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libginger73 t1_j5z48zy wrote

What's really fascinating for me is to keep in mind that while the site dates back to 2000 years ago, that's not when this civilization began. To achieve that height of civilization where art is valued takes centuries of time to develop past the point of simply living to survive.

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offu t1_j600874 wrote

And people still think Mexico was just Aztecs and Maya. People always forget the Zapotec and Mixtec.

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dhrisc t1_j607nog wrote

Aztec history is fun to me because it really is so recent but it gets treated like its ancient. It put everything into context when i learned that teotihuacan was already an abandoned mystery (at least to them) by the time the aztecs showed up.

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offu t1_j60b6j8 wrote

I absolutely love that the Aztecs were fascinated with Teotihuacan.

Similar claims are made today about the Inca as though they were ancient, when we know there were ancient civilizations along the Peruvian coast thousands of years prior link

Or this 3,000 year old Chinese text talking about old writings “‘What did the ancient classic "Zhou Shu(周書)" mean by the sentence that Zhong and Li caused the heaven and earth to disconnect from each other?’ “. So 3,000 years ago the Chinese were talking about ancient stuff. link

Or people being shitty tourists 2,000 years ago link

I love ancient people, and people don’t change that much.

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Khwarezm t1_j61bhvw wrote

The Incas held a polity called Tiwanaku in high regard that came before them, even though their own empire had more in common with a different state called the Wari empire.

Tiwanaku is super weird btw, it gets called an empire but it doesn't really seem to have much in common with any other empire that comes to mind, including the Incas, there's not much sign that it was a militaristic state and instead it almost comes across as an extremely popular religious centre.

A good video on the subject.

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Eldrxtch t1_j649v6y wrote

this also makes me think of Homer’s Iliad. That was an ancient Greek writing about even more ancient greeks

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secretly_a_zombie t1_j60slqn wrote

The Aztecs, Mayas, Incas are "ancient" in the way that their way of life is similar to other ancient empires. What makes them interesting is that they're huge "ancient" empires living in close to modern day. It's like being able to step into Babylon and/or the Assyrians. Except we have more than buried ruins and scattered texts, we have actual cities, documents describing meeting these people and how they lived, actual recent descendants, it's getting to peek into ancient life.

Not trying to detract but these empires really are on a level on their own in just how interesting and helpful they are to understanding human history.

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Bem-ti-vi t1_j61iyin wrote

How was life in Tenochtitlan or Inka Cusco more similar to the ancient Middle East than other places/times?

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bjbark t1_j62g20o wrote

The tools they used were more similar to the tools used in ancient Middle Eastern societies, which would effect many aspects of life. Their weapons were largely made of wood and sharpened stone. They had no practical applications for the wheel. Only scant evidence exist for any use of sails. Not to say they didn’t have advanced or complex societies, but only the Maya and Olmec had a Bronze Age, and none had reached the Iron Age by the time the Spanish arrived.

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Bem-ti-vi t1_j62j6ps wrote

>Their weapons were largely made of wood and sharpened stone

And the Assyrians largely used metal weapons.

>They had no practical applications for the wheel.

[The Assyrians did](https://arkeonews.net/chariots-in-neo-assyrian-army/#:~:text=Chariots%20were%20the%20most%20significant,(888%2D884%20BC).

>but only the Maya and Olmec had a Bronze Age

The Stone Age/Bronze Age/Iron Age paradigm is based on a specific European historical process that is very different from what happened in many other parts of the world. Pretty much none of the Americas fits this model. Many societies - the Muisca, Aztec, Mixtec, and others - had complex and advanced metallurgical traditions even as they generally didn't use those technologies for utilitarian purposes. Others, like the Purepecha and Inka, made use of metal weapons and tools in certain contexts while still using stone and wood in others, often again while dedicating the most complex metallurgical processes to religious and ostentatious creations.

The three-age system often breaks down in many parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, too. If you're interested in reading more about contemporary archaeologists' critiques of this system, I'm happy to share some articles.

There's no denying that Indigenous American societies such as those of the Maya, Zapotec, Chimor, and others were highly complex. So were those of the ancient Middle East. But they weren't as generally similar as I think is being argued on the basis of them both not fitting the Iron Age or characteristics of 16th century Western Europe.

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missanthropocenex t1_j62acvn wrote

Reminds of the whole Cleopatra was closer to our time than the ancient Egyptians timeline thing.

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Edstructor115 t1_j6086we wrote

The most amazing part to me is the people now that still have nahuatl as their mother tongue

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seahawksgirl89 t1_j62fi5i wrote

And the Tlaxcaltecas, Olmecas, Totonacas, Toltecas, Huastecas, Chichimecas, and so many more

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FoolInTheDesert t1_j63f1xu wrote

A lot of that is modern politics in the USA. The Aztecs are used as a totem by political orgs or groups with an agenda to try and unify a diverse group of Spanish speaking immigrants under a common fake ancestry to unify them and use them as a power base. I literally took public school classes where 'Mexican American Studies' teachers were using books that claimed Arizona was the ancestral home of the Aztecs, and if you are Mexican or Chicano the Aztecs are your ancestors, so you didn't really cross the border the border crossed you.

The Aztecs have been fetishized and turned into a totem that is used to organize people who immigrated from south of the border in the USA.

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offu t1_j63fewr wrote

The Aztec homeland may have been in Arizona. Although current consensus it was still northern Mexico, but they did come from the north near the border.

That is why the Hopi of Arizona speak a language similar to the Nahuatl of the Aztec empire. link

“Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago.”

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FoolInTheDesert t1_j63g5k6 wrote

The language is not similar, it's just in the same tree. There is a common linguistic ancestor that they all share but that goes back THOUSANDS of years. Imagine a Spaniard claiming to be pure Roman because of the Latin influence on Spanish and just ignoring the rest of their history? Same thing except add a few thousand years! Additionally most archeologist in the field think that the Aztecs were a group of mercenaries that probably took their language from the tribe they married into or were hired into, took their religion and culture from and after 100 years or so left or were kicked out and then went on to form their own city-state and the rest is history. Point being, the language of the Aztecs is not necessarily the language of their own ancestors and even if it were, it's an ancestor that was not Aztec! It's like saying I am from Africa because all humans are from Africa. Or that all Americans are obviously from England because they speak English. It's silly. The Aztecs emerged from a dominant culture that they borrowed their language and religion from.

Edit: To sum it up: There is ZERO evidence of an Aztec 'homeland' in Arizona. Period. It takes blind faith to believe a story like this and it's insulting to the indigenous peoples whom we do have thousands and thousands of years of archeological evidence for having inhabited these areas in Northern Mexico and Arizona. They share common linguistic ancestors that spread throughout an incredible large geographic area but these people are not and never were Aztec. Stop the madness.

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