[HN Gopher] New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San And...
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New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andres Tetepilco
Author : dzdt
Score : 325 points
Date : 2024-03-23 22:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tlacuilolli.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tlacuilolli.com)
| otras wrote:
| > The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican
| government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous,
| but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of
| the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa
|
| It's fascinating to imagine the journey of these books throughout
| the years. Kept in a basement somewhere? Passed down from
| generation to generation for safekeeping?
|
| Reminds me of the Sarajevo Haggadah, surviving from the 1300s:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Haggadah
| UberFly wrote:
| I always wonder just how much like this gets thrown away
| through the generations.
| ductsurprise wrote:
| ... and the lost MicroSD cards grandma has been holding onto
| for you.
|
| We will leave next to nothing.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I went back to printing photos on a regular basis.
|
| It is relatively easy to select the best and edit photos
| every other day on vacations or at home for printing. It is
| however a major PITA to do that for hundreds or thousands
| of photos at a time. Thus I am still too lazy to have a
| look at those 20 years gap where the only pictures I took
| were digitized and are stored on a hard drive and remote
| backup.
| tetris11 wrote:
| My ex and I had a wonderful tradition of collating all
| the photos we'd taken in a single year, and making a
| printed album of it. It's a fantastic ritual to let you
| appreciate the good moments.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I would print more photos if I could find a printer that
| didn't actively hate me. Even the ink tank one I got
| turned out to have non-replaceable waste ink sponge with
| an internal counter that will brick the unit long before
| it wears out.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Color Laser. Rumor is that HP-M254DW is great b/c it's
| before a lot of E15N has taken place (enshittification...
| we should numberize it!). I got mine used off Craiglist
| nearing 10 years ago and it's been a pretty serious
| workhorse, along with pretty decent "trash" picture
| output.
|
| I say trash b/c home printed photos on regular paper are
| never going to compete with your local CVS/Walgreens
| prints (which I do batches about 2-3 times per year,
| putting them in letters / christmas cards).
|
| ...but if I'm willing to wait for really good prints,
| I've had a great experience with "PersnickityPrints" who
| I tried after a local pharmacy print shop gave me an
| envelope of my wedding prints where some of the fancy B&W
| ones showed ~2mm chromatic aberration (hence: all the
| photos were misaligned / mis-calibrated).
|
| Persnickity basically says: "you take the photo, we print
| the photo!" ...no auto-redeye reduction, no trying to
| make the colors pop, and they calibrate their machines at
| least once per day as opposed to once a month or whatever
| the generic pharmacy places do.
|
| 1) Color Laser for "tossable" printouts. 2) Walgreens +
| Mobile App for "5 copies to send in letters" (pick up in
| ~1hr, ~$0.20 per print, often less). 3) Persnickity for
| 8x10's, custom paper, cards, or if I'm planning ahead.
| (~$0.40/print, modulo shipping, etc).
| prmoustache wrote:
| I have a canon Selphy for 10x15 format as well as a Kodak
| Mini Shot Saqure "instant camera" that I really use as a
| printer for square polaroidlike photos from the
| smartphone. I also own a Fujifilm Instax Wide and an old
| Polaroid 600 that I converted to rechargeable batteries
| so that I can buy the slightly less expensive I-Type
| films. Between the Polaroid and the Instax, I take an
| average of maybe 2 instant pictures per week, maybe more
| during Christmas period or if I have family visiting me.
| Sometimes pictures that I don't keep but just gift to
| friends I am meeting with. All in all 2 pictures per week
| is just around 100 pictures. 2 packs of 10 Instax Wide
| cost me around 20EUR, a pack of 8 polaroid I-Type is much
| more expensive, around 17EUR but I don't think spend more
| than 150EUR a year on those anyway. Both printing with
| the Selphy/Kodak and taking instant pictures is expensive
| compared to bulk printing at a shop or online but in my
| opinion it is worth it and is still better than
| forgetting about those photos or even not taking them in
| the first place. I tend to think it is still less money
| wasted than if I was smoking.
|
| One of the last Polaroid picture I took was of a little
| girl playing with her mom. Her husband told me several
| week later that it had become a bookmark that he has
| pleasure rediscovering everytime he grab his current
| book. Sometimes the smallest but meaningful gifts are the
| nicest.
|
| For holidays, special events, whenever I have more than a
| handful of pictures to print or if I want bigger format I
| am doing it through the local photo print shop or online.
