Aztec Culture ART EDUCATION

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1 Aztec Culture The Aztec civilization contained about 15 million people that lived in nearly 500 towns and cities. About 300,000 people lived in Tenochtitlan. In this famous city, the government controlled and were responsible to deal with taxes, punishment, famine, and market trading. Punishment in the city of Tenochtitlan was enforced for breaking any of the code of government laws. Offenders were enslaved into tedious work conditions for a specific amount of time. If the offense happened to be minor, the law-breaker was charged with a string of fees or fines. This type of governing system is only one of the many things that affected aspects of everyday life for the Aztecs. ART The Aztec sculptures which adorned their temples and other buildings were among the most elaborate in all of the Americas. Their purpose was to please the gods and they attempted to do that in everything they did. Many of the sculptures reflected their perception of their gods and how they interacted in their lives. The most famous surviving Aztec sculpture is the large circular Calendar Stone, which represents the Aztec universe. EDUCATION The Mexicas were especially interested in education. Boys and girls were carefully educated from birth. During the first years of life, fathers educated boys, while mothers took care of girls. Once family education was over, the children of the nobles and priests went to the calmecac, and all others went to the tepochcalli. The Aztecs believed that education was extremely valuable and insisted that boys, girls and young people attend school. There were two main types of school, the so-called tepochcalli and the calm*cac. Boys and girls went to both, but were kept separate from each other. The tepochcalli was for the children of common families and there was one in each neighborhood. Here, children learned history, myths, religion and Aztec ceremonial songs. Boys received intensive military training and also learned about agriculture and the trades. Girls were educated to form a family, and were trained in the arts and trades that would ensure the welfare of their future homes. The calmecac was for the children of the nobility, and served to form new military and religious leaders. Teachers were greatly admired. FAMILY LIFE In the context of the family, men and women played distinct roles. Aztec women married at about 16. In school boys were taught arts and crafts, and the girls were taught to cook and other necessities. FARMING - IRRIGATION The Aztecs made terraces, which were steps descending down a hall to control the flow of water. This kept their crops from flooding. Like the Olmec civilization, the Aztecs also used a slash and burn method of farming. Chinampas, artificial islands made by weaving giant reed mats and covering them with mudded plants, were used to extend crops into the swamp. Although they seemed to float, the chinampas were anchored to the

2 ground by plant roots. All this helped the Aztecs grow and abundance of corn, chili peppers, squash, tomatoes, beans, and other kinds of food. The Aztecs were late arrivals to the Lake Texcoco area. They were surrounded by very strong neighbors, so they were forced to live on the swampy, western side of the lake. As the Aztecs grew in number they made excellent military and civil organizations. By 1325, they founded the city of Tenochtitlan. The city was located on present day Mexico City. It was very hard to build Tenochtitlan because the Aztecs only had a small piece of land in the surrounding marshes. The Aztecs made the swampy, shallow lake into chinampas. In this case the islands were made by piling up mud from the lake bottom. They used them as their city foundations. Then they built causeways and bridges to connect the city to the mainland. To easily move people and goods, canals were dug and lined with stone. All this made it easy to defend the city from attack. Because of Tenochtitlan's location and high organization, the city grew rapidly. By 1519 there were about 60,000 people in the city every day. Goods were exported and traded in many other parts of the Aztec Empire. FOOD The principal food of the Aztec was a thin cornmeal pancake called a tlaxcalli. (In Spanish, it is called a tortilla.) They used the tlaxcallis to scoop up foods while they ate or they wrapped the foods in the tlaxcalli to form tacos. They hunted for most of the meat in their diet and the chief game animals were deer, rabbits, ducks and geese. The only animals they raised for meat were turkeys and dogs. The Aztecs have been credited with the discovery of chocolate. T he Aztecs made chocolate from the fruit of the cacao tree and used it as a flavoring and as an ingredient in various beverages and kinds of confectionery. In 1519, Hernan Cortez tasted Cacahuatt, a drink enjoyed by Montezuma II, the last Aztec emperor. Cortez observed that the Aztecs treated cacao beans, used to make the drink, as priceless treasures. He subsequently brought the beans back to Spain where the chocolate drink was made and then heated with added sweeteners. Its formula was kept a secret to be only enjoyed by the nobility and the warrior class. LANGUAGE The Aztec spoke a language called Nahuatl (pronounced NAH waht l). It belongs to a large group of Indian languages which also include the languages spoken by the Comanche, Pima, Shoshone and other tribes of western North America. The Aztec used pictographs to communicate through writing. Some of the pictures symbolized ideas and other represented the sounds of the syllables. Variations of this language are still spoken in some of the more remote areas of Mexico in which the indigenous cultures are still alive. Nahuatl is a variation of a larger language group known as Uto-Aztecan. Other variations on this language group are still spoken in some of the regions spanning from central Mexico through northern Mexico on into the southwestern United States including the Pima, Tohono O'ohdam of Arizona. MATH The Aztecs used a vigesimal system, counting by 20s. The numbers 1-19 were expressed by dots or occasionally by fingers; 20 was represented by a flag; 400 (i.e. 20 >(20) by a sign which looks like a feather or a fir tree; and 8,000 (20 x 20 x 20) by a bag or tasseled pouch which was imagined to contain 8,000 cocoa beans.

