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Latin America
Related: About this forumFifth Sun by Camilla Townsend review - a revolutionary history of the Aztecs
Ben Ehrenreich
Thu 13 Feb 2020 02.30 EST
In the summer of 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer viewed a sampling of the treasures the conquistador Hernán Cortés had recently shipped to Europe from the land that would later be called Mexico. In his diary, Dürer enthused about a golden sun a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, plus all kinds of wonderful objects. All the days of my life, he wrote, I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things.
The awe with which Europeans at first beheld the civilisation of the people who would be known as the Aztecs they called themselves the Mexica would not last long. They would later be remembered mainly through images of hearts torn from living bodies with obsidian blades and corpses tumbling down bloody-stepped pyramids, as a people ruled by ritualised bloodlust, trapped in a rigid fatalism, easily conquered by more agile newcomers from across the sea. Moctezuma, the story goes, mistook Cortés for a god whose return had long been prophesied, and surrendered his empire without a fight.
In Fifth Sun, the historian Camilla Townsend points out that even Cortés, a figure hardly known for his modesty, did not mention being welcomed as a god in any of the letters he wrote at the time. Would he have neglected to include such a detail? The story only began to circulate decades later, and it is no surprise that it took hold: In such a scenario, Townsend writes, the white men had nothing to feel remorse about ... The Europeans had not only been welcomed, they had been worshipped. Most of the enduring myths about the Aztecs perform the same function, flattering the conquerers by expelling the conquered from the realm of the rational. It did not help that until recently most of the textual sources on the Aztecs were accounts prepared by the Spanish.
Another body of sources survives, the neglected Nahuatl-language texts known as the annals, written in the years following the conquest by men Townsend describes as indigenous intellectuals eager to record their experiences in their own tongue for their own people, to preserve their history before it faded from collective memory. They allow Townsend who has been championing, translating and publishing the annals for more than a decade to synthesise a history of the Aztecs that relies primarily on their own words. In the annals, she writes, we can hear the Aztecs talking. They sing, laugh, and yell.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/13/fifth-sun-camilla-townsend-history-aztecs-review
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Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend review - a revolutionary history of the Aztecs (Original Post)
Judi Lynn
Feb 2020
OP
Squinch
(50,773 posts)1. I'm definitely getting this. Thank you.
Judi Lynn
(160,211 posts)2. So glad people are keeping at penetrating the lies fashioned by the murderous monsters who invaded
the Americas and nearly destroyed the human race already living there.
I really want to find out more, as well. With time, so much more is going to be learned now that ways of finding cities, temples, etc. lost in time are being created, which can locate them under jungles or layers of sand, etc.
Reading books written by people who dare to think beyond the early lies we were taught is a totally worthy way to spend valuable time.
I'm seriously thinking about this book, too.
Thank you.
Squinch
(50,773 posts)3. When I think about the literature and learning that was destroyed. Who knows what
they knew that we don't any more?