Redpill me on the Aztecs

I was under he impression that they did have bronze tools, but Obsidian wasn more effective for cutting implements so they stuck with it for knives and wepons.

You are correct, it was alot more common for jewlery then it was for tools you would usually see bronze on axes, hammers or hoes

they also crafted with gold, silver and copper

>not advanced enough agriculturally not to overpopulate from over farming, salt their land as a result
They didn't exceed the carrying capacity in the Valley of Mexico.
Haven't seen a source mentioning the salting of the land though.

>Ayo we stacked stones n farmed grainz n shieeet! We even used to look at the stars and count to ten!! We wuz civilized!!!

HOL UP

Exhibit A:

They had crappy crop rotation that, in addition to causing soil nutrients problems, eventually caused soil salinity. This, really, is caused by any set of crops when you don't let the soil rest long enough and by irrigation.

Which is a cautionary tale, as while our current farming and irrigation methods do all sorts of things to mitigate this, eventually, even with modern techniques, you wind up in the same boat.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1752-1688.1972.tb05100.x/abstract

Get ready to eat your babies.

Actually, Aztecs counted in twenties.
/autizmo

Interestingly thats the same things that resulted in the end of the first civilisations in mesopotamia. And they too ended up going full brutal sacrificing people and shit.

It's probably babbys first lesson of civilisation. Don't overfarm.

I'm all ready to eat them, but I would appreciate a citation

Jesus fucking christ why were indo-arabic numerals so hard for humans to invent

>GUYS I HAVE A GREAT IDEA, LETS DRAW A FUCKING TREE FOR FOURHUNDRED

You have no idea what you're going on about. Before you say anything, tell me what a milpa is.

Happens a lot in isolated communities. There's a lotta population booms followed by cannibalism and human sacrifice in the world, including around the ancient mediterranean and Europe. There's a running theory that such incidents are the primary cause, but no others were quite as large as the Aztec's and the Mayan's.

shut up relativist cuck

Micenan tier advanced

typical Veeky Forums posting with no knowledge of the subject. It's obviously a ribbed dildo.

>Get ready to eat your babies.
While it's true, soil salination remains a problem to this day, the only reason the Mayans and Aztecs, and various other isolated communities, were completely screwed, is that there was no comperable agricultural empire to trade with, in order to let their soil rest and compensate for the temporary downturn in food supply through trade.

In the modern world, every nation is interconnected with every other via the international trade and transportation network, and thus nations can trade with one another to deal with any temporary agricultural crisis. Even if it makes the price of food rise temporarily, it's generally far from baby-eating fatal, particularly if the nation in question has a diversified economy, and thus isn't dependant entirely on its agricultural sector.

In the VERY long term - like millenias hence, it may become a problem, even then, only a tiny fraction of arable land is actually in use, and with modern technology, it's even possible to reclaim more land, if need be (albeit, it isn't cheap). Thus, while soil salinity maybe a problem on the local level, it isn't going to be an epidemic requiring world wide population reduction anytime soon (especially since the world wide spread of women's liberation, forcing women to have careers, is rapidly reducing population growth anyways.)

Ill put it in this context: The Agricultural Revolution happened in Afro Eurasia about 10,000 B.C. The American Agricultural Revolution happened about 1,000 B.C. 3,000 years after their respective Agricultural Revolutions, the Aztecs and the Ancient Mesopotamians were about on equal footing. but tbqhf the Aztects were doing better.

They don't leave every field fallow and trade for food, they leave a proportion of their fields fallow like this user said

Built a bunch of huge buildings, had pretty advanced mathematics for a stone age civilization, that's pretty much it, they were dogshit otherwise.

Yeah in Eurasia it happened much earlier because the locals weren't retarded like the Americans.

there is no iron in Central america.

That only mitigates the problem, it doesn't end it entirely. And if your population is already too large to sustain, you end up not letting your remaining fields rest in desperation (and they need to rest for even longer when you're so close to the ocean).

