Related Articles on Ancient-Origins. Deep beneath the ruined Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan four bouquets of flowers have been discovered.
Carefully deposited in a sacred tunnel beneath a vast stone pyramid, archaeologists suspect Do our myths come from the stars or do we project our myths onto the stars? The story of Mithras truly does come from astronomical discoveries in the ancient world. It was noticed that every 2, In the heart of central Mexico, surrounded by majestic mountains and volatile volcanoes, is the Valley of Mexico Basin. There, hidden in plain sight stands Teotihuacan, a vast vexing complex of Many myths have cropped up in the centuries since Columbus landed upon the shores of Hispaniola.
While some of these myths have come to be seen for what they are, many more persist in the zeitgeist Mictlantecuhtli was a god in the Aztec pantheon. The Aztecs believed that there were Kukulcan was the all-powerful snake god worshipped by the Maya. While little information remains about the legends and mythology of Kukulcan — due to the tragic destruction of the Maya codices by the Top New Stories.
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It incorporated the philosophy and science of Aristotle,. Ten amazing inventions from ancient times. Ancient Places. On October 9, , a German theologian named Gustav Adolf Deissmann was cataloguing items in the Topkapi Palace library in Istanbul when he happened across a curious parchment located among some Fact or Fiction? Our Mission At Ancient Origins, we believe that one of the most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings.
Ancient Image Galleries. Impressed by the horses and goods the Spanish brought with them, the people who met Cortes on his march inland surmised the Europeans were important people. If the Aztecs had truly believed that Cortes was a god, Cortes himself would certainly have made note of it.
But in all the letters he wrote to King Charles V in which he attempted to establish political and moral legitimacy for the war he started, he never mentions it. Whether or not Montezuma ever actually spoke those words, we can never know. Surely, such a thing would have gone far in his attempts to justify the conquests he sought in the New World.
Additionally, in the midst of the battle for that conquest, the Aztec did not sit passively by and watch the Spanish take their capital of Tenochtitlan. While they found Spanish horses and guns rather fascinating, the Spaniards themselves had quickly worn out their welcome. In traditional Aztec warfare, soldiers captured enemies for sacrifice, which was thought to be an honorable death.
To get a better understanding of how this myth came to permeate both European and Mesoamerican histories of the conquest, we need to examine the works of prominent thinkers in post-conquest Mexico. While in the decades following the Aztec-Spanish War, many Spanish chroniclers made mention of the variant forms of teotl used to identify the conquistadors, most left it at that.
Known as the Florentine Codex , this gargantuan work comprised 12 books that took around 45 years to compile. Spaniards disposing of the bodies of Moctezuma and Itzquauhtzin in the Florentine Codex. Public Domain. This gave the Codex a decidedly Indigenous point-of-view on the conquest of Mexico. Aztec Gods in the Florentine Codex. For some Europeans, the notion of Indigenous inferiority sufficed as an explanation for the success of the Spanish conquistadors.
Other Spaniards who immigrated to the colony built on the ruins of the Aztec empire, known as New Spain, undoubtedly observed the unjust treatment the Indigenous populations faced at the hands of the Spanish empire. Luckily, the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth helped to assuage, at least in part, whatever guilt colonists may have felt.
The Nahua had the opposite question to answer: How did we fall from power? After all, their ancestors had built the most sophisticated city in the world, Tenochtitlan, and the Aztec empire had never before known defeat.
And on top of that, they had personal memories of fathers and grandfathers who had fought against Cortes and his conquistadors. To account for the fall of the Aztec from power, the Nahua writers of the Florentine Codex ascribed a generally positive attribute, piety, to their ancestors, rather than the negative attribute used by some Europeans, inferiority.
Could Montezuma and his empire be blamed for losing if they had been stunned, even just temporarily, by overwhelming reverence to their gods? Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent. The Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth had been building steam for a few decades before work on the Florentine Codex began.
By the s, it had reached its final form, the one that survives to this day. In order to truly understand what happened in the years of the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, indeed to understand the history of European colonization in general, we must expose this myth, and others like it, as falsehood.
Myths like this deny agency to the colonized, cause European victory to seem inevitable when it was not, and keep us from knowing the true, much more interesting story. Top Image: Quetzalcoatl, detail. Jordan Baker blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.
While in school, his research focused on empire and the French Atlantic. Since graduating, he has expanded his research and writing to include any and all Read More. Glad you mentioned ancient Sumer. The photo of photo of La Venta Stela 19 shows the same handbag seen in many Sumerian carvings. Hello Jordan, most truths and ancient writings have been labelled myths to protect the stories and events that humanity has been forced to believe for centuries Quetzalcoatal was the Nephilim knowed as Enki god of the Sumerians.
Ancient Origins. Sorry but the premise that this was a post-Cortez story made decades after so everyone feels better is incorrect. The Aztec arrived to the boat of Cortez on the shore with the pre-made and clearly assigned significance, and dress Cortez with ceremony.
This event was noted in common and readily available books on the subject. Second, a myth that lasts millennia let alone decades is in itself something beyond a myth.
Myths rarely last such time without deep and significant representations of something of magnitude taking place. Ancient Origins has been quoted by:. At Ancient Origins, we believe that one of the most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings. The name is a combination of quetzalli , a brightly colored Mesoamerican bird, and coatl, which means serpent ; it is therefore usually translated as "feathered serpent" or "plumed serpent".
Quetzalcoatl was often pictured as a snake with feathers, although he was sometimes shown in the form of a human. Quetzalcoatl was associated with the planet Venus, as well as being the patron god of the Aztec priesthood, of learning and of knowledge.
The name Quetzalcoatl was also taken on by several ancient Aztec leaders. Many events and characteristics attributed to Quetzalcoatl are therefore exceedingly difficult to separate from the political leaders who took his name.
Today Quetzalcoatl is arguably the best known Aztec deity but there were several other important Aztec gods too: Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli. Other Mesoamerican cultures have worshipped a feathered serpent god as well: At Teotihuacan the several monumental structures have images of a feathered serpent See the so-called "Citadel and Temple of Quetzalcoatl" [1].
This has led scholars to conclude that the deity called Quetzalcoatl in the Nahuatl language was among the most important deities of Mesoamerica.
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