yesterday are drug cartels of today, except with less gay attire. Everything else is exactly the same.

Yes, thank you mister Rosenblatt.

How can you be disgusted by something you have no idea about?
Do you not study Germany because of the Holocaust? Do you not study the USSR because of the Holodomor, and the gulags?
Honestly baffling how you can completely write off an entire region and a thousand year history based on your nonexistent knowledge.

>sacrifice
That's literally what europeans and middle-easterners were doing for thousands of years, in fact mesoamericans reached that stage in less time.

You can worship whoever you want, boy. However Amerindians have more civilization potential than europeans. That's a fact.

>their own people

>Aztecs
>People

For starters, don't listen to Veeky Forums for advice, 99% of the people here don't know shit about Mesoamerican stuff. I do though.

To begin with, you are going to want to make sure your sources are good, since there's a huge amount of bullshit information out there. FAMSI is good but probably too dense. mexicolore.co.uk is generally accurate and is aimed at the general public. I'd take a look at it. [spoiler]Askhistorians on reddit is also good, there's a random selection of good threads here on mesoamerican shit: pastebin.com/EKKCpgT3 [/spoiler]. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805201/ is also a good source on their sanitation and medicinal practices, which were actually ahead of europe's

With that in mind, I would try to focus on the following points

1. That the "Aztecs" were not really a single people, and what most people think of when they hear the word Aztec are in fact the Mexica of Tenochtitlan. The "Aztec empire" is the political alliance of the city states of Tenochtiitlan, Tlacopan, and Texococo and what the 3 controlled as tributaries.

2. That Mesoamerica was almost universally urban and filled with complex, state societies. Cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants were the norm, as was complex governments and socieites. They had books, worked metal (copper and bronze), and had the wheel (they just didn't use it for transportation) contrary to what most people think. Particular emphasis should be placed on Tenochtitlan, as it was th 5th largest city in the world, was built on a lake, and had venice level canals, aquaducts, causways, and other complex waterwork systems.

3. While human sacrifice was a huge part of Aztec, and all of Mesoamerican culture, that they did not generally sacrifice their own people and that it was more a part of how they waged war then anything. The links I posted above go into this a lot, and i'll clarify in the next post when I reply to and 1/2

Inca are Andean, not Mesoamerica. This is like saying India or China are Mediterranean civs.

They mostly sacrificed enemy warriors. You know like how they otherwise would have killed them in battle. And even then only some were sacrificed. The rest that were captured were enslaved.

That was my point

is that why europeans went on to rule the entire world and not them?

cont:

4. That the Aztecs and Maya weren't the only civilizations in Mesoamerica. I mainly focused on Aztec stuff in these posts since that's what the thread title said, and I know less about the Maya, but civilization arose in Mesoamerica with the Olmec around 1400 BC. Between then and when the Spanish showed up, that's around 3000 years. There are hundreds of cultures. In summary, though, you can mention:

>Tarascans/Purepecha: Empire to the northwest of the Aztecs, second largest state in mesoamerica at the time of spanish arrival. Repelled an Aztec invasion, were the best metallurgists in the region

>Tlaxcala: A confederacy of city states that the Aztecs were conquering when the spanish showed up. Allied with the spanish. They operated like a republic and had a senate

>Olmec: The earliest complex culture in Mesoamericas. Had early roots since 2000 BC or so, but developed the first cities in the region around 1400 BC. Started many of the cultural practices that would inform mesoamerican, such as the ball game, human sacrifice, etc

>Teotihaucans: Built Teotihaucan, a massive city that existed from around 0ad to 500ad, and has Aztec levels of influence in their day. Even Invaded Maya city states and installed puppet rulers there. Tenochtitlan took many urban design traits from teotihaucan, and like Tenochtitlan, teotihaucan was in the top 5 largest cities in the world at the time.

You can refer to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_chronology. Also, there was no "Maya empire", the maya existed as seperate city states and kingdoms, and The Inca aren't mesoamerican and were 3000+ miles away.

5. That the Spanish won mainly not due to superior tech, but thanks to having hundereds of thousands of native allies and armies that helped them topple the Aztecs; many of which were Aztec cities that flipped sides and due to diseases crippling the Aztecs, and that the Spanish conquest still took decades after the Aztecs fell.

Shit, need another post

2/3

>retard with a gun against a child genius
Hmm...?