| tomek_ycomb wrote:
| I told my [family member] this for years she should edit
| her digital photos. She said, no, my 40k pictures are a
| retirement project. Then I said <<you'll be overwhelmed
| by that many photos>> and actually I was wrong.
|
| AI photo stuff massively improved, and all her bad photos
| were very easy to sort in Picasa and bring down to a
| reasonable 5k or so photos to put into albums over few
| years of retirement.
| serallak wrote:
| Of course Picasa is one of Google abandoned projects...
| sethammons wrote:
| I'm still sore about Picasa. while it was great to use,
| it lost a few years of photos that I hadn't backed up
| outside the service. Figured it was online and safe.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Figured it was online and safe._
|
| That's a contradiction in terms.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Print photos degrade over time, if you want them to last
| you'll need to preserve them in an additional way.
| dzdt wrote:
| There are remarkably few surviving Aztec codices. Wikipedia lists
| 39, of which only 3 are possibly pre-hispanic. The new codices
| all seem to be in the later group, but this is still a
| substantial increase of the corpus.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_codex
| alpacca-farm wrote:
| That's pretty fascinating, dzdt. The idea of a palimpsest
| hiding older Aztec text opens up so many possibilities. Wonder
| what kind of insights or history was considered worth erasing
| back then. Has anyone come across any initial findings or
| interpretations of the erased text?
| dzdt wrote:
| My impression is so far investigations are extremely
| preliminary, not much more than was necessary to validate the
| authenticity of the documents. Hopefully we will see a lot
| more detailed analysis come out in the coming years.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > Wonder what kind of insights or history was considered
| worth erasing back then.
|
| Generally, everything that they didn't know would be useful
| or important. These are written on parchment, which has great
| durability over time, but sadly this means that very little
| of all the material that was written on parchment survives.
| This is because parchment is both very expensive and easy to
| recycle, which means that for most of history the second
| someone no longer values the material written on their
| parchment, they are going to wash that off and use it for
| something else.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Etch-a-Sketch
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the Spanish systematically destroyed them in the early stages
| of contact, no?
| navi0 wrote:
| Correct. To the great dismay and anguish of the Mexica at the
| time.
|
| The hubris and bigotry of the Spaniards (repeated elsewhere
| by them and other Europeans) was truly a loss for all of
| humanity.
|
| It's on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria
| in my book (pun intended).
| roughly wrote:
| They did the same to the Incan Quipu, which more recent
| study and discoveries suggest was an actual full written
| language, not just a counting system.
|
| The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with
| sophisticated arts and cultures who'd built cities that
| dwarfed their European counterparts with building
| techniques and on terrain that would've flummoxed western
| builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today)
| and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands
| on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the
| plague.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > dwarfed their European counterparts
|
| I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think
| you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its
| not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so
| different.
| jcranmer wrote:
| It's not that much of an exaggeration. Tenochtitlan--the
| capital of the Aztec Empire--is estimated to have been
| about 120-150k people at the time of contact, which is
| larger than any city in the Spanish Empire at the time.
| Even the Spaniards themselves, as they recorded in their
| journals, were astonished at the scale of Tenochtitlan.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| How did the Spaniards justify this to themselves?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Religion
| taejavu wrote:
| This is not an apologist perspective, my heart weeps for
| the knowledge that was lost. But from the perspective of
| the Spanish conquistadors, all of Aztec culture looked
| like devil worship. Bear in mind these were Catholics who
| were suddenly immersed in a culture that regularly
| performed ritual human sacrifice. So they buried their
| statues and burned their books. It's tragic, but not all
| that surprising, really.
| dzdt wrote:
| According to the article in La Jornada one of the codices is a
| palimpsest! Under multispectral imaging older erased Aztec text
| is visible. If anything substantial can be recovered there it may
| be this should be counted as four new codices.
|
| [1] https://www.jornada.com.mx/2024/03/21/cultura/a03n1cul
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Before someone asks: No you're not gonna see this in an
| LLM/ML/AGI anytime soon. The corpus of text is far too small to
| make the statistical simulation viable.
| keithalewis wrote:
| Making true statements on HN seems to be a great way to get
| shadow banned. Dang it.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| What?
| acheron wrote:
| Very nice. Will be interesting to see what comes out of studying
| these.
|
| Semi-related, I still hold out hope for more discoveries of the
| Isthmian/Epi-Olmec script.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmian_script
| canjobear wrote:
| Fascinating. I didn't know Aztec writing used glyphs for their
| phonetic value.
