Aztecs hidden Empire

Modern Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. Once it was a wilderness area, a valley of saltwater lakes and swamps surrounded by mountains and active volcanos. At the beginning of the 14th century, a nomadic tribe called a mexica settled here. Giving their name to Mexico and its capital city. Today, the mexica are better known as the Aztecs. The Aztecs transformed themselves from simple nomads into rulers of the most powerful empire Central America had ever known. But after just 200 years, it would all be gone. Eyewitness accounts of Aztec life and intricate illustrated records portray a highly sophisticated and literate society. Yet there was a dark side to Aztec life. People lived in fear. Ritual human sacrifice was performed on a scale unmatched throughout history. It's for this, above all things that the Aztecs are remembered. How could brutal sacrifice be so commonplace in such a civilized society? Who were the Aztecs really? Bloodthirsty Barbarians? Or a great world civilization? When the Spanish conquistadors first saw the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, it was so beautiful they thought they were dreaming. They called it the Venice of the Americas. At the height of the Aztec Empire, in 1519, the Spaniards had landed on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Having heard about the fabulous riches of the Aztecs, they'd come to make their fortunes. After 12 weeks of marching, they found the Aztec capital. It was built entirely on water and with over 200,000 inhabitants was one of the largest cities in all the world. Mexico City was built on the side of Tenochtitlan. An area on the outskirts of today's capital still gives a flavor of what it might have been like. This region still supplies the city with flowers, just as it did 500 years ago for the rituals in the Aztec capital. It was these rituals which so shocked the Spaniards. We saw the men being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. The priests laid them down on their backs and cutting open their chests drew out their palpitating hearts, which they offered to the idols before them. Then they flung the bodies down the steps. Interpreting the cultures of Mexico's past has been a lifetime study for novelist Carlos Fuentes. The whole conception of the world of the Aztecs is so alien to our modern sense of the world that we can only guess. We can only hint. The Aztec regime to put it in a nutshell was the regime at odds with itself. How could the Aztecs create a beautiful city with such violence at its heart? To investigate the contradiction, it's necessary to go back to the time when the Aztecs first arrived in the valley of Mexico. The original nomadic tribe of Native Americans lived in the north of what is now Mexico. A tribal prophecy told them to journey south and build a city where they saw an eagle landing on a cactus. According to their history, it was here in this inhospitable swampland that the prophecy came true. At the edge of the valley, 30 miles north, the Aztecs came upon an abandoned place called Teotihuacan. People had first settled in this place a thousand years before the Aztecs came, but had long since disappeared. The Aztecs discovered a great ghost city. The deserted city seemed tailor made for the Aztecs and their beliefs. They even adopted as their own, the gods that were carved into these ancient temples. The Rain God, and the feathered serpent God, who would eventually bring them to grief. David Carrasco's groundbreaking work explores the profound impact of other cultures on the Aztecs. The Aztecs of the 15th and 16th century would have been drawn to Taiwan because of the monumentality of the place. Guilty Wakanda is one of the great world cities and the largest ceremonial center in mesoamerica. The Aztecs looking for their own origins, their own legitimacy, would have been attracted to the city. With their humble nomadic background, the Aztecs envied the great architectural heritage and history of their predecessors in the valley of Mexico. They took many things from this place, including the setting for their creation myth. The Aztec creation story describes how the universe had already passed through four eras or stages of the sun. The symbols for each age are depicted on the great Aztec sun stone, four feet thick, 12 feet in diameter and weighing 24 tons. It was discovered in 1790 beneath Mexico City's central square. At its center is the face of the sun with a sacrificial knife in its mouth. Each of the four mythical ages lasted hundreds of years and ended in destruction. After the fourth son, the world was left in darkness. They imagined that the gods gathered here to build a fire and contemplate how they could bring forth another son. To give the new son energy to be born and travel on its journey across the sky, the gods sacrificed themselves, jumping into the fire and cutting out their hearts, their own blood giving life to the 5th sun. The dawning of the Aztec age. In this remarkable story, we see not only the idea of healthy Wakanda, the primordial origin of the Aztec sun, we also see the participation of the gods in a self sacrifice so that human life can then go on with this sets up for the Aztecs, the crucial idea about human sacrifice, which was that when they sacrificed themselves, they were paying a debt back to the gods who had created the sun for them here in 30 welcome. The Aztecs believed that the daily journey of the sun could only continue while it was supported with blood. Human sacrifice on the American continent is most often associated with the Aztecs, but in fact, it had been practiced for centuries by previous civilization