Aztec Art Photostream by Ilhuicamina
Happy New Year’s! Instead of fireworks, let’s ring in the new year with a superb photostream from Flickriver user Ilhuicamina. This set is of exceptional quality and covers many significant artworks excavated from the Templo Mayor and safeguarded by INAH at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Take a look!
Xultún And The Baktun
In honor of the approaching end of the 13th baktun on December 21, per the famous Mayan calendar, I’d like to write about a piece of ironclad historical evidence contradicting the “Mayan doomsday” nonsense. That particular piece of evidence lies in the ruins of Xultun.
Xultun was once a flourishing Mayan metropolis, and its importance continues to the present day as the site of a series of murals of great significance to clearing up an archaic misunderstanding of the great calendar. More specifically, painted on the walls in a house that appears to have been a workshop for scribes and astronomers, is a series of complex astronomical tables extending well past the end of 2012. In other words, the Mayan astronomers of the ninth century C.E. most certainly didn’t think the world would end when the thirteenth baktun did, but instead carried on with their work charting planetary and stellar activities well beyond the supposed end of the world. “So much for the supposed end of the world,” quips William Saturno, one of the present-day (re) discoverers of these scientific calculations.
Another of Saturno’s comments sums up the contrast between Western pop culture’s misconceptions and Mayan thought nicely, in my opinion — “We keep looking for endings… the Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.” (National Geographic, 5/10/2012)
After the above excerpts, you might be interested in getting a look at Xultun and these murals for yourself. If so, you’re in luck!
If you click HERE, you can view National Geographic’s “Giga Pan” high resolution photographs of some of the murals.
If you’d like to explore the beautiful stone stelae (carvings) that dot the city, you can click HERE to visit the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard’s website cataloguing a bit of the site’s history, its carvings, and their locations around the town. (The diagrams of the carvings are in the list on the lefthand side of the page.)
Finally, National Geographic has also prepared a short video on the discoveries at Xultun for your viewing pleasure, which you can view HERE if you have trouble viewing the embedded version below.
Soustelle’s Daily Life Of The Aztecs
I was doing some digging online today, and had quite a stroke of good luck — I found a complete copy of Jacques Soustelle’s classic The Daily Life of the Aztecs online! The English edition of the entire book is available to read for free on Questia. Soustelle was a famous French anthropologist who specialized in studying the Aztecs before the Conquest, one of the bright lights in Mesoamerican studies of the mid 20th Century. His Daily Life of the Aztecs is one of his best-known works on this subject, covering a wide variety of details of Mexica life in great Tenochtitlan, ranging from architecture to agriculture, religion, economics, and the conduct of war. Though somewhat dated (written in 1962), most of the information in this book still remains quite useful, and his respectful, non-sensationalistic tone is refreshing. As it predates the rediscovery of the Templo Mayor (Huey Teocalli) in the 1970’s, it sadly doesn’t include much on that famous structure. Still, I strongly recommend giving it a read, as it remains one of the better general histories and anthropological overviews of life in Precolumbian Mexico.
Go HERE to read The Daily Life of the Aztecs in full!
Incidentally, I have now activated the Pre-Conquest History page in the History section of this blog’s static pages and placed an additional permanent link to this book there.
Library Acquisition: The Codex Mendoza & More
Wow, it’s been a while. Sorry about that. The stuff I’ve been trying to write about kinda pulled a Three Stooges with a narrow door type thing, which was not helped by adding a dash of summer laziness.
Anyway, I’ve had some amazing strokes of luck lately in expanding my library. I’ve acquired a copy of the Bancroft Dialogues, a tough to find Post-Conquest Era volume of Mexica upper class speeches, greetings, and other daily life bits of talking. It’s a significant text because it’s the only early book that has full marks indicating pronunciation, so anyone who wants to learn Classical Nahuatl needs this one. It’s also interesting because it shows how the nobles spoke to their equals and superiors. As the relationship between the Aztecs and their gods was often framed as a noble/subject relationship, I believe the examples likely hint at how they spoke to the Teteo when offering worship. I’m looking for some nice examples to post that people might find interesting.
Another major acquisition has been a copy of the deluxe four-volume Anawalt & Burdan edition of The Codex Mendoza for a stupidly good price. It’s a lovely piece of printing that makes this bibliophile get excited in unhealthy ways. Bound in three quarters Morocco leather, HUGE format, and printed crisply on good alkaline paper, it’s physically well-made. And the info is delightful. There’s a full-color facsimile, a black and white facsimile with parallel text translating the Spanish commentary, and two volumes of essays about the codex and its contents. Very nice! There’s an essay on the honorific warrior uniforms that was particularly interesting and will likely provoke a post at some point. It also gave me a lot of tips on how to spot priests in the codices based on dress and body/face paint.
Lastly, the same gentleman who sold me his copy of the Mendoza just agreed to part with his Dibble & Anderson edition of the Florentine Codex to boot, for a price I never thought I’d see on that set.
The upshot of all this frenzied book-greed for my readers? If you have questions that relate to stuff that’s covered by these texts, I may be able to help. My time’s limited, but so long as it’s reasonable I can try to look something up for you.
Tlacatecco 