| nathancahill wrote:
| It's heavily debated.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| How many of these are by Aztecs about Aztecs?
|
| * "The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a
| pictographic map which contains information regarding the
| foundation of San Andres Tetepilco ...": San Andres Tetepilco
| must have been Spanish, of course.
|
| * "The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andres
| Tetepilco ...": Churches would be Spanish.
|
| * "Tira of San Andres Tetepilco, is a pictographic history ...
| comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan
| polity from its foundation to the year 1603.": At least it seems
| to be about Aztecs.
|
| Why were the first two books about Spanish topics but written in
| the local language? If Spanish people writing, wouldn't they
| write in Spanish? If Aztecs were writing, why would they care to
| record these things? I suppose the latter is plausible if they
| were absorbed into Spanish society.
| yorwba wrote:
| The Aztec Empire fell in 1521, but of course its people didn't
| disappear. If the codices date after 1603, that's plenty of
| time for the Spanish to influence their lives, even without
| full absorption.
|
| That San Andres Tetepilco has a partly-Spanish name _now_ doesn
| 't necessarily imply that Spaniards had a role in its founding
| or lived there in significant numbers at the time the codices
| were written. The church might have been founded by a Spanish
| missionary, but it might also have been an Aztec convert
| instead. The history apparently also covers events that
| happened under Spanish rule, so it's not entirely about a non-
| Spanish topic either.
| jmopp wrote:
| Fun fact: the descendants of Moctezuma still live today as
| Spanish nobility
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > San Andres Tetepilco must have been Spanish, of course.
|
| It is not. I mean, yes, the "San Andres" part of the modern
| name of the settlement (from a church there built not long
| after the conquest) is, but its one of Itzapalapan settlements
| that was later conquered by the Aztecs, so an Aztec codex about
| its founding is Aztecs writing about pre-Aztec history.
|
| > "The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andres
| Tetepilco ...": Churches would be Spanish.
|
| Yeah, unlike the colonization of the United States, the native
| peoples were still present in and often the bulk of communities
| after the conquest of Mexico, they weren't simply displaced for
| the Europeans (not to say the Spanish were _better_ , but the
| pattern of colonization was _very different_.) So, while the
| Church was built under the direction of the Spanish, it would
| have been built and attended largely by locals, who would
| record things for the same people anyone would record things
| about the community they live in.
| linehedonist wrote:
| Yeah Spanish colonialism was very different from English
| colonialism. The Spanish attempted to coopt and convert the
| local population, not displace and kill them. That's not to say
| it wasn't a nasty process but to this day there are millions of
| people in Mexico who speak Nahuatl (the Aztec language) as
| their first and primary language.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > The Spanish attempted to coopt and convert the local
| population,
|
| Population densities in Mexico and throughout much of what is
| Latin America were considerably higher than in the North.
|
| Also IIRC the number of Spanish colonists who came to the
| Americas during the 17th century is about the same as the
| number of immigrants to the English colonies on the East
| Coast. Considering how massive the Spanish empire was there
| just weren't that many Europeans there. Trying to subjugate
| and assimilate the natives was really the only option they
| had.
| linehedonist wrote:
| Sure, underlying conditions were different and partially
| explain the different colonizing strategies. Doesn't change
| the fact that there were key differences that manifest
| themselves in evidence like these newly discovered codices.
| kristopolous wrote:
| There's so few surviving because guess what? European colonizers
| destroyed a bunch for religious reasons.
|
| On the Mayan side the destruction rate is well north of 99%. To
| quote one of the bishops that did a book burning party:
|
| "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as
| they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as
| superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which
| they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much
| affliction."
|
| Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science,
| philosophy ...
|
| I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.
|
| Hopefully some indigenous scholars managed to stash some in a
| cave or tomb somewhere 500 years ago and we simply haven't found
| them yet.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| >I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.
|
| Well, about that...
| daliusd wrote:
| Depends who are "we":
|
| https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.a...
| Amezarak wrote:
| > Details:The National Resistance Center has reported that
| the Russians are using the pretext of removing "Nazi
| literature" to explain their actions, while the list of such
| literature includes all books in Ukrainian. In doing so, the
| occupiers are repeating the practice typical of Nazi Germany.
|
| Ah, that's the justification. I've never understood the
| official Russian "denazification" position; it should be
| clear to them no one now or ever is going to take it
| seriously, why continue with this absurd pretense?
