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Mesoamerican Civilizations

The “big three”: Aztec, Maya, Inca

James Bannigan

Aztecan Religion
The Aztecs were a polytheistic people,
worshipping several dozen gods; chief among
these was Quezalquohuatl, the Feathered
Serpent God who ruled the sky, the winds, and
all other gods. The priesthood of the Aztecs
was extremely zealous in their practice,
sacrificing prisoners and committing
cannibalism on the corpses.
To the Aztecs, everything in nature had at least
one god; to not sacrifice something , be it food,
art, or other people, was a crime against them.

Aztecan Politics
The Aztec empire was initially ruled through three
allied city-states that made conquest central to
the Aztec identity. They were eventually united
under the rule of Montezuma II, who controlled
the vast area from the “floating” city of
Teotihuacán, also known as Tenochtitlan,
where present-day Mexico City lies... The
emperors had great power, but they would
always consult a council of merit-proven
advisors before going to war or changing
something.

Aztecan Economy
The Aztec empire was only as good as its food
supply... The main dish was maize, and most
families would grow their own gardens in order
to add fruits and vegetables to the diet; fish was
the main protein that the Aztecs ate, due to the
fact that hunting was difficult... The only
animals that could provide meat—panthers, for
example—could fight back.
The Aztecs had no pack animals, so merchants
would have to carry their wares by their own
power. This was risky, though, due to the Aztec
nature of human sacrifice...

Aztecan Society
The Aztec social structure was divided into five
different parts: the Emperor, nobles,
commoners, peasants, and slaves. Slaves
were considered property, but their children
were not born into the same social class; of
these classes, slaves were the ones most
often given to the sacrificial altar... Their
military used weapons of wood, stone, and
obsidian to conquer neighboring tribes of
Mesoamericans.

Aztec Artistic Sides
The Aztecs, and many other pre-conquest
Mesoamerican cultures, did not have a specific
word for art; the closest that they came was
Toltecan, meaning “of the Toltecs,” an earlier
civilization that had been decimated by war.
Much of Aztec art, no matter the medium,
reflected a deep appreciation for the natural
world. The Aztecs worked in wood, stone,
precious metals, gems, and animal pelts, to
create great pieces of art... Sadly, the Spanish
Conquistador Hernando Cortez melted many of
these treasures down.

Aztecan Intellect
The Aztecs had well-developed schools for the
military, astronomy, mathematics, theology,
and trades. They had a written language, called
Nahuatl, that was essential to their empirical
success. They had a counting system for use in
trades and military, and even grasped the
difficult concept of the number zero. They were
essentially a civilization emerging from the
Stone Age, due to the beginnings of smelting
and smithing in their society at the time of their
destruction...

Maya Mythos
The Maya people had a view of deific ideals that
was similar to their northern neighbors; they
saw a god in every aspect of the natural world,
and respected it greatly; they saw the sun god,
Kinich Ahau, as their paternal figure... Their
pantheon consisted of very few female figures,
and was dominated by overly-masculine gods
of everything from war to solar eclipses. Human
sacrifice was a central ideal to them, and they
later identified with the Christian idea that a god
would shed his blood for his people.

Mayan Politics
The Maya were less a kingdom, and more an
amalgam of allied city-states that shared a
language and a religion; despite this, though,
they were a society built on the blood of
thousands of sacrificial victims from dozens of
brutal wars... Their kings passed rulership
down to sons, and no settlement was truly
permanent—they lived as much in the jungle as
in their small temple-centered towns.

Mayan Arts
The Mayans didn’t have much metalsmithing, so
most of their work was done in stone; their
murals and ceramics were dyed in a color
known only as “blue Maya” and the technique
to produce the beautiful shade has been lost to
time... Perhaps the best-known show of Mayan
artistry are their multiple famous step-pyramids
that dot the jungles of southern Mexico—the
greatest of these, the Pyramids of the Sun and
the Moon at Chichenitza, correspond to the
solar and lunar years so well that, five centuries
later, they are only off by a few seconds...