3 METALS The Aztecs had 3 basic crafts: metal work, feather work, and music. The metal workers had no iron so they used copper, gold, and silver. That created jewelry of gold and silver. SOCIETY The Aztec society was divided into 3 classes- slaves, commoners, and nobility. Slaves: The children of poor parents could be sold, usually for only a certain time period. Slaves could buy back their freedom. The slaves that escaped and reached the royal palace without being caught were given their freedom instantly. Commoners: The most numerous social group was known as the macehualtin; these people were engaged in agriculture and the common trades. Although they worked the land in family units and were allowed to kept their produce, the land itself was collectively owned by the inhabitants of the neighborhood or calpulli. Commoners were given lifetime ownership of an area of land. The lowest group of commoners were not allowed to own property. They were tenant farmers, they just got to use the land and never be owners. The lower social orders were made up by peasants, who like the European serfs, were attached to the lands owned by the nobility and were obliged to cultivate them in exchange for part of the harvest. Nobility: The nobilities were the people who were nobles by birth, priests, and those who earned their rank. The very highest social sphere was occupied by a minority of families known as the pipiltin. These people were members of the hereditary nobility and occupied the top positions in the government, the army and the priesthood. The nobles chose a supreme leader known as the tlatoani from within their own group; in Nahuatl this name means he that speaks. This leader was greatly revered and ruled until his death. In Aztec society, warriors, priests, and the nobility were considered to be among the most respected in the Aztecan social hierarchy Because of the Aztecs' emphasis on warfare, the warrior class was highly valued, and often warriors would volunteer for the most important Aztec sacrificial rituals. The long distance traders also enjoyed considerable privileges and often served the government as ambassadors and spies. The most outstanding artisans, physicians and truly wise teachers were also highly respected. WAR

