The nobles were supposed to report to the emperor and run their city as the emperor directed. But in truth, most nobles ran their cities any way they wanted. Like the Mayas, the Aztecs developed city-states, cities with their own way of running things day by day. Laws: The laws of the Aztec people were for all the people in all cities.
These laws were written down. If you broke the law, your punishment was listed, along with the law. There were Aztec courts, but the laws were clear.
If you could not prove your innocence, everybody knew what would happen to you if you broke a particular law. One of the thing you learned in school were all the laws and how to behave.
Many of the laws included a punishment of death. Laws were tough. Codices warned of the punishment you would receive for breaking the law. One time forgiveness law: There was one way to escape punishment, but it was only good one time. This was called the one time forgiveness law. If you confessed your crime to a priest before your crime was discovered, you would be forgiven once.
You would receive no punishment for that crime. A massive stone statue of Coatlicue was discovered in Mexico City in Almost 12 feet tall and 5 feet broad, the statue shows the goddess as much a goddess of death as of birth. The myth of Coatlicue tells of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war and the sun. The myth of Coatlicue tells of a priestess sweeping the sacred temple on Mount Coatepec when she was impregnated by a ball of feathers.
Her son Huitzilopochtli is born full grown when Coatlicue is attacked by her daughter, the moon goddess. The newborn warrior kills his sister and cuts her into pieces, symbolizing the victory of the sun over the moon. The statue was so horrifying that each time it was dug up, it was reburied. The Stone of Tizoc is a carved disk showing the victory of the emperor Tizoc over the Matlatzinca tribe.
The emperor had it carved to celebrate his victory and reveal the martial power of the Aztecs. The large, circular disk has an eight-pointed sun carved on the top, which was used for sacrificial battles. A warrior captured in battle was tied to the stone, and armed with a feather lined club.
Aztec warriors, armed with obsidian lined clubs, fought the tied warrior and naturally defeated him. The Matlatzincas are shown as despised barbarians, while Tizoc and his warriors are represented as noble Toltec warriors. The Stone of Tizoc artfully mixes sun worship, mythology and Aztec power.
Another massive stone disk, the carvings on the Sun Stone, also known as the Calendar Stone, show the four consecutive worlds of the Aztecs, each one created by the gods only to end in destruction. This basalt stone, 12 feet in diameter and three feet thick, was discovered near the cathedral in Mexico City in the 18th century.
At the center is the sun god Tonatiuh. Around Tonatiuh are the four other suns which met destruction as the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca fought for control. After the destruction of a sun and the epoch it represents, the gods had to recreate the world and humans until finally the fifth sun held. At either side of the center, jaguar heads and paws hold hearts, representing earth. Fire serpents are at the bottom of the stone, as their bodies snake around the edge.
The Sun Stone carving is probably the most recognized artwork of the Aztec world. The Aztecs created a rich variety of art works from massive stone sculptures to miniature, exquisitely carved gemstone insects. They made stylized hand crafted pottery, fine gold and silver jewelry and breathtaking feather work garments.
The Aztecs were as intimately involved with art as they were with their religion and the two were tightly interwoven. Our knowledge of the Aztec culture mostly comes from their pictogram codices and their art. Aztec craftsmen worked images of their gods into much of their artwork.
Of gold and silver jewelry, much of it was lost to the conquering Spanish who melted it down for currency. Textiles too, are destroyed by time, and pottery is fragile. Energetic stone carvings, however, remain to show us the great artistry of the Aztecs.
While much of the Aztec population worked in agriculture to keep the empire fed and others were involved in the great trading networks, many others devoted themselves to producing the artworks that noble Aztecs loved. Thus, samples of artistic creativity in precious metal jewelry, decorated with jade, obsidian, turquoise, greenstone and coral still exist, mainly in smaller pieces such as earrings or labrets for lips. Pottery from Tenochtitlan and surrounding areas still reveal the fine abstract symbolism of the Aztecs.
Feather workers made colorful tilmas for the emperor and nobles, and produced ceremonial costumes for the highest warrior castes, creating intricately decorated shields and headdresses. Many Aztec families and even villages were devoted to providing artwork for Aztec nobles. Every art had its own calpulli or guild.
The nobles in the calpulli provided the raw materials and the artists created the finished works—the magnificent stone carvings, jewelry, elaborate ritual costumes for the great religious ceremonies and feather shirts, cloaks and headdresses.
