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Aztec society was a highly complex and stratified society that developed among the Aztecs of central Mexico in the centuries prior to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and which was built on the cultural foundations of the larger region of Mesoamerica.
The Aztecs [a] (/ ˈ æ z t ɛ k s / AZ-teks) were a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
It is said that the Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli, instructed the Aztecs to found their city at the location where they saw an eagle, on a cactus, with a snake in its talons (which is on the current Mexican flag). The Aztecs, apparently, saw this vision on the small island where Tenochtitlan was founded.
The area was expanded upon in the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and administered from the former Aztec capital as New Spain. The city of Tenochitlan was destroyed, looted and the treasures stolen by the victorious Spanish and Tlaxcaltec soldiers, though not nearly as much gold as the Spanish had hoped for. [ 20 ]
Day of the Dead originates from rituals practiced by Indigenous people in the Americas, most notably the Aztecs. The Aztecs had a ritual known as Miccaihuitl, which was a time to honor the dead.
Friar Diego Durán (c. 1537 –1588), who chronicled the history of the Aztecs, wrote of Aztec emperor Moctezuma I's attempt to recover the history of the Mexica by congregating warriors and wise men on an expedition to locate Aztlán. According to Durán, the expedition was successful in finding a place that offered characteristics unique to ...
Rig Veda Americanus at Project Gutenberg, Daniel Brinton (Ed); late 19th-century compendium of some Aztec mythological texts and poems appearing in one manuscript version of Sahagun's 16th-century codices. Aztec history, culture and religion Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (tr. by A. P. Maudsley, 1928, repr. 1965)
While the driving force behind the creation of Spanish-commissioned codices was to serve as aid in converting natives to Catholicism and exterminating the Aztec religion and culture, the Codex Ixtlilxochitl is a tribute to the complex relationship between the colonists and the natives and how that relationship eventually resulted in enough ...