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Aztec Nation The Aztec Nation A distant sound is heard. It sounds like a deep
drum being hit with a heavy instrument. You hear it again and strain your eyes
in the direction of the sound. All around you is dense jungle. Snakes slither
between your legs. You hear the sound once again.
In front of you is a dense
stand of ferns. You part them and look down into a wide open valley. The valley
gets so wide and it is so green that it takes your breath away. But that is not
what you are looking at.
You are staring at a huge city with glittering
buildings shining in the spring sunlight. Smoke rises up from some of the many
houses. You can see and hear children playing in the wide open fields in front
of the shining buildings. Lamas and chickens are being bought and sold. You see
bags of gold jewelry being bought and sold.
Beyond the market place you can
watch a religious ceremony. You hear the scream of a person being sacrificed to
one of the gods. Beyond the city there are roads made of stone and canals full
of pedestrians and canos.
Who are these people and what are they doing here you
wonder? The above paragraph describes what an early explorer in Mexico might
have seen between 1400 and 1500 AD. The Aztec nation is one of the largest and
most advanced Indian nations to ever exist on earth. Just about every part of
the Aztec life was advance to such a state that at that time of the world the
people were living better than many European nations.
The Aztec nation is unique
in its history, economy, environment, and way of life then any other nation at
that time. Perhaps three to four thousand years ago, small bands of
hunting-gathering peoples made their way across the land bridge that was the
frozen Bering Strait, migrated southward through what is now Alaska, Canada, the
United States, Central America, South America, and Mexico, settling along the
way.
One such hunting- gathering group settled in the Central Valley of what is
now Mexico (Nicholson 1985). There is a long history of civilizations in the
Central Valley of Mexico; as early as several centuries before Christ
agricultural tribes had already settled, and by the birth of Christ had
established as their great religious center Teotihuacán.
The history of the
Central Valley after circa the tenth century A.D. is one of tribal conflict and
superiority. About the time of the fall of this agricultural civilization, which
flourished from approximately the second to the tenth centuries A.D., a new
tribe, who we know as the Toltecs, settled at Tula, Hidalgo. They belonged to a
larger group known as the Nahua, or Nahuatl- speaking, and seem to have entered
the Central Valley from the north or northwest.
The Toltec civilization
gradually replaced the older, agricultural civilization, as Toltec influence was
felt as far as the Yucatán Peninsula and other areas occupied by the Mayan
peoples. Yet by the eleventh century A.D., another tribe, the Chichimecs, had
already begun to eclipse the Toltecs as the dominant group of the Central
Valley. By approximately the thirteenth century, the Chichimecs had replaced the
Toltecs (Wolf 1998).
About this time, another Nahua tribe known as the Aztecs
began their migration, in c. 1168. They left their mythical mysterious homeland
called Aztlán, place of the herons, or Chicomoztoc, place of the seven caves,
and migrated southwards through Michoacán (León-Portilla 1992).
The Aztecs, or
Crane People, arrived in the Central Valley and obtained permission to settle at
Chapultepec in c. 1248 (Caso 1958).
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