Tell me about the Aztecs. Why did they wear the jaguar outfits?

gods n shit

No one cared who they were until... Fuck it...

The Aztec culture was created by Phoenician colonizers who created this identity and metaphysical matrix of thought for themselves as High Priests and Philosopher Kings of Atlantis, and formed a spiritual Tradition for the people of Mesoamerica built upon the structure of Atlantean culture and civilization as they conceived it

thats some good shit your smoking man

It's really not that outlandish. Events like this happened across the world at the hands of the earliest culture creators from civilizations that exhibited highly developed language and seafaring techniques. Men who were philosophically minded often developed poignant visions for the advancement and expansion of human cultural expression, taking this vision to a foreign land where they would present themselves as a herald of this divine vision and uplift a lower natured people into the fulfillment of this dream.

So rivers and lakes in other civilizations are/were clean?
Which cities?

Except the Phoenicians were gone long before the Aztecs ever put two bricks together.

Language was around long before the Phoenicians and neither the Mayans nor the Aztecs shared any similarities with Phoenician's in written language, nor did either of them have any advanced sea fairing techniques.

These colonizers would have been isolated and far removed from the wider Phoenician people, who would have created their own systems and structures of knowledge in their isolation in addition to adapting to the native people they came across.

You have no goddamn idea what your on about.

How did they get there without having those systems to begin with?

Seems the simpler explanation would be that the mesoamericans came up with their own, given that we see similar systems come up in every corner of the globe, and there's only so many lost Phoenician ships to go around.

They would have preserved this knowledge from their ancestors, slowly morphing it over generations.

While you might find that explanation sensible, that intrinsically similar structures of civilization and cultural expression just happened to emerge simultaneously in complete isolation from one another, like it's all just a simple coincidence, I'm drawn to the idea that in the earliest ages of civilization, there were culture creators driven by their visions for the development of the world that were circling the globe and actualizing these visions, creating entirely new matrices of thought and understanding of existence for humanity. These visionaries don't necessarily have to be Phoenicians, but they were of some culture that had a high developed language and knowledge of seafaring.

They would have preserved the advancements the Phoenicians had given them and built upon those. As it is, they were way behind the Phoenicians instead, and neither their culture nor their writing seems to have any relation to said.

And they didn't emerge simultaneously, they emerged hundreds to thousands of years apart, and the timeline doesn't coincide Phoenician civilization in any way, in addition to the fact that people were coming up with writing and boating, elsewhere in the world, long before the Phoenicians ever existed.

It's an even bigger stretch than Ancient Aliens.

It seems that, given enough time and proper circumstance, language leads to writing, watching plants grow leads to agriculture, agriculture and seasons leads to astrological calendars, and the fact that water is around leads to boats, regardless of where humans are in the world, no aliens or Phoenicians required.

I highly doubt Phoenician ships could cross the Atlantic ocean, IIRC the Phoenician ships would be suited to the smooth sailing of the Mediterranean, an inland sea. with the strait of Gibraltar acting as a natural tide breaker.

and even if they were to easily sail the Atlantic it would make much more sense to sail up or down along the coast line. The Scandinavians could have more feasibly established colonies in the new world, opposed to the phoneticians as the Scandinavians regularly sailed rivers and had the Arctic coastline to follow

Like I said, these civilization creators wouldn't necessarily have to all have been Phoenicians, but there certainly were Phoenician pioneers who did carry out such ventures in the world. Perhaps the Aztecs were met by colonizers from some other culture, but the essential concept of their civilization being formed by an Atlantean visionary remains the same.

Regardless of how far apart in time they were, the intrinsic similarities between the civilizations of Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia are too unique to simply be a coincidence. We're talking about a unity of higher ordered social structures and spiritual Tradition in two regions of the world total removed from one another.

I disagree with the assertion that these expressions of culture emerge solely from time and environment. Time and environment are factors, but they are exterior factors. Language, writing, agriculture, seafaring and philosophy are all instituted within a culture by design, united by the central authority and spiritual Tradition of it's people as a consolidated effort to realize a vision for civilization.

