Facts about the Aztecs
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| human sacrifices |
- About three hundred years before Columbus made his first voyage to the New World, a tribe of Indigenous people moved down from the north into what is new Mexico. These people were the Aztecs.
- The Aztecs dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.
- The Aztecs were hunters with bows and arrows.
- At that time most of the natives of central Mexico were corngrowers. They had no weapons except clubs. It was easy for the Aztecs to conquer them.
- Aztec is the Nahuatl word for "people from Aztlan", a mythological place for the Nahuatl-speaking culture of the time, and later adopted as the word to define the Mexica people.
- 2 centuries after the Aztecs came, most of central Mexico was under their rule.
- The Aztecs chose an island in the middle of a lake as the place for their capital city. They named it Tenochtitlan.
- To the Aztecs themselves the word "aztec" was not an endonym for any particular ethnic group. Rather it was an umbrella term used to refer to several ethnic groups, not all of them Nahuatl speaking, that claimed heritage from the mythic place of origin, Aztlan.
- The Aztecs made jewelry of gold and silver. They made, for instance, ornaments for their lips and ears.
- The Aztecs had no alphabet, but they could write. They wrote with pictures.
- One of the most famous relics of the Aztecs is a great calendar stone that weighs more than 20 tons
- The chief god of the Aztecs was the sun god, and there were other gods of wind, light, rain, and fire. The Aztecs believed that their gods wanted human sacrifices.
- In 1521, the beautiful city of Tenochtitlan fell to the Spaniards. Now Mexico City stands where this older city stood.