And that's it for the Aztecs, I don't feel comfortable doing the Maya since I know less, even moreso for the Inca. Focus on those 5 things, and use the sources I recommend. Since these are 11 year olds, of the 5 things I mentioned, I would spend the most time on how rad of a city Tenochtitlan was with Venice like elements and shit, and warfare/sacrifice stuff.

Also, here's a images for you to use. Unfortunately imgur will downscale/compress these, but if you want the uncompressed versions let me know.

imgur.com/a/B9kVS
imgur.com/a/RW54Q

I had more but imgur is being dumb and won't let me upload more

>I don't know shit and refuse to know more because of this "fact" that's not actually a fact and if I bothered to learn more i'd know it's bullshit

The Aztecs weren't worse then any military expansionistic state. Pretty much anybody they were sacrificing would have been somebody that they captured in battle after the enemies's lines broke: In european warfare, this is where most of the deaths in battle happened. literally the only difference is it being later vs now. Also the numbers that get repeated in popular culture are massively inflated. I can clarify on this if you want

To be clear, the Mexica weren't saints: They had a strict class system, they were, agaiin, military expansionists, and extracted heavy tributes from those they conquered. Also around 20 years afte the Mexica of Tenochtitlan allied with Tlacopan and Texcoco and actually formed the Aztec empire; during the rule of Montezuma 1, the class system was made even more strict and Aztec religion was basically re-written to place a greater empahsis on the collection of captives to justify their own military expansionsim. But, again, none of those things are exceptional: plenty of empires and kingdoms in europe and asia had strict class systems and used shady shit to justify their militarism.

he's actually right: Amerindian societies were less advanced overall, but that's because they arrived to the Americas and settled down tens of thousands of years later then eurasian ones.

Humans arrived in Mesopotamia 60k years ago, and then developed civilization around 6k years ago, so a 54k year gap. Humans arrived in Mesoamerica 15k years ago, and developed civilization around 3k years ago, or a 12k year gap, which is significantly faster then in Eurasia.

When comparing how fast they developed after that, though, they are mostly on par: Mesoamerica was mostly Bronze and Iron age level for most facets of their culture (with a few exceptions: They were behind bronze age in terms of metallurgy and maritime tech, but ahead of iron in terms of hydraulics, sanitation, agriculture, and population sizes) and Ancient greece, the transition from bronze age to iron age in the old world, happened around 3k years after the first civilizations in eurasia; so Mesoamerica being at that level when the Spanish showed up makes sense, since as mentioned, they had 3k years of civilization.

I think the Mexican calendrical system is worth mentioning. Time and the idea of cyclical elements are important throughout the world. Prehispanic Mexicans constantly observed astronomic cycles and they viewed a relationship between what happened in the heavens and on Earth. Mainly, they watched the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and Venus, and the conversion of the observed cycles into numbers result in what is known as the Mayan and Aztec calendars, which likely were successors to an older Olmec calendar.
One of the main characteristics of the calendar is that its dates don't repeat every year as other calendars: the combination of year, month, and day only repeats every 52 years, a period called Xiuhmolpilli.
In the aztec calendar, the year has 18 months of 20 days each, plus 5 and 1/4 days called Nemontemi. These 20 days are attached to a specific symbol (rabbit, lizard, house, etc).
The 18 months of the aztec calendar contain one festival dedicated to a certain personified element of nature. The aztec society was mainly an agricultural society, like all precolombian civs, and most festivals were dedicated to Tlaloc, personification of rain. Following Tláloc in importance was the personification of the sun as Huitzilopóchtli.
By our standards, the mexican year starts in march.
Look up pictures of the mayan and aztec codices for the kid to look at.

Thank you very much for all this. It gives me a lot to look into further over the next few days.

>They were bloodthirsty savages
>Had a number system, writing system, knew mathematics, knew astronomy, had expansive knowledge on agriculture techniques
>Savages

Nice job brainlet.

the skinning of the princess daughter of the Maya king who gave them lands

they only had one cultural reference: the four priests of Huitzilopochtli

don't underestimate the child: tell it how all those beliefs stemmed from nomadic peoples whose economical core was agriculture and animals were of minimal use to them; human labour/manpower was the greatest resource and as such was offered to the "gods", like all societies who were based on agriculture, before they transitioned to animal herding.

how do you know he was referring to the Inca?

maybe he was referring to Teotihuacan, Maya and Aztecs.

HAHA! FUCK YOU

search youtube clips of "Horrible Histories"