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Sacrifice was a common theme in the Aztec culture. In the Aztec "Legend of the Five Suns", all the gods sacrificed themselves so that mankind could live.Some years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, a body of the Franciscans confronted the remaining Aztec priesthood and demanded, under threat of death, that they desist from this traditional practice.
The practice of human sacrifice in pre-Colombian cultures, in particular Mesoamerican and South American cultures, is well documented both in the archaeological records and in written sources. The exact ideologies behind child sacrifice in different pre-Colombian cultures are unknown but it is often thought to have been performed to placate ...
Sacrifice of a war captive (Image based on the Codex Magliabechiano) The tecpatl or sacrificial knife, was an important element in Aztec rituals. The tecpatl was used by Aztec priests to open the chest of the victims of human sacrifice to extract the heart that would feed the gods, in the hope that the offerings would bring blessings to mankind ...
The Aztecs performed ritual self-sacrifice (also called autosacrifice or blood-letting) on a daily basis. [17] The Aztecs believed that Huitzilopochtli needed daily nourishment ( tlaxcaltiliztli ) in the form of human blood and hearts and that they, as “people of the sun,” were required to provide Huitzilopochtli with his sustenance.
Human sacrifice was practiced on a grand scale throughout the Aztec empire, which was performed in honor of the gods, [43] although the exact figures were unknown. At Tenochtitlán , the principal Aztec city, "between 10,000 and 80,400 people" were sacrificed over the course of four days for the dedication of the Great Pyramid in 1487 ...
Archaeologists have reconstructed the face of Juanita, a young Inca woman who was sacrificed and buried in the peaks of the Andes 500 years ago.
The scale of Aztec human sacrifice has provoked many scholars to consider what may have been the driving factor behind this aspect of Aztec religion. In the 1970s, Michael Harner and Marvin Harris argued that the motivation behind human sacrifice among the Aztecs was the cannibalization of the sacrificial victims , depicted for example in Codex ...
Boys were younger than 6 when they were sacrificed. The team behind the new study was able to extract and sequence ancient DNA from 64 out of around 100 individuals, whose remains were found ...