Life in america before conquest

Market of Tlatelolco

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‘We turned to look at the great marketplace and the crowds of people that were in it, some buying and others selling, so that the murmur and hum of their voices and words that they used could be he heard more than a league off. Some of the soldiers among us who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a marketplace and so full of people, and so well regulated and arranged; they had never seen before.’

Well, the Aztec civilization began when an Aztec prince was to marry the princess of another tribe. The Aztecs sacrificed her, pulled her heart out of her still living body, then flayed her and invited her father to a feast to their god at which they wore her skin.

Thus were they exiled to their swamp.

Many things about Aztec civilization amazed the Spanish Conquistadores, including their intensive, highly productive agricultural system of chinampas or ‘floating gardens’ (Picture 1), and the size and sophistication of their great city Tenochtitlan (Picture 2). At a time in Europe when street cleaning was almost non-existent and people emptied their overflowing chamber pots into the streets as a matter of course, the Aztecs employed a thousand public service cleaners to sweep and water their streets daily, built public toilets in every neighbourhood, and transported human waste in canoes for use as fertilizer.

While London was still drawing its drinking water from the polluted River Thames as late as 1854, the Aztecs supplied their capital city with fresh water from the nearby hill of Chapultepec by means of two aqueducts, the first built by Netzahualcóyotl between 1466 and 1478, the second some 20 years later by the ruler Ahuitzotl. The symbolic importance of water to the Aztecs is clear from their (metaphorical) word for ‘city’ - altepetl which means literally ‘water-mountain’ in Náhuatl.
The aqueducts were described by Hernán Cortés in 1520: Along one of the causeways to this great city run two aqueducts made of mortar. Each one is two paces wide and some six feet deep, and along one of them a stream of very good fresh water, as wide as a man’s body, flows into the heart of the city and from this they all drink. The other, which is empty, is used when they wish to clean the first channel. Where the aqueducts cross the bridges, the water passes along some channels which are as wide as an ox; and so they serve the whole city.

some days, I actually believe that I've gotten over the loss of Mesoamerican civilization. but then... then one of these threads comes up and I'm reminded of the dark void left inside me. I will never forgive those sp*Niards, or as I like to call them, Iberianiggers

nothing seemed more bizarre to the Spaniards than the Aztec attitude to personal hygiene. In a word, they valued cleanliness. The conquistador Andres de Tapia reported, in a tone of wonder, that Montezuma bathed twice a day. He did, but there was nothing extraordinary about that for an Aztec, since everybody, according to the Jesuit historian Francisco Javier Clavijero, ‘bathed often, and many of them every day’ in the rivers, lakes or pools.
Their documents also make frequent mention of deodorants, breath fresheners and dentifrices. (Spaniards of the time cleaned their teeth with urine.) As well as bathing in lakes and rivers, the Aztecs cleaned themselves – often daily – in low sauna-like hot-houses. An external fire heated one of the walls to red-hot, and the bather threw water on the baking wall, creating steam. As in a traditional Russian steam bath, the bathers could speed up perspiration by thrashing themselves with twigs and grasses. Almost every building had such a bath-house or temazcalli, used for medical treatments and ritual purifications as well as ordinary grooming

oh no, savage tree-niggers can't perform ritualistic sacrifice on each other to appease the gods, we have truly lost such a noble and influential people

howd they deal with skeeters

The real betrayal is not that the Aztecs got destroyed; they deserved it. The other natives in Mesoamerica got betrayed. At least, thats what I think with the little I know.

Thanks OP for posting. I'm glad there are people like you on this board that actually care about history and conveying historical information.

God my grammar was awful there. It's late.

Why did the second generation moors had to destroy it all?

So they were all murder all the time? Why weren't they on the level of the savages living to their north, then?

Poland springs been around prior to Cortes?

ancient africa

this shit depresses me
thinking about what could've been, had columbus and his buddies not come and fucked everything up with smallpox and colonialism.
it's like the we wuz kangz people, except actually real. Imagine what the Americas would be like if it wasn't colonized, and had a little more time to advance.

>they never invented the wheel
>they didnt use metal

Oh wow, look at this insane development

you are an ignorant meme

fuckin wh*tey

why is the entire axe made out of bronze(?)?

they never invented wood

they didn't have bronze, it is made of some other alloy of mostly copper, but they did have metal and the wheel

this guy knows his shit

It might be ceremonial. Notice it has decorative parts meant to mimic the leather/fiber that helps to hold the bit to the handle

Yes but why is the whole damn axe made out of it? Shouldn't just the head be made out of copper?
also
>no bronze
lmao

oh ty

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ebin

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Imagine this at its glory

Whether they deserved it or not it was the aztecs who were betrayed by the surrounding tribes. Those tribes joined the conquistadors and the conquest would not have been successful without massive numbers of natives fighting against the aztecs

The allies of the spanish really had a bad time after Tenochtitlan was taken, the people of Cempoala who were the first to ally to the spanish had its people enslaved and were worked to death at spanish plantations. from the accounts of Francisco de Aguilar, a conquistador that was with cortes, the city of Cempoala had 20 000 houses. twenty years later it had less than 40. As he laments the destruction of the indians

That sounds like bullshit. Cortes had no reason at all to destroy a city and massacre 10k people. We need a better explanation that isn't as black and white.