4 Due to the aspirations of conquest and the religious beliefs of the Mexicas, war was a very important activity. The Mexicas believed that the gods had sacrificed themselves for mankind, that their blood had given man life, and that the Sun was nourished with the blood of human hearts. This belief led them to sacrifice many prisoners at their temples. Some people were able to resist the Aztecs; the most powerful of these were the Tlaxaltecas and the Purepechas. The people were completely prepared for war and great emphasis was placed on the creation of codexes and on the interpretation of the calendars, since both activities were essential to religion and community life. The codexes consist of writing and drawings made by the Mesoamerican people on strips of deer skin, or on a kind of paper made from amate tree bark. Once finished, these strips were folded like a concertina. Although there were surely a large number of codexes, only a few were conserved. Many were destroyed by the Spanish Conquistadors, and others were lost through neglect or due to the fragile materials on which they were created. WRITING The Aztecs made paper by taking strips of bark from fig trees and pounding it on hard pieces of wood. The administration of Tenochtitlán and its foreign provinces required a great deal of paperwork. Taxes had to be collected, lawsuits between villages or private individuals had all to be recorded, and the merchants kept accounts of their goods and profits. Instructions and reports passed to and fro between the capital and the outlying cities, and like any civilized people of today the Mexicans were familiar with both red tape and official correspondence. The clans maintained land registers, and when Cortes reached Tenochtitlán he had no trouble in procuring from the royal archive a map showing all the rivers and bays along a 400-mile stretch of the north coast. In addition each temple owned a library of religious and astrological works, while a large private household, like that of Moctezuma, employed a full-time steward to look after the accounts which were so many that they filled an entire house. Ixtiuxochiti, a brother of the last native ruler of Texcoco, has left this account in the prologue to his Historia Chichimeca: They had scribes for each branch of knowledge. Some dealt with the annals, putting down in order the things. which happened each year, giving the day, month, and hour. Others had charge of the genealogies, recording the lineage of rulers, lords and noblemen, registering the newborn and deleting those who had died. Some painted the frontiers, limits, and boundary markers of the cities, provinces and villages, and also the distribution of fields, whose they were and to whom they belonged. Other scribes kept the law books and those dealing with the rites and ceremonies which they practiced when they were infidels. The priests recorded all matters to do with the temples and images, with their idolatrous doctrines, the festivals of their false gods, and their calendars.

5 And finally, the philosophers and learned men which there were among them were charged with painting all the sciences which they had discovered, and with teaching by memory all the songs in which were embodied their scientific knowledge and historical traditions. In the law courts, especially those dealing with land and property rights, the disputants supported their claims with genealogies and maps, showing the king's land in purple, the lords' in red, and the clan fields in yellow. Of this mass of paperwork hardly anything remains, and nearly all the surviving books from the Aztec homeland are of post-conquest date. Some are copies of earlier works, while others are written in Aztec script with Spanish or Nahuati commentaries in European letters. The best collection of preconquest books comes from Oaxaca, the land of the Mixtecs, where more than a dozen examples have been preserved. Each book, or codex, consists of a strip, anything up to 13 yards in length and some 6-7 inches high, made of paper, maguey cloth, or deer skin, and folded in zigzag or concertina fashion like a modern map, so that wherever the user opened it he was confronted by two pages. The ends of the strip were glued to thin plaques of wood which served as covers and were some-times decorated with paintings or with discs of turquoise. Both sides of the strip were covered with writing and pictures, and the individual pages were divided into sections by red or black lines. Each page was normally read from top to bottom, though in some codices the arrangement is zigzag or even goes around the page. The strip was scanned from left to right. This enormous production of documents was dependent on a steady supply of the raw materials, and each year 24,000 reams of paper, the equivalent of 480,000 sheets, were sent to Tenochtitlan. Aztec paper was made from the inner bark of various species of fig tree. The bark was soaked in a river or in a bath of limey water, and the fibers were separated from the pulp, then laid on a smooth surface, doubled over, and beaten with a mashing stone which had a ridged surface. A binding material (probably a gum of vegetable origin), was added, and the fibers were beaten out into a thin, homogeneous sheet. After smoothing and drying, the processed bark fibers had recognizably become paper, but the surfaces were still porous and rough, unsuitable for painting until they had been given a coating of white chalky varnish or size. On this background the scribe drew his figures, first sketching the outlines in black, then adding the colors with his brush. The principal colors were red, blue, green, and yellow, and the pigments were sometimes mixed with an oil to give added luster. Scribes were respected craftsmen, and the profession was probably hereditary. The Aztecs wrote using symbols similar to the characters used by the Chinese and Japanese. All the symbols were pictures of one kind or another.