The Phoenicians who would have accomplished this wouldn't be representative of average Phoenician capabilities, nor would their ships represent average technology. These would have been truly exceptional individuals, among the most highly developed humans intellectually and spiritually to ever live, people who defined humanity in significant ways

Agrarian societies have intensively farmed the same plots of land for millenia without productivity dropping to zero so if there is something I have "no goddamn idea" about, these farmers obviously did. After depleting virgin soils they reach an equilibrium with the environment, they just have to leave fields fallow, collect dung and ash to fertilize their fields, use shadoofs to extend irrigation to land with a higher water table, provide adequate drainage and so forth.

I'm not even disagreeing with you, it won't get to baby eating point. Or at least this won't be the cause. Why so mad?

In all honesty, what exactly do you find so absurd about the notion that distant civilizations were shaped by a shared vision and matrix of thought, spread throughout the world by seafaring colonists?

You can't just dismiss the similarities between the cultures of the Mesoamerican people and the Mesopotamian people. I'm not just referring to exterior similarities of the physical structures of their architecture and temples, I'm referring to the inherent similarities of their spiritual Traditions and social orders. It's absurd to suggest that purely by coincidence, two extremely similar Priesthoods with similar social hierarchies would emerge in these distant cultures.

> concept of their civilization being formed by an Atlantean visionary remains the same
It's not as if the Phoenicians were sending fleets of ships 10,000 strong to go the straights of Gibraltar and sail across the Atlantic... Which is what you'd have to do to get even one across, given the odds of hitting a current strong enough to get you across, before you ran out of water, but not so strong that it destroyed the boat, given the size of the ships involved.

>1423588
>among the most highly developed humans intellectually and spiritually to ever live, people who defined humanity in significant ways
More like the most physically fit, and extraordinarily lucky, skilled sailors and fishermen. Not a lot of intellectuals and high priests going on suicidal sailing missions.

>1423739
Pyramids and stair steps were all over the world long before the Phoenicians ever put to bricks together. Physics simply makes pyramids the simplest large structure to make - as any child with some blocks knows. Beyond that, there's no similarities between the civilizations.

...and under no circumstances, do you enter a land with a written alphabet, and then go back to using fucking pictograms.

Nevermind the fact that the Mayan civilization began *before* the Phoenician, even if their cities didn't. Mayan artifacts with pictograms on them go as far back as 2000BC, the oldest Phoenician artifacts date back to 1050BC.

Probably, it's an apt methafor, but they had a more advanced agricultural base specially in the chinapas, and the one than made the plans for Tenochtitlan was a genius of great proportions than designed a fuckton of things than were delicate as fuck if not well maintained.
Impressive understanding of mathemathics and astronomy? Those were the Mayas, the Aztecs were more engineers, they had a complex set of believes and astronomy, but not at the level of the Mayas. They also borrowed a lot of the cultures of they surroundings, they were lifted nomads and only formed an empire in the last century before the Conquistadors. They also didn't suffer from European disaes after La noche triste, when one of the slaves than were in the new expedition than was send to capture Cortez and was persuaded to join him had the flu.

Regardless if you believe Atlantis actually existed or not, the philosophical and ideological concept of it most certain does exist, and has permeated through the development of human thought for thousands of years. It's clear that Tenochtitlan was the fulfillment of an Atlantean vision.

Like I said, these ventures of culture creation across the world were not only undertaken by the Phoenicians, I just believe that Phoenician intellectual and philosophical minds orchestrated a significant portion of these efforts. It could have been any culture that developed language and philosophical thought.These efforts likely came at great cost and might have often failed, but when they succeeded, they made a mark on human history that we're still talking about to this day.

It's the fact that social structures centered around pyramid style temple compounds exist all across the world that I believe there is a unity between them all. Like I said, I'm not simply talking about the physical structure of a pyramid, I'm talking about the spiritual and religious Traditions that they are built for, and the social hierarchies instituted by the Priesthoods that form within them. You can't dismiss those aspects, the actual definitive and interior aspects of what a pyramid is with material pragmatism.

