SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
An ongoing excavation in the heart of Mexico City, once the great Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, has revealed a legendary tower inlaid with hundreds of skulls. This tower was first described by Europeans in the early 16th century, when a Spanish soldier named Andres de Tapia came to the city with Hernan Cortez' invading force. In his memoirs, de Tapia described an "edifice" covered in tens of thousands of skulls. Now his account is corroborated by this historic find.
According to a report from Reuters, the tower is 6 meters in diameter, and once stood at the corner of a massive temple to Huitzilopochtli, an Aztec god associated with human sacrifice, war, and the sun. It's likely the tower was part of a structure known as the Huey Tzompantli, which many of de Tapia's contemporaries also described.
Tzompantli were ceremonial wooden scaffolds used in many ancient cultures of the Americas to display the skulls of human sacrifices. Priests would prepare each skull by drilling two holes in it, then stringing it like a bead on a long cord. Once a set of skulls had been strung together, the cord would be stretched between two wooden posts, to form one row of skulls among many. The sight was designed to terrify the Aztec's enemies, and it certainly worked in the case of Spanish soldiers. Many recorded their terror upon seeing tzompantli in Tenochtitlan.
National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH [Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia]) archaeologist Raul Barrera told Reuters that "the skulls would have been set in the tower after they had stood on public display on the tzompantli." It appears that the skulls were coated in lime and sunk into the wall of the tower in tidy rows.
Source: Ars Technica
Additional Coverage:
Reuters
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @10:48AM (11 children)
Except the Holocaust? and the Churches of Skulls in Bohemia. [dailymail.co.uk] Vlad the impaler, and the Sorrow of Moldavia? khallow of very little historical knowledge, you make a mistake. At least the Aztecs were not racist!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @11:28AM
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Friday July 07 2017, @01:00PM (1 child)
Vigo the Carpathian, who was the Scourge of Carpathia and the Sorrow of Moldavia, commands you remember that he's a Ghostbusters villain and not an actual historical figure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:02AM
You are but the buzzing of flies to him! Vigo says:
No Aztec ruler ever said anything so absolutely evil.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 07 2017, @01:12PM (7 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @09:58PM (6 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Tower [wikipedia.org]
Similar? Turks, made of Serbian skulls. And that "inquisition" thing is just wrong. Nobody saved the bones from the Spanish inquisition, because no one expected it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:26AM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @04:12AM (4 children)
I am starting to think that khallow lost relatives to the Aztec, or that he saw Mel Gibson's very bad movie, Apocalypto [imdb.com].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @01:50PM (3 children)
My point remains. The Aztecs (and many other cultures in this area) killed a lot of people every year just to keep their neighbors down. There is no analogue to this in the modern world. The US (who would be the nearest equivalent to the Aztecs as the current relatively dominant power in the world) isn't demanding the delivery of millions of people for public, ritual slaughter as tribute each year from their subordinate neighbors and client states.
The original claim that "Christianity" is somehow as bad as the Aztecs' religion completely ignores the bloodbath that the Aztecs had going on continuously. I'll note also that when various parties in this thread were straining for anything even remotely close, they couldn't find a single Christian example, but had to resort to Islamic, Nazi, and Communist examples.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:59PM (2 children)
Your point is pure speculation. Is this your realpolitik world view projecting onto the Aztecs? For them sacrifice was religious, not political. Now for Christians, massacre is political, not religious. Once again, khallow is wrong. Poor khallow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 08 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)
I guess I must know more of them than you.
Or not. Religious dictates often followed political realities.
I see the non sequiturs are coming out. You still have to look at the incident and degree of massacres, comparing the steady, rather large ones of the Aztecs to the alleged ones of the Christians. My view is that we have a high frequency and lethality of Aztec massacres.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 08 2017, @11:59PM
REMEMBER Magdeburg! [wikipedia.org] Yes, khallow, you know more than the average AC, it's just that what you think you know is not actually what you know. We wish you a happy St. Bartholomew's Day! [wikipedia.org] "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." [wikipedia.org]