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Tlacuilo ( a painter) from the Mendocino Codex.
The painter of hieroglyphics was highly respected for his skill in
using pictures to record events.
The hieroglyphics served as a sort of stenography, a collection of notes, suggesting to the initiated much more than could be conveyed by a literal interpretation. This combination of the written and the oral comprehended what may be called the literature of the Aztecs. At the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, great quantities of these manuscripts were treasured up in the country. They were looked on by the spaniards as magic scrolls. The first archbishop of Mexico, Don Juan de Zumarraga, collected these paintings, especially from the capital in Anahuac, the great depository of the national archives. He then caused them to be piled up in a "mountain-heap" - as it is called by the spanish writers themselves in the market-place of Tlatelolco, and reduced them all to ashes. |
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Calmecac was a school associated with temples. It was run by priests and priestesses primarily for the boys of noble families, starting at ages 10 - 15. They were taught the working of the calendar, glyphs or pictographs, so that they could learn from the codices on military arts and other public concerns. The Calmecac taught self expression and how to speak well and be respectful. |
| Father giving the ritual Precepts of the Elders advice to his daughters when they reached age 15. |
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An Aztec market. Cortez wrote to Charles V in his his second letter
"There is also one square, twice as big as that of Salamanca,
with arcades all around, where more than 60,000 people come each day to buy and sell
.... provisions as well as ornaments of gold and silver,
lead, brass, copper, tin, stones, shells, bones and feathers."
The remarkable abundance of food available included corn, beans, salt, honey, chilli peppers, tomatoes, various fruits, edible roots, fish, frogs and insect eggs which were treasured as a delicacy. (ibid page 128) |
The narratives of the conquerors relate one side of the history of ancient Mexico; the documents of the conquered tell quite another. Writing in Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue, by using the Latin alphabet, Indian sources poignantly evoke a civilisation lost forever. Each of the following documents describes the final capitulation of Tenochtitlan. The first by Alva Ixtlilxochitl, himself a descendant of the Texcoco king and ally of Cortes, recreates the surrender of the Aztec emperor. The last two, both anonymous elegies, from collections of post-Conquest Aztec poems called, respectively, the Cantares Mexicanos and Unos Anales Historicos, de la Nacion Mexicana, capture the the trauma of the Indian's defeat. The flower is a common Aztec symbol for a man's brief and fleeting life on earth.