All societies, even the most primitive, begin with religion at the top, so of course the first large structures are going to be religious in nature. It's also worth noting that, while they were all religious in nature, not all of these pyramids served the same religious purpose.

And yes, the pyramid is the epitome of pragmatic materialism, when it comes to making a large stable structure.

Maybe if everyone had suddenly started making skyscrapers, and using the same language and alphabet all at once, you might be onto something - even then, ancient aliens would be more likely, as there simply is no evidence of any civilization with the maritime technology to so efficiently seed the planet until the renaissance. So many of these civilizations have unique languages and alphabets, with nothing more in common than stars and seasons, the physical and environmental obstacles they faced, that they can only have developed independently of one another.

We all experience the same obstacles of resources, share the same Earth and sky, and are fairly genetically homogenous, so yes, there will always be some commonality among humans wherever they are. We'll all eventually figure out the seasons, and phi, the Fibonacci sequence, and make gods to explain it all, because they are all fundamentals within our environment and psyche. That doesn't mean we can't develop them independently from one another - there's no need for a group of super humans, or aliens, to spread that knowledge to every corner of the world, and they will, circumstances permitting, always be discovered on its own by any group of human minds well off enough to have the time and means to create civilization.

The jaguar warriors were kind of a warrior elite class (think of knighthood chapters or elite Greek hoplire groups) that earned the position through capturing a certain amount of enemies. This was a pretty common way for commoners to ascend into the nobility.

I also disagree with the notion that the development of civilization only progresses in a linear fashion, that language and knowledge wouldn't regress, like in the example of the Phoenician and Mayan languages you posted. Human history doesn't neatly build off of what came before, there have been entire ages of human effort that have been lost.

The theoretical proposition of Atlantis is that in a lost prehistory of humanity, there was a highly developed, intellectually advanced center of civilization in the world upon a lost island continent in the Atlantic Ocean. The civilizations of this continent were privy to higher ordered knowledge that allowed them to realize extraordinary feats of cultural and creative expression, feats of human creation that rival or overshadow any technological advancement in our known history, achieving the means to colonize much of the world before this center of civilization was lost, and along with it this ancient knowledge and it's fruits were lost as well.

Regardless if you believe this lost prehistory truly existed or not, this concept of lost knowledge and the notion of restoring civilization and human potential to it's fullest realization has influenced the thought processes and visions of the minds who have shaped the creation of cultures throughout the world. It isn't a coincidence that these ideas are expressed within all human civilization on earth.

>Human history doesn't neatly build off of what came before, there have been entire ages of human effort that have been lost.
Yeah, but you don't pass down the information about how to build and use pyramids, while also abandoning your written alphabet, the primary mechanism through which such information would be preserved.

> feats of human creation that rival or overshadow any technological advancement in our known history, achieving the means to colonize much of the world before this center of civilization was lost
The only description of Atlantis doesn't describe its inhabitants as god-like, only civilized and cultured. If they had been building galleons large enough to sail across the Atlantic, surely the descriptions would have been much more grandiose, and much more widespread.

>It isn't a coincidence that these ideas are expressed within all human civilization on earth.
There's nothing that these cultures have in common that couldn't be more easily explained by the fact that they all made up of the same species faced with the same obstacles and physics as a result of sharing the same world. Beyond that, they are far too diversified to share a common influence or culture. Just humans being human.

Your line of thinking feels counter intuitive to me, like you're conceiving of the development of human culture from it's most exterior factors which leads you to define it first and foremost by it's most inferior aspects and base commonalities rather than the unique differentiations. You're thinking from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

You assume that human intellectual development and cultural growth will just naturally occur within the masses of a population when met with the proper environmental conditions. I disagree with this assertion. All development of human civilization was brought about from truly exceptional pioneering minds who were able to united the disparate people of a region of land with a unified vision of a higher ordered way of life. It isn't a matter of simply figuring these things out and piecing together a society, these things are brought about by design.