|
| That said, in this case it's more barbed than the article
| suggests. As part of denazification, the Allies did destroy
| books. To suggest book destruction is what typifies Nazis is
| absurd unless we also call the Allies Nazis.
|
| > As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book
| titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were
| then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated
| and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made
| a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these
| books were to be confiscated and destroyed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship
|
| That said, Aztec culture was full of horrors we can now no
| longer even imagine, paling even before the Nazis. To the
| extent the destruction of codices was deliberate, much of
| what went on would have seemed to be a relatively necessary
| de-Aztecification.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Sure it's still happening. Seems to be less common. That's a
| good thing.
| gradschool wrote:
| I think it continues to happen in forms we don't easily
| recognize because of our biases. When Google tried to scan
| every book in existence, the copyright lobby put a stop to
| it because of "intellectual property rights". Nobody's
| claiming that Sci-hub is sacreligious, but it's on our
| cultural gatekeepers' hitlist all the same. I suspect that
| future generations will view these events in the same light
| as the destruction of the Mayan codices or the library of
| Alexandria.
| iperboreo wrote:
| I don't justify this, but perhaps also this should be
| mentioned:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-
| withdraws-19-ml...
|
| and if you will say that I take this out of context, well,
| also do you. And actually I think my case is stronger.
|
| I would say more, but on this forum one should be very
| careful about what one says (actually I think that this post
| will not stay here for long, regardless).
| dziulius wrote:
| Or maybe people here are not brain-dead and russian
| propaganda does not fly here. It's not like russians
| occupied bunch of Ukrainian territory and started burning
| books there.
| iperboreo wrote:
| You are flattering yourself. The level of US people's
| acquaintance with anything outside of their country is
| well known across the world, and I am afraid that the
| information you get from your media is not as informative
| as you think.
|
| On my cell phone I have a video of some polish
| mercenaries (or volunteers) burning Russian church books,
| laughing and obviously pleased about what they are doing.
| I will share it with you if you want.
|
| In Kiev, not long ago, a monument to Pushkin was taken
| down. Bulgakov is practically forbidden. I will stop
| here.
| dziulius wrote:
| Have you stopped for a moment to consider why it's
| happening? Every single person in former eastern block
| (including me) is sick of russian propaganda and being
| ruled by them for last few hundred years. War in Ukraine
| was a great excuse to get rid of russian sh**.
| iperboreo wrote:
| I will point to the fact that before the collapse of
| Soviet Union, most Ukranians did not see any difference
| between them and Russians, and most of them voted for
| keeping Soviet Union intact in the referendum held on
| 17.3.1991 (as in most other USSR republics), ignored then
| by Yeltsin and other people who wanted to get their share
| of power sponsored by US. The division between Russia and
| Ukraine, as far as I know, was mostly administrative. In
| Odessa and Kiev people laughed at ukranian nationalism,
| which was then confined to L'vov and such places.
|
| As for "hundreds of years", Russia was seen as liberator
| by the same eastern Europe when it fought against the
| Turks and nazi Germany, was seen as oppressor in some of
| Caucasus and in Poland, which in their turn thought it
| was their right to take the land of barbaric Russians.
| And in the Baltic states there are sources from the 16th
| century (Guagnini, an italian at the service of Polish
| court) which describe the Lithuanian Vitold governing
| Russians in Vilnius, stating that there seem to be more
| Russian Orthodox churches in Vilnius than catholic ones
| (and Guagnini cannot be suspected in sympathy to
| Russians).
|
| So you see, you simplify history, and you do so, I think,
| first because you don't read, and then because your own
| country just changed one empire for another.
| 127 wrote:
| Painting all the peoples in Europe as colonizers is such a lazy
| thing to do.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| They said "European colonizers" not "Europeans."
| kristopolous wrote:
| You're the one who just did that.
|
| Take your issues up with the editors here
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
| EA-3167 wrote:
| It _does_ seem to be painting with an overly broad brush to
| talk about "Europeans" (which covers everyone from
| Portugal to greater Russia) when it was a very small group
| of Spanish conquistadors and priests who actually did all
| of what we're discussing.
|
| And frankly the Wikipedia article talks specifically about
| "Spanish" invaders, and the word "European" isn't even in
| the article. I'm not sure why you think that link supports
| the idea that someone other than the gp here turned
| "Spanish" into "European colonizers".
