Has anyone here tried starting with the Aztecs?

Has anyone here tried starting with the Aztecs?

I didn't even know they had writing

My ancestors started with the Aztecs. Then they conquered other native empires throughout Latin America.

>Our sources for studying Conquest-era Nahua philosophy include: (1) native pictorial histories, ritual almanacs, tribute records, and maps, including the Codex Mendoza (painted several years after the Conquest), Codex Borgia (painted shortly before the Conquest), and Codex Borbonicus (painted about the time of the Conquest); (2) reports of the Spanish conquerors (e.g. Hernando Cortes and Bernal Diaz del Costillo); (3) ethnography-style works composed by missionaries (e.g. Friars Olmos, Motolinia, Sahagun, Duran and Mendieta) entering Mexico shortly after the Conquest -- most notably Sahagun's encyclopedic Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana; (4) early seventeenth-century chronicles of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Domingo de San Anton Munon Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, both Spanish-educated creole descendants of Aztec nobility; (5) native sources of non-Nahuatl-speaking indigenous peoples of Mexico (e.g. the Dresden Codex and Popol Vuh; (6) ethnographies of contemporary Nahuatl-speaking (e.g. Knab 1995; Sandstrom 1991) and non-Nahuatl-speaking (e.g. Hunt 1977; Monaghan 1995; Myerhoff 1974; Schaefer 2002; Tedlock 1992) indigenous peoples; and (6) archaeological studies (e.g. Smith 1996). (For further discussion see Carmack, et al. 1996; Leon-Portilla 1963).

In a word, not really.

not really is two words

In a further twist, those first three codices are apparently actual bona fide Aztec writing.

They did but the spaniards burned a shit ton of it because they thought it was satanic

I've read this book, it was interesting. I want to read about Inca and North-American thought as well.

bump

For you a two parts of the book I personally found interesting:
>Jicarilla Apache philosopher Viola Cordova argues indigenous North American metaphysics conceives the cosmos as a seamless dynamic field of energy or power that is called usen in Jicarilla Apache. Although standardly glossed as “great spirit” by anthropologists, she contends usen refers to something nonanthropomorphic and nonpersonal.74 Usen has a tendency to “pool” and concentrate in varying degrees, creating “things” such as rocks and trees.75 Cordova, Jace Weaver, Gregory Cajete, George Tinker, Willie Ermine, Deloria, and other Native scholars liken usen to other indigenous North American conceptions of a single, primordial, processive all-encompassing and ever-flowing creative life force including natoji (Blackfoot), wakan tanka (Sioux), yowa (Cherokee), orenda (Iroquois), and nil’ch’i (Navajo).76 According to Leroy Meyer and Tony Ramírez, Sioux metaphysics conceives all objects as “distinct manifestations” of wakan tanka.77 Once again, we see that native North American philosophies reject as false the distinctions between sacred and profane, spirit and matter, mind and body, and natural and supernatural.
>Aztec metaphysicians had a keen appreciation of the fact that things fall apart, that things become unraveled, imbalanced, and disordered, and that everything – including the Fifth Sun and Fifth Era – tends toward tlazolli (disorder, entropy). Thus we see another expression of the Tezcatlipoca factor, since tlazolli is associated with Tezcatlipoca. Sahagún includes dust (teuhtli) and filth (tlazolli) among Tezcatlipoca’s attributes.137 “When he used to go about on the earth, he would bring to life dust and filth.”138 Tlazolli threatens the order, balance, centeredness, and hence very existence of individuals, homes, temples, communities, and the Fifth Era. Aztec philosophers consequently believed the Fifth Era requires tireless and uninterrupted maintaining, attending to, arranging, and purifying. Humans must prevent the forces of tlazolli from accumulating, and sweeping is one of the principal ways of doing so. Brooms stand out as one of the principal weapons in humans’ struggle against this threat. When carefully executed, sweeping enables humans to defuse (if only temporarily) the destructive forces of tlazolli and transform them into something creative.