6 The symbols can be thought of as ideograms in which the objects express their own natures but also the underlying ideas and not concepts associated with them. Thus the idea of death can be represented by a corpse wrapped for burial, night by a black sky and a closed eye, war by a shield and a club, or speech by a little scroll issuing from the mouth of the person who is talking. Concepts involving the idea of motion, walking, migration, or the sequence of events were usually indicated by a trail of footprints going in the necessary direction. Aztec personal names were of the descriptive type which could usually be written in glyphs. The name of the Emperor Acamapichtli means 'Handful of Reeds' and his glyph is a forearm with the hand grasping a bundle of stalks. Chimalpopoca, the name of the next ruler but one, means 'Smoking Shield', and his successor was Itzcoatl or 'Obsidian Snake'. There was also a phonetic element in Aztec writing. Every word in spoken language has a sound as well as a meaning, and glyphs were sometimes used to indicate the phonetic value of a word rather than its sense. Thus, to give an example from English, a drawing of an eye may be a pictogram (meaning the eye as part of the body), or an ideogram (expressing the idea of sight and vision), or a phonogram (standing for the sound 'I'). In the latter case, the eye symbol can be used, as a sort of pun, to indicate the first person singular. It is possible to write the sentence, 'I can be hospitable', as a series of phonetic glyphs: an eye, a tin can, a bee, a horse, a pit or hole, and a table. The Aztecs applied the same technique to the writing of Nahuatl. Pictures were sometimes used for their sound, without reference to their meaning. The symbol for teeth (tiantli in the Aztec language) expressed the syllable 'tlan'; the glyph or tree or forest (quauill) stood for the syllable 'quauh', a stone (tell) for 'te', a mountain (tepeti) for 'tepe', and so on. Vowels were sometimes represented phonetically; the sound 'a' by the symbol for water (all), or '0' by a road (olli). Names of towns could be expressed by a combination of such phonograms. The sign for the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, was a stone (tell) from which sprouted a prickly pear cactus (nochili); Tochtepecan was indicated by a rabbit (tochtli) above a mountain (tepeti); quauhtitlan by a tree (quauitl) with teeth (tiantli), quauhnauac by a tree with a speech scroll issuing from it (nahuall -speech).

7 These symbols were not placed in sequence, one after the other like the letters and words in a book, but formed part of a larger composition which often took the form of a scene in which many things may be happening at once. An Aztec manuscript is not read in the normal sense of the word, but is deciphered like a puzzle picture in which the glyphs provide. labels and clues to what is going on. The lower part of the picture generally represents the ground, while the upper is the sky. Since the Aztecs had not discovered the rules of perspective, distance is shown by placing the furthest figures at the top of the page and the nearest at the bottom. Relative importance is indicated by size: a victorious king, for example, may be drawn larger than his defeated enemy. All figures are in profile, with no three-quarter views or fore-shortening. Every item in a composition is there to give information, either directly or by implication, and the painter assumes that the person examining the document is familiar with the insignia of rank, the costumes appropriate to the various classes, and the iconography of the different gods. A priest, for instance, is always depicted with his face painted black, his hair long, and his ear-lobe stained red from blood-letting. He can thus be recognized as a priest even when dressed in warrior 5 costume or plain garb. In the same way, an old person can be recognized by the lines which represent the wrinkles on his face. Color was also important. The signs for grass, canes, and rushes look very much the same in black and white, but in color there could be no mistake: in the Codex Mendoza grass is yellow, canes are blue, rushes green. A ruler could be recognized at once from the shape of his diadem and from its color, turquoise, which was reserved for royal use. A scribe who could keep pace with court proceedings had every reason to be proud of his skill Aztec. Both writing and reading were therefore specialized skills, and it is no wonder that the mass of the population remained illiterate. Writing was not taught in the schools attended by plebeian children, and indeed the ordinary man would have no need for it. In a bureaucratic and centralized society the common man received his instructions from above, from the priests who looked after the religious side of his life, or from the secular officials who were drawn from the nobility and had the benefit of a calmecac education. From: