Author: Norman Spinrad
Publisher: Little Brown GBR
ISBN: 9780316726047
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 506
Get Book Here
Book Description
The year is 1531. In a small hut on the slopes of the volcano Popocateptl, scholar and poet Alvaro de Sevilla reflects on his extraordinary life. For Alvaro was one of the small army of conquistadors who, some years earlier, set out to conquer an empire... Hernando Cortes is a man driven by his desire for gold and glory - in the name of his God and his country. Having been proclaimed a reincarnation of the god Quetzacoatl, the Feathered Serpent, shortly after his arrival in the New World, Cortes takes advantage of the hatred for the central state of Mexica - and their superstition - to force his way to the capital city. There he will meet Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, who at first welcomes the conquistadors to his city, showering them with gold. But it is an encounter between two civilisations - two worlds - that can only end in chaos, death and destruction.
Author: Eduardo Matos Moctezuma
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786077844020
Category : Aztec mythology
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Camilla Townsend
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190673060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.
Author: Kay Almere Read
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253113917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Get Book Here
Book Description
This introduction to the imaginative world of the Mexica (or Aztec) explores sacrifice in the richly textured life of 16th-century Mexico. Kay Almere Read describes a universe in which every object was timed by a given lifespan and in which sacrifice was the mechanism by which time functioned. This book makes a convincing case for what sacrifice meant religiously and for how it came to be that human sacrifice of staggering proportions could be accepted, matter-of-factly, by the Mexica people.
Author: Michael E. Smith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118257197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Aztecs brings to life one of the best-known indigenous civilizations of the Americas in a vivid, comprehensive account of the ancient Aztecs. A thorough examination of Aztec origins and civilization including religion, science, and thought Incorporates the latest archaeological excavations and research into explanations of the Spanish conquest and the continuity of Aztec culture in Central Mexico Expanded coverage includes key topics such as writing, music, royal tombs, and Aztec predictions of the end of the world
Author: Manuel Aguilar-Moreno
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195330838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Get Book Here
Book Description
Describes daily life in the Aztec world, including coverage of geography, foods, trades, arts, games, wars, political systems, class structure, religious practices, trading networks, writings, architecture and science.
Author: Angela Herren Rajagopalan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477316078
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325–1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts—Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin—document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as “Aztec.” In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.
Author: Lori Boornazian Diel
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477316752
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Get Book Here
Book Description
Winner, Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2019 Some sixty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals in Mexico City set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, which was recorded in pictorial form with alphabetic texts in Nahuatl clarifying some imagery or adding new information altogether. This manuscript, known as the Codex Mexicanus, includes records pertaining to the Aztec and Christian calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and an annals history of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City, among other topics. Though filled with intriguing information, the Mexicanus has long defied a comprehensive scholarly analysis, surely due to its disparate contents. In this pathfinding volume, Lori Boornazian Diel presents the first thorough study of the entire Codex Mexicanus that considers its varied contents in a holistic manner. She provides an authoritative reading of the Mexicanus’s contents and explains what its creation and use reveal about native reactions to and negotiations of colonial rule in Mexico City. Diel makes sense of the codex by revealing how its miscellaneous contents find counterparts in Spanish books called Reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, Reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the issue of time, as does the Mexicanus. Diel masterfully demonstrates that, just as Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain, likewise the Codex Mexicanus provided its Nahua audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.
Author: John F. Schwaller
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806164115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Mexica (Aztecs) used a solar calendar made up of eighteen months, with each month dedicated to a specific god in their pantheon and celebrated with a different set of rituals. Panquetzaliztli, the fifteenth month, dedicated to the national god Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird on the Left), was significant for its proximity to the winter solstice, and for the fact that it marked the beginning of the season of warfare. In The Fifteenth Month, John F. Schwaller offers a detailed look at how the celebrations of Panquetzaliztli changed over time and what these changes reveal about the history of the Aztecs. Drawing on a variety of sources, Schwaller deduces that prior to the rise of the Mexica in 1427, an earlier version of the month was dedicated to the god Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror), a war and trickster god. The Mexica shifted the dedication to their god, developed a series of ceremonies—including long-distance running and human sacrifice—that would associate him with the sun, and changed the emphasis of the celebration from warfare alone to a combination of trade and warfare, since merchants played a significant role in Mexica statecraft. Further investigation shows how the resulting festival commemorated several important moments in Mexica history, how it came to include ceremonies associated with the winter solstice, and how it reflected a calendar reform implemented shortly before the arrival of the Spanish. Focused on one of the most important months in the Mexica year, Schwaller’s work marks a new methodology in which traditional sources for Mexica culture, rather than being interrogated for their specific content, are read for their insights into the historical development of the people. Just as Christmas re-creates the historic act of the birth of Jesus for Christians, so, The Fifteenth Month suggests, Panquetzaliztli was a symbolic re-creation of events from Mexica myths and history.
Author: Jill Leslie McKeever Furst
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300072600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
A richly illustrated look at basic Precolumbian beliefs among ancient Mesoamerican peoples about life and death, body and soul. Drawing on linguistic, ethnographic, and iconographic sources, art historian Jill McKeever Furst argues that the Mexica turned not to mental or linguistic constructions for verifying ideas about the soul, but to what they experienced through the senses. 32 illustrations.