Cortes did nothing wrong :DD

long live the spirit of the aztecs.

Slavery killed a lot of people, some towns and cities were entirely depopulated by forcing them to work in other places. This is what happened with the Huastecs, the Pipil and probably others. The Huastecs btw were neighbors to Cempoala and along the coast where later african slaves would be sent to in Veracruz. Many of the Postclassic towns were burned to the ground such as Iximche, abandoned from disease and the people moved to colonial founded towns. Others continued to be occupied like Tenochtitlan, Cholula.

What's the point of burning down these towns and cities? Why not just occupy and preserve them as future bases of operation/colonization?

Glorified bandits aren't renowned for their long-term planning skills.

>Spain's best conquistadors
>Glorified bandits who can't think for shit
idk user, maybe there's more to this.

My face when Mexican-American aztec nationalists are still half Spanish no matter how hard they try to ignore it.

I doubt the conquistadors impregnated every single woman that moved past their way.

They didn't, they descendents did tough. Most of them where also sons of Native princes and the nobility, at least the legal ones.

You're telling me an entire race of people got replaced by mullatos? Was Mexico the US before the US was a thing?

Illnesses brought by Conquistadors certainly helped.

>Was Mexico the US before the US was a thing?
No
there is only one La Creatura, la Bestia del Norte, La Atrocidad de l'obscuridad.

How do we know all of this is true?

Amerindians had a higher development rate compared to europeans though.

For the same reason we know ancient greece happened

I mean, was it noted by Spanish conquistadors or did they actually a written language that I’m not aware of?

It was written by spanish conquistadors and at the same time spanish chroniclers.

Mesos were subhuman assmen

>subhuman
[citation needed]

How does one exclude the other?
Conquistadores were former soldiers from the Spanish-Moorish wars who had a 'choice' to either go overseas to find their fortune elsewhere, or turn to brigandry, get arrested and executed in horrible ways. The united Spanish kingdom had an excess of people who only knew how to stick pointy things into other people.
Very few of them were truly smart. The only people whom you could be certain of their education were the priests, monks, friars who accompanied them (and eventually vehemently protested against their treatment of the natives).

Objectively false, outside of the very select few cities such as Tenochitlan, Mesoamerica was essentially tribal. You'd have a better standard of living in the Low countries in Europe at this time than anywhere in the Americas.

>and eventually vehemently protested against their treatment of the natives

Only a few did this. A lot of them saw them as subhuman heathens who were getting their divine punishment.

>that one dickhead who burned literally the entirety of the written Mayan (IIRC) language so even to this day most of it is indecipherable

>europeans:
>from aurignacian proto-gravettian to solutrean:10000 years (30000BC-20000BC)
>from aurignacian-antelian to neolithic: 15000 years(30000BC-15000BC)
>from neolithic proto-agriculture societies to neolithic revolution: 6000 years (15000BC-9000BC)
>from neolithic revolution to copper and arsenical bronze: 4000 years (9000BC-5000BC)
>from neolithic revolution to bronze age and tin bronze: 5200 years (9000BC-3800BC)

>Amerindians:
>from aurignacian proto-gravettian to clovis: 4000 years (15000BC-11000BC)
>from aurignacian proto-gravettian to the start of crop development: 7000 years (15000BC-8000BC)
>from neolithic proto-agriculture societies to neolithic revolution: 5000 years (8000BC-3000BC)
>from neolithic revolution to copper and arsenical bronze independently: 2000 years (3000BC-1000BC)
>from neolithic revolution to bronze age and tin bronze: 4000 years (3000BC-1000 AD)
Amerindians had a higher development rate compared to europeans. In other words, Amerindians have more civilization potential than europeans.

Do you think if Cortes and La Malinche were out of the picture, Spain could have had peaceful trade relations with the Aztecs like they wanted and would have gotten even more powerful with all this access to European tech?

>Having the need of a wheel
>For uneven jungle, mountain and lake terrains
>With no horses
Are you retarded?

Impossible. Aztecs were destined to die due to the 20+ non-immunized diseases either way.

You do know that some of them had been in prison for violent crimes before arriving right?