The Aztec emperors received art works as tribute or the artists sold them in the great marketplace at Tlatelolco. The walls of the great Tenochtitlan Templo Mayor are covered with carvings of Aztec symbolism. Stone carvers created sculptures of the Aztec gods to be used in the monthly religious ceremonies. Very common was the chacmool, a reclining figure which received the extracted hearts and blood of sacrificial victims.
Aztecs in the rural regions carved the agricultural gods in both stone and wood, especially Xipe Totec, the god of spring and vegetation. Other carvers worked in miniature, creating tiny shells, insects and plants out of jade, pearl, onyx and obsidian.
Artists created mosaic masks used in religious ceremonies with pieces of turquoise, shell and coral. These masks are highly representative of the Aztec devotion to their gods. Although much Aztec was destroyed during the Spanish conquest, many fine samples of each distinct art form remains to outline for viewers the great talent and technique of Aztec artists.
Check the Aztec Resource Page on Aztec art for links to further information. Aztec symbols were a component of material culture in which the ancient society expressed understanding of the corporeal and immaterial world. The members of that culture absorb the symbols and their meanings as they grow up.
They see the symbols all around them, on the walls of their temples, in jewelry, in weaving and in their language and religion. The Aztecs also used symbols to express perceptions and experiences of reality. The Aztecs, like the other Mesoamerican cultures surrounding them, loved symbols of their gods, animals and common items around them.
Each day in the ritual day calendar, for example, is represented by a number and a symbol. The tonalppohualli or sacred calendar, consists of two interlocking cycles, one of 13 days, represented by a number called a coefficient and one of 20 days represented by a day glyph or symbol.
The day symbols include animals such as crocodiles, dogs or jaguars; abstract subjects such as death and motion; and natural things that the Aztecs saw around them every day like houses, reeds, water and rain.
See the Ancient Scripts section on Aztecs to see good, colorful example of the day glyphs. All Mesoamerican cultures used body paint, especially warriors going into battle. Different ranks of warriors wore specific colors and used those same colors in painting their bodies. The most prestigious warrior society, the Shorn Ones, shaved their heads and painted half their head blue and half yellow. Other warriors striped their faces with black and other colors. Aztecs also decorated their bodies permanently in the form of piercing and tattoos, although there is not as much evidence for Aztec tattooing as for the cultures around them.
The Aztecs centered their lives on their religion. For that reason, many statues and carvings exist of the Aztec gods, as hideous as they may be to modern eyes. Symbols of the sun, the eagle, the feathered serpent and cactus were used in the Aztec writing system, in dates and time and in titles and names. The magnificent Sun or Calendar Stone contains both the day solar calendar and the sacred day tonalpohualli, all of which are represented by the rich symbolism of the Aztec culture.
Most Aztec symbols had layers of meaning. A butterfly symbol, for instance, represented transformation while frogs symbolized joy. The day signs and coefficients corresponded to one of the Aztec gods, which means the day calendar could be used for divination. An order of the Aztec priesthood were diviners. When a child was born, they were called to find a name for the baby based on the day of the birth and the god corresponding to that day. Today, because of the growing interest in body art, more people are learning about Aztec symbols and designs.
Codex painter was an honored and necessary profession in the Aztec world. They were highly trained in the calmecacs, the advanced schools of the noble class. Some calmecacs invited commoner children to train as scribes if they were highly talented, but most scribes were nobles. After the Spanish conquest, codex painters worked with the priests recording the details of Aztec life. These codices are the richest source of information we have about the Aztecs. The Aztec Empire, as with many empires, required a great deal of paperwork: keeping track of taxes and tribute paid, recording the events of the year both great and small, genealogies of the ruling class, divinations and prophecies, temple business, lawsuits and court proceedings and property lists with maps, ownership, borders, rivers and fields noted.
Merchants needed scribes to keep accounts of all their trades and profits. All of this official work required the scribes of the Aztecs—the codex painters. Pictography combines pictograms and ideograms—graphic symbols or pictures that represent an idea, much like cuneiform or hieroglyphic or Japanese or Chinese characters. To understand pictography, one must either understand the cultural conventions or the graphic symbol must resemble a physical object. For instance, the idea of death in Aztec pictography was conveyed by a drawing of a corpse wrapped in a bundle for burial; night was conveyed by a black sky and a closed eye, and the idea of walking by a footprint trail.