Mayan Advancements
The Maya had extremely advanced masonry
skills and a heavy emphasis on astronomy.
Their mathematics system was a series of lines
and dots, and could go into the millions... They
raised terraces and created irrigation channels
for easier farming, and their calendars were
only slightly off. Most impressive, though, was
their pictographic and logosyllabic system of
written communication that allowed for swift
messages to be carries from city to city, and
took approximately four centuries to convert
into modern English.

Mayan Social Structure
The Mayan society was exceedingly religious,
regularly making sacrifices to their gods; slaves
were often the offerings of these sacrifices. The
small settlements, and the empire formed of
them, created a delicate paradox that survived
until the Spanish came... The most important
non-noble and non-military personages were
the Maya scribes, who wrote the multiple sets
of codex that carried the Mayan history and
allowed anthropologists to decode their
language.

Mayan Economic State
The Mayan people were very simple in their
economic outlook; they farmed what they
couldn’t hunt, traded when they couldn’t hunt,
and fought when they couldn’t trade... Their
irrigation and terracing techniques are probably
what allowed them to be so successful as a
civilization—compared to relative cultures, they
were years ahead of their time. Their weaponry
was Stone Age in material, with the beginnings
of metalwork appearing by the time of their
downfall...

Incan Pantheon
The Inca believed not in the sun as their ultimate
god, as most other Mesoamerican civilizations
did, but instead turned to Viracocha Raska,
the Condor God who controlled everything.
They had gods for all of nature’s creations, a
common theme in the Americas, but the
condor was the greatest—its coming foretold
the life-giving rains that allowed the Inca to
survive. The two other gods that the Inca saw
as most important were Inti and Qilla, the sun
god and moon goddess. They also believed in
Chakana, a planar “Tree of Life” with three
levels: Snake, Puma, and Condor.

Incan Advancements
The Inca were probably the most technologically
advanced American civilization until their destruction;
they ground stones to create exact fits, they created a
road system the size of the Roman empire’s own, they
built ships from reeds and wood, they could
successfully perform brain surgery, they had
advanced metalsmithing, their astronomy was
exceedingly accurate, and they were able to create
several different dyes by natural processes. They
valued their weaving—called quipus—more than their
gold, as quipus was their system of accounting and
mathematics... Their language was called Quechua,
and it remains spoken—even in this day and age— by
the descendants of the Inca people.

Inca Social Lives
The Inca were almost like early an early
Mediterranean civilization; their women
were no more than housewives, and they
were empirical conquerors in the most
extreme sense of the phrase... What sets
them apart is the fact that jewelry meant
exceedingly little to them.

Incan Economics
The Inca were a very agricultural people, farming
for almost all of their food; they grew over two
hundred different kinds of potatoes and sweet
potatoes, maize, chili peppers, tomatoes, and
nuts... In addition, they hunted and fished for
meat. They grew cotton for their clothing, and
also created vast storage warehouses that
prevented a city’s death from prolonged
starvation.

Politics of the Inca
The Inca were a class-based society, nearly
feudal in structure, which lasted from their rise
until their demise. The Incan empire, called
Tawantinsuyu and ruled by Sapa Inti, “the Child
of the Sun,” was formed of four federalistic
provinces: Chinchay to the northwest, Antichay
to the northeast, Kuntichay to the southwest,
and Qullachay to the southeast. The kings were
inheritors of their title, believing that the sun
truly was their ancestor...

Incan Artistry
The Inca were not as artistic as many of their
Mesoamerican counterparts, like the Aztec, Maya,
Toltec, Olmec, or even the Mexica, their architecture
was centuries ahead of anything those other
civilizations could produce; using no more than the
raw physical power provided by man and beast, they
built massive stone cities that had no space
whatsoever between their bricks... Their textiles had
the highest thread count in the world, often higher than
six thousand, until the industrial revolution in the
1800s, and their metalwork was much more
professional than any other American civilization until
their annihilation.

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Mesoamerican civilizations

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Mesoamerican civilizations