Don't forget when after the fall of the city the Aztec philosophers willingly turned themselves as a group to the Spaniards, and they in return threw the dogs at them and burned the codices the philosophers were attempting to save

They could have bounced back though. It would taken a while but they could have.

I really like Teotihuacan

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I don't think so. They could have theoretically bounced back after those 20+ diseases massacred most population for centuries, if europeans didn't settle there. However, as europeans settled in Americas, the devastated high-mortality populations were fucked as there was no meritocratic system inside their own kind.

Back then, the most successful was the one who showed warrior-like features or intelectual capacity, and they got priviledges, increasing their descendance against the lesser ones. After the diseases arrived, no meritocratic system could maintain the trend, instead a new high class appeared in Americas, now the intelectual ones and charismatic individuals get assimilated by the non-native population, meanwhile the native gets fucked till the XX century. Some of them keep struggling till today.

Yay now we can have civilized Christians burning the heathens alive and ripping people in half truly the natives should be worshipping us for bringing civilization

The conquistadors and priest writed a lot about them, and teached them to write in Spanish, so you have Tlaxcalans sendind letters to the King of Spain short after the conquest of the Aztecs and other minor polities to claim they merits in said conquests.

The Maya had a written language and the Aztecs, Mixtecs, Teotihuacan, Zapotecs and even Epi Olmecs had their own glyphs and pictographic histories. It's how we know the story of 8 Deer Jaguar Claw the Mixtec king of Tututepec who united the Mixtecs, and conquered a vast empire. Ending in a dramatic downfall.

>Born in 1063 on the Mixtec Calendar date from which he got his name, 8 Deer was the son of the high priest of Tilantongo 5 Crocodile “Sun of Rain”. His mother was Lady 9 Eagle “Cocoa-Flower”, queen of Tecamachalco. He also had two brothers, 12 Earthquake “Bloody Jaguar” and 9 Flower “Copalball with Arrow” who were both faithful war companions of 8 Deer.

>He also had a half-sister 6 Lizard “Jade-Fan”. First the fiancee and lover of 8 Deer himself, she was finally married to 8 Deer's archenemy 11 Wind “Bloody Jaguar”, the king of the city "Xipe's Bundle", also known as Red and White Bundle. The lords of Xipe's Bundle had rights to the throne of Tilantongo and were therefore the most important rivals to 8 Deer's power.

>Lord 8 Deer is remembered for his military expansion. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall counts 94 cities conquered during his reign. Almost always pictured wearing a jaguar helmet, he supported the powerful Toltec ruler of Cholula, Lord 4 Jaguar “Face of the Night” in his attempts at expansionism, and was thus awarded a turquoise nose ornament, a symbol of Toltec royal authority.[3]

>The Codices also tell of his several marriages which seem to have been part of a political strategy to achieve dominance by marrying into different Mixtec royal lineages. He married 13 Serpent, daughter of his own stepsister and former fiancee of 6 Lizard.

>In 1101 8 Deer finally conquered Xipe's Bundle, killed his wife's father and his stepsister's husband 11 Wind and tortured and killed his brothers-in-law, except the youngest one by the name of 4 Wind. In 1115 4 Wind led an alliance between different Mixtec kingdoms against 8 Deer who was taken prisoner and sacrificed by 4 Wind, his own nephew and brother-in-law.[3]

There are many native American peoples that still exist

Would make for a good adaption I think.

This. Pic related.

this story is fucking weird, why would be fuck the sorcerers after they made fun of him?

Hatefucking is a thing.

Also to show his dominance over them.

Have you ever been insulted by a girl and then you get an erection?

When I was little about 6 or 7 I remember I would get erections when I made mistakes. It's weird and I know no one who experienced this too.

They probably would've been like china accept with even weaker, shittier immune systems than when cortez showed up.
Literraly the moment anyone else made contact, they wouldve died out either died out or forced themselves into a quarantine assuming they grasped some retarded mythological explanation for germ theory which wont help their development worth shit.
Diseases are no joke.

Considering most of the american continent was far from the reality of Aztecs and other more advanced civilizations you're right.
The Tupi people and other native amazonian tribes literally were in constant war since god know when before the Europeans came.
War was based in revenge so the tribes were fighting each other all the time to avenge their tribesman killed in other wars on the past.

>Not building proper paved roads
>not breeding obedient carriage pulling livestock.
>traveling through the forest as if they were god damned nomads
>only ever populating their "cities" seasonaly
>god those white people show is dick even though germs wouldve been worse from arabs or any other naval presence.

Hitler yourself.

Consider other groups of people were not as filthy as Spanish conquerors, they were used to diseases so much that they carried equipment to cut blisters on their way to the americas