| defrost wrote:
| > I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying
| stuff.
|
| Agreed, it's 2024 after all, not bloody 2019 . . .
|
| _The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred
| Aboriginal objects_
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
| txutxu wrote:
| Also non-colonizer Europeans, for the same religious reasons,
| did burn more knowledge (and persons) here, in their own towns.
|
| Most of the history that we got, is what those ancestors did
| leave in their writings.
|
| Today the inquisition simply consists of our beloved
| governments, covering up their dirty dealings, and telling a
| different story in the media, media dominated to the most
| inquisitorial extreme.
|
| At least in Spain, videos are deleted, the monetization of
| certain channels on social networks is cancelled, forwarding of
| certain content on WhatsApp is rate-limited, and today,
| Telegram is closing in Spain, while all the ministers, the
| president and their families are involved in continuous
| corruption scandals, forgiven by judges who have been put in
| position by the same politicians.
|
| Politicians forgiving the robbery of politicians, while TV only
| talks about the color of the air (if they don want to be
| reported and economically punished).
|
| Journalists without a journalism career, who only look with a
| magnifying glass to the families of the monarchies, but totally
| forget forever about the families of the hundreds (thousands?)
| of Spanish politicians and ex-politicians.
|
| Journalist without a journalism career, who try to tell us that
| life has increased a 6% (hello, do you mean that what
| previously did cost 1 Eur, now costs 1 Eur and 6 cents? where?
| basic education mathematics, please?)
|
| The same supposedly lefty politicians, who criticize priests,
| are worse than priests, in this inquisitorial sense.
|
| Something I ask myself... if the history that we got, was what
| the priests did write or didn't burn... what history will get
| about us, people in 500 years? That lies published in the
| media? 24 different versions of the same fact? Nothing at all
| if it's about ministers stealing public money? Whatever the
| generative AI tells them?
| soyyo wrote:
| Well the aztecs did the same before the europeans:
|
| "Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs
| eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as
| the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
|
| I dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something,
| but there is this tendency of picking historical eventsand
| judge them by todays standards, and is particularly egregious
| when it is only applied to just one side portraying others as
| innocent victims when they were actually doing the same thing.
| sophacles wrote:
| If alice murders bob, then charlie murders alice, 2 murders
| have been committed, indepdendent of one of the victims also
| being a perpatrator. Its still perfectly reasonable to be
| upset about the murder rate, and it's ok to be upset that
| alice was murdered.
| hugetim wrote:
| But is it reasonable to consider charlie worse than alice?
| mmustapic wrote:
| If you feel closer to Charlie, yes
| kristopolous wrote:
| I think the final group in the line deserves disproportionate
| blame for destroying the remaining collection.
|
| No matter how I think about it, it seems like a more
| egregious act.
|
| Pre-Colombian literature on philosophy, nature and governance
| would be quite a find. Hopefully there's many places yet to
| be searched.
|
| To be speculative, if I was trying to hide books while being
| invaded, I'd bury them in a box in an old cemetery in a dry
| climate.
| infoseek12 wrote:
| A cemetery would be a bad place for them as cemeteries tend
| to attract looters.
| enhancer wrote:
| Also I'm getting tired of people using Europeans as a whole
| all the time when it's one particular country. How are
| Bulgarians, Greeks, Estonians or Swedes to blame for anything
| there. It's amazing. No one is blaming Japanese, Vietnamese
| or Malaysians for the Mongol invasions in Europe. It's beyond
| ridiculous.
| huytersd wrote:
| No one is blaming Eastern Europeans. Everyone knows they
| were not capable of carrying out colonization. They were
| the slaves used in the Arab world for a lot of antiquity.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| The middle ages, not sure there were many East European
| slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia. Also plenty of them were
| "imported" into the Byzantine empire and Italy. After the
| Vikings Venice and Genoa mostly controlled the slave
| trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and
| also the Balkans (Venice had a massive slave market).
| jeltz wrote:
| Italians and Spaniards were sold as slaves in North
| Africa and were still perfectly able to colonize.
| huytersd wrote:
| Those were overwhelmingly women.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| They said "European colonizers." That doesn't signify every
| European nation, but only those with colonialist histories.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| The Franciscan priests deserve eternal ignominy for destroying
| these priceless and irreplaceable books.
| xyzelement wrote:
| // Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science,
| philosophy
|
| Perhaps having seen the Aztec human sacrifice, of children, the
| Europeans weren't too keen to maintain these things.