Let's look at Tenochtitlan for an example. There is no way you can make the claim that the design of this city was rooted in pragmatic materialism, there was clearly a profound, intellectually and creatively complex vision for what this city and it's culture was to be, and I believe that the mind who conceived of this city had the dream of restoring the Atlantean ideal of civilization to humanity.

You're only looking at these civilizations in terms of their dissected, base aspects and mechanistic functions, you aren't looking at the civilization as a whole, where each aspect in relation to one another become a whole that is greater than each part on it's own.

What I'm suggesting is that all of these disparate civilizations across all of humanity each had at least some fraction of this same vision of a lost Atlantean civilization that they were all attempting to restore in the context of the nature of their individual people.

There are many different ways knowledge is preserved and passed through generations. Knowledge was often kept only in the hands of the elite in the ancient world, and it's not unfeasible that these hypothetical colonizers would keep a language for themselves separate from the language of the people they were colonizing. There has always been a great deal of knowledge that has been far removed from the populist circles of society, either by being kept intentionally secret or just through it only capturing the interest of a select intellectual caste of society.

We likely have very different conceptions of what it truly means to be human. You're still assuming that the high cultures and civilizations across the earth were primarily developed without real intent, that the creation of culture was the result of facing obstacles and a matter of environment, where I'm suggesting that all of these things you're attributing to mere coincidence were very much by design.

Your conception of these things inherently suggests that civilization was created without any real cohesive vision.

Problem is I don't see anything that unites these civilizations that doesn't arise as a matter of necessity and common circumstance. They don't show any signs of a common culture and crop up on every corner of the globe, requiring much more than just intrepid sailors to have any such common influence, and there's no sign of any such entity, either within or without.

This is because you base your understanding of culture and societal development primarily in terms of necessity and common circumstance, which leads you away from understanding cultural expression in terms of higher ordered aspects of the human identity, aspects beyond base necessity and the struggle for survival. It's within these higher ordered aspects of the human experience that we can truly see the transcendent unity between the civilizations of humanity across the world.

Looking at the rise of civilizations throughout humanity just from the beginning, the notion that each culture centered it's society around complex spiritual Traditions, Priesthoods and temple compounds is beyond being able to be explained by necessity or common circumstance. Suggesting that we all were just following some utilitarian survival instinct becomes absurd

Bump

they were so avancded they didn't have a proper alphabet, litterally nigg tier.

>avancded
*advanced

thank you /pol/ for enlightening us with your well researched and studied opinions

>Mayan
>1750 bc

Kek, kys

This is kind of dumb other than Mesopotamia where alphabets started and spread and maybe China, (their script is native and was developed quickly but may have been contact diffusion) no other civilizations developed alphabets or scripts completely on their own. That the Aztecs had even their primitive form of writing is noteworthy both for the Aztecs and that it could possibly have independently evolved into a proper script if left to it's own devices.

Oh and guys, I'm not going through the thread, but the whole human sacrifice thing is severely overestimated. Archaeological tests show that the amount of human sacrifice was incredibly low compared to written sources and we shouldn't forget that other societies and cultures practiced it too.

That being said, they were kind of ugly and as far as we can tell did not develop a lot of noteworthy thought like the Greeks or even the Persians or Indians. Their religion was strange but I really like their floating water gardens and Aztec by Gary Jennings was a good book.

>They were kind of ugly

Kys

seriously, how could they have transcribed this?

You wrote all that stuff about alphabets but it's all pointless because the Aztecs didn't have written language at all. And going by the rest of your post you seem to know it. But let's be clear and open.

The Aztecs were functionally illiterate. All of Mesoamerica seemed to have forgotten true writing after the Mayan collapse, as far as I can tell.

I don't encourage /pol/ shitposting but this is something that really pissed me off about liberal historical revisionism when I finally figured it out. Liberal/relativists types HATE to admit it and give an honest account of Aztec era Mesoamerica's technological development.