The codices were made of Aztec paper, deer skin or maguey cloth. Strips of these materials up to 13 yards by 7 inches high were cut, and the ends pasted onto thin pieces of wood as the cover. The strip was folded like a concertina or a map.
Writing in the form of pictograms covered both sides of the strip. Only 15 pre-Columbian Mesoamerican codices survive today—none of them Aztec, but from other cultures of about the same time. However, hundreds of colonial-era codices survive—those that carry the art of the tlacuilo codex painters but with Nahuatl and Spanish written commentary or description.
The Aztec number system was vigesimal or based on twenty. Numbers up to twenty were represented by dots. A flag represented twenty, which could be repeated as often as needed. One hundred, for instance, was five flags. Four hundred was depicted by the symbol of a feather or fir tree. The next number was eight thousand, shown as a bag of copal incense. With these simple symbols, the Aztecs counted all their tribute and trade.
For example, one tribute page might show 15 dots and a feather, followed by a pictogram of a shield, which meant that the province sent shields to the emperor. To understand the Aztecs, it is necessary to understand, as best we can, their religious beliefs and how those beliefs manifested in their culture. To that end, we will look at their religion in general, the gods, sacred calendar and temples here. Other articles will cover religious ceremonies and rituals and the practice of human sacrifice.
Aztecs were a devoutly religious people, to the extent that no Aztec made a decision about any aspect of his or her life without considering its religious significance. The timing of any event large or small required consulting the religious calendar.
The Aztecs worshipped hundreds of deities and honored them all in a variety of rituals and ceremonies, some featuring human sacrifice. In the Aztec creation myths, all the gods had sacrificed themselves repeatedly to bring the world and humans into being.
Thus, human sacrifice and blood offerings were necessary to pay the gods their due and to keep the natural world in balance. The Aztecs used two systems for counting time. The Xiuhpohualli was the natural solar day calendar used to count the years; it followed the agricultural seasons. The year was separated into 18 months of 20 days each. The 5 extra days at the end of the year were set aside as a period of mourning and waiting.
The second system was the ritual calendar, a day cycle used for divination. Every 52 years the two calendars would align, giving occasion for the great New Fire Ceremony before a new cycle started.
The Aztecs built temples at the top of sacred mountains as well as in the center of their cities. The temple we know most about is the Templo Mayor in the heart of what was Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. At the top of this foot tall pyramid stood two shrines, one to Tlaloc, the god of rain and one to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war. Templo Mayor was in the center of a great plaza, one of 75 or 80 buildings which constituted the religious center of the city.
Sacrificial victims walked up the numerous steps to the top of the pyramid. After their hearts were extracted and given to the gods, their bodies were thrown down into the plaza. Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering. The numbers of people sacrificed by the Aztecs is a mystery today and will probably remain a mystery, unless more archeological evidence is uncovered.
Whether only a few thousand of victims were sacrificed each year, or , as some scholars say, few human remains such as bones have been found at Templo Mayor or other Aztec temples. A couple of dozen skeletons and a few thousand loose bones and skulls do not add up to , or 20, or whatever number is cited. Evidence of human sacrifice comes from both the Aztecs themselves, their art and codices containing their writings, and from the Spanish conquerors.
However, it is safe to say that the Spanish could easily have exaggerated the numbers killed to make the Aztecs seem more savage and brutal than they actually were.
In , the great Templo Mayor was dedicated in the main Aztec city of Tenochtitlan with a four-day celebration. How many were sacrificed during that time is a subject of scholarly speculation: some put the figure as low as 10, or 20,, several others put it as high as 80, people sacrificed during those four days.
Scholars think the Aztec priests used four sacrificial altars for the dedication ceremonies. Spanish missionaries sent to convert the Aztecs to Christianity learned the Nahuatl language spoken by the Aztecs. At the center of the empire were the main Aztec altepetls, or city states, of Texcoco, Tlacopan and Tenochtitlan. Of the three, Tenochtitlan gradually muscled its way to dominate over the others.
The pinnacle of power centered in the Huey Tlatoani, the Reverend Speaker or emperor. The emperor had absolute power and was worshipped as a god. Directly under the emperor were his advisors, the Council of Four. These advisors were generals from the military societies.
If something were to happen to the emperor, one of these four men would be the next Huey Tlatoani. The council advised the emperor in his decisions.
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