| lukan wrote:
| Have you heard of the spanish inquisition? Or the general
| treatment of the pagans?
|
| I do not think what we now call human rights mattered to them
| in any way.
|
| It was a different and therefore enemy religion. It was
| beaten and then destroyed. That was the main thing. That they
| also happened to sacrifice humans was maybe a moral bonus to
| justify it, but destroying the cultural foundation of the
| culture you want to conquer was quite standard and old
| practice. Ask the druids for example.
|
| Once a culture lost its foundation, it becomes way easier to
| control.
|
| Also it is a proof, "see, your gods did nothing to protect
| you, they are powerless, like you. So joining us (means
| working for us) is your only option"
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Have you heard of the spanish inquisition?
|
| Sure. As one of Neal Stephenson's characters observed, it's
| a measure of what utter shitheads the Aztecs were that when
| the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually got more
| humane. To name just one issue, the Spaniards weren't
| cannibals.
|
| > Ask the druids for example.
|
| The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the
| Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were
| horrified by their cruelty.
| philwelch wrote:
| > Ask the druids for example.
|
| Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Is human sacrifice the only practice that means a culture
| deserves to be eradicated or are there others?
| xyzelement wrote:
| I do think if there's an objective thing that can condemn
| a culture, it's willingness to sacrifice its children is
| that thing
|
| And I do think this extrapolates to modern cultures, from
| slapping a suicide vest on a toddler, to "one child"
| policies to "children are bad for the environment" type
| movements.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Maybe Spanish culture should have been "condemed" long
| before they set sail for America.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_the_anci
| ent...
| philwelch wrote:
| They were. The Iberian Celts were conquered and repressed
| by the Roman Empire, and the Roman culture was in turn
| reformed by the early Christians.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| And we lost a lot every time. I don't believe it was
| needed to crush the cultures of America and elsewhere
| because of disagreeable religious practice. The argument
| could be made that we should wipe out Islamic culture
| because of their opression of women. And it would be an
| abbhorent argument.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to
| be eradicated, not in the sense of killing everyone who
| practices that culture (of course the Spanish didn't
| exterminate the Mexica either) but in the sense of
| converting or reprogramming them into a different
| culture. This is what was done to Germany and Japan after
| the Second World War for instance.
|
| Literal human sacrifice is a sufficient but not necessary
| condition. Though I suppose in a broader and more
| metaphorical sense, Germany and Japan also practiced
| human sacrifice.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > I think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve
| to be eradicated
|
| I can assure you that's far from the case.
| philwelch wrote:
| No, when it really comes down to it, it isn't the case,
| aside from a few fringe pacifists. Some cultures, like
| the Germans and Japanese, engaged in repeated aggressive
| military expansion until the rest of the world was forced
| to conquer them and reprogram them into pacifists. Other
| cultures engage in practices that are outside of what
| even tolerant liberals are willing to tolerate, like
| female genital mutilation or not letting girls go to
| school or not tolerating homosexual behavior or having
| traditional gender roles, and so we use human rights
| NGO's and Western mass media to attempt to assimilate
| them into our culture.
|
| If you look at what the Spanish actually did to the Aztec
| Empire, they basically organized a coalition of other
| indigenous tribes who were tired of living under Mexica
| domination (and having their people intermittently
| sacrificed), overthrew the Mexica, and installed
| themselves as the new suzerain. This isn't far off from
| what the Western countries were trying to do during the
| Arab Spring or Syrian Civil War, except the Western
| countries tried to either install a local client or
| pushed for elections, and neither of those plans tended
| to work out for the countries involved.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I understand there are extreme cases like the Nazis. I'll
| say something about that below. But I'm not sure we can
| group the Aztecs in with them, certainly not to the point
| that so much of their culture was destroyed as it was.
| Also worth nothing they weren't sailing around the world
| conquering peoples. Yes, maybe they were doing it at
| home, but Spanish culture is the one that survives, even
| though they also behaved abbhorently. And I love Spanish
| culture even though they did. I wish I could enjoy Aztec
| culture in a similar way.
|
| I disagree that Japan and Germany had their cultures
| eradicated. Both nations maintain rich cultural
| traditions and express them within the safe bounds of
| their nation states. What happend in meso-America was
| much closer to the kind of eradication of cultures the
| Nazis wanted to see, which was the reason they are so
| reviled.