Any books recs? Already got 1491 on my list.

it is a really shitty drawing of what was a glorious work of art

they were fucking blood-thirsty savages. only thing they advanced in was mass-murdering people as cruelly as possible.

Bump for Atlantis

is this /pol/ 2.0 now ?

underrated post
sage

I'd say this is the most accurate.

At the end of the day they were still a mostly stone age culture (they worked bronze and obviously decorative metals like gold and such but they mostly used obsidian for shit), but holy fuckballs did they do a lot of impressive shit despite the fact.

The Spanish were shitting themselves at how large and magnificent their cities were. Not just Tenochtitlan, but Tlatelolco (I think at that point it was still a separate city?) and Iztapalapa as well

Here's some posts of an user dumping accounts from Cortes and Bernal Diaz on the subject

desuarchive.org/his/thread/983869/#990357
desuarchive.org/his/thread/983869/#990370
desuarchive.org/his/thread/983869/#990381
desuarchive.org/his/thread/983869/#990405

Mind liking to some further reading on this?

their culture was shaped by a metaphysical Atlantean vision.

>no noteworthy thoughts
The only reason you think that is because all their slaves revolted during a plague and some guys with proper siege weapons showed up to help. The entire civilization got bodied pretty hard, but we have extensive records of a philosophical tradition that mirrors Greek and Hindu developments.

>iep.utm.edu/aztec/
Get educated.

to be devoured

Easy access to soft metals (eg: hold) and obsidian, fuck their tech tree really hard.
So they were advanced in some aspects but very limited if you compare them with other civs

This thread did load better than

So in summary, Aztecs = Romans, while Mayans = Greeks?

>...and under no circumstances, do you enter a land with a written alphabet, and then go back to using fucking pictograms.

I submit to you Yuan Dynasty China.

While I do find it odd that, for ~100,000 years you have nothing, then suddenly, maybe 10,000 years ago, you get civilizations cropping up all over the world over maybe 5,000 years, Atlanteans aren't any better an explanation than Ancient Aliens. In many ways, they're worse, as merely advanced humans, they'd have to leave evidence behind - unlike the aliens. Plus you get the usual question - if your average well-to-do human beings can't create civilization on their own - how did the Atlanteans do it?

This. I always report fags with no knowledge. You all should do this too.

It's not a problem when someone knows nothing about the subject. I'm a silent lurker then who asks some questions.

He is a western european type, so he probably means how tall they could stack stones.
Thats every westerner's idea of advanced civilization.

That's just what a five foot stacker would say.

Myceneans without bronze and with much bigger cities and monuments

Literally not fucking true, you're comparing simple throwing around grains of wild wheat tier agriculture to full on civilization, in fact the date of the agricultural revolution in afro eurasia generally varies around 3000 year range.
If you do an accurate comparison, compare the rise of the first city-states, which would be around 4000 B.C (The Sumerians), and 3200 B.C (Norte Chico), which isn't that great of a difference.

below their lvl

a few thousand years later

Why did the mesoamerican tribes have so little contact with the northern american ones?

Fuck off Arthur it's harder to stack rocks than you think

The massive pyramid based religious structures are the evidence that they left behind.

>be white man
>appear in the middle of Aztec capital
Would I survive?

How true is it that they were generally disliked by all nearby tribes?

It was an empire that made everyone pay a tax. I think history tells us how the popular perception was around there.

Except they were all serving different functions (from tombs to temples to supermarkets), built in different ways (from filled, to chambered, to mounds), built hundreds to thousands of years apart, and built by the yocals (not ayylmoas or super humans).

If some super humans were wandering the globe, THEY would have left evidence, beyond simply what they were teaching other humans, and they would have had to somehow have acquired these techniques on their own, when, supposedly, no other humans could. All rather drastic plot holes, even by J.J. Abrams standards.

Not that taxes aren't motivation for sedition - but I suspect, in this case, there were some rather more dire motivators.

t. Ngongo Bongo