|
| And just to say I don't think it's fair to say pacifism
| is a fringe idea. Many of our world's states are
| officially pacifistic, many of our greatest philosophers
| have subscribed to it and there have been mass movements
| for peace which in some cases have resulted in
| decolonisation or have bolstered democratic opposition in
| war time.
| lukan wrote:
| A) likely, but not really confirmed to be a regular thing
| by my knowledge.
|
| What we know, we know mostly from the romans.
|
| B) The romans practiced ritual murder (among other
| things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice
| to me.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20726130/
|
| And yes, I can go on, but why? The point was not, that
| the druids were saints. (Btw. many of the christian
| "saints" were pretty bloody as well)
| philwelch wrote:
| > The romans practiced ritual murder (among other
| things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice
| to me.
|
| Yes, this is also how the early Christians felt, which is
| why they eradicated Roman paganism once they became the
| dominant religion within the empire.
| nathancahill wrote:
| One of the greatest tragedies of human knowledge loss. Right up
| there with the library of Alexandria. The 4 remaining Maya
| codices are a wealth of information. Imagine if we had the
| rest.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > library of Alexandria
|
| Its importance and size are massively over-emphasized though.
| We aren't even sure if that were that many books left there
| when it was supposedly destroyed.
| trelane wrote:
| Destroying things and killing others for religious reasons has
| a long history, even amongst atheists. For example,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
| and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
| dash2 wrote:
| Can someone tell me what an Aztec codex is? I assumed Aztec
| writing was not on paper but on stone... these seem to be from
| the colonial period, so are they hybrid cultural forms or what?
| ako wrote:
| The link includes some pictures and a video, there it looks
| like paper, not stone.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| They had a pre-colombian pictographic writing system with some
| phonetic elements that they wrote on animal hides. Priests did
| most of the writing and there was quite a lot recorded by them
| before it was mostly destroyed after contact with Europe.
| bawolff wrote:
| Codex usually does not mean stone, but more like a book (albeit
| usually something like vellum instead of paper)
| retrac wrote:
| It's a book. Paper bark or parchment. . The Aztecs didn't have
| full writing in the sense of a system to represent a spoken
| language. Aztec codices are more to the calendar and graphic
| end of things. (But I could be wrong, since so few examples,
| are truly from pre-exchange times.)
|
| The primacy of stone is a misconception. The following applies
| not just to the Aztecs, but also Sumer and Babylon, Egypt, the
| Maya, etc: the primary writing material for all of these
| civilizations was not stone. It was perishable materials,
| including parchment, wood bark, wax tablets, papyrus in Egypt,
| or just drawing in a pile of fine sand to do some arithmetic.
| (Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception, maybe.
| But they also wrote on wood, bark paper and cloth, among other
| things.)
|
| That means we only get monumental inscriptions. I'm more
| familiar with the Maya, who did have a complete writing system
| for spoken language, and we strongly suspect the Maya had
| literature in the same way the Egyptians, Chinese or Sumerians
| did. Poetry anthologies, mythological anthologies, religious
| texts, and also textbooks on medicine and astronomy, etc.
| Obviously, they didn't carve those on monuments, they wrote
| them on the closest analogue to paper they had.
|
| Unfortunately, neither Mexico's meteorological climate nor
| Spain's religious climate at the time was conducive to
| preserving such fragile books.
| detourdog wrote:
| The fired clay tablets I believe were long term record
| keeping. Things important enough to try to maintain the
| information.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception
|
| It wasn't just Babylon but dozens of other civilizations in
| the region. IIRC we have a lot more Assyrian tablets because
| Babylon and their allies sacked and burned the Assyrian
| capital which preserved their library.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I'm sharing my admiration for the Museo Nacional de Antropologia
| in Mexico City, one of the best museums in the world. An
| absolutely astounding collection of history, archaeology, and
| art. Well presented. Worth a visit to CDMX just for itself. If
| you ever are in the area plan at least a half day at the MNA; you
| could spend two full days and not see everything. (Take another
| day to visit Teotihuacan!)
| paul wrote:
| Agreed! Wonderful museum.
|
| They also have some original codices along with translations
| that are interesting to look at
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/zeo3Hn2Q8v81cidX9
| profeatur wrote:
| It will be interesting to find out why Cortes is depicted as a
| Roman. Considering the church inventory, it reminds me of the
| Holy Week processions in Spain where you often see people dressed
| as roman soldiers.
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