Course Highlight: HIST 3704, The Aztecs

For the average person, the Aztecs conjure up images of bloody sacrifices. Yet, the Aztecs or Mexica were just one people of a larger culture now identified as Nahuas. Their complex belief systems and elaborate speeches are just a few aspects of their past that are obscured by the overwhelming images of popular culture. The Aztecs often are surprising as a culture. While they were fierce warriors and harsh imperial masters, they were also poets. They appreciated beauty and had a quirky sense of humour as shown in the nicknames they gave to people such as Tochnenemi (He Hops Like A Rabbit) or Maxtlacozhuehue (Old Yellow Breechclout). They built one of the largest cities that existed in the world in the fifteenth century—Tenochtitlan—in a lake. The city was dotted with canals, so a lot of transportation and commerce was done via canoes. Spaniards who first saw Tenochtitlan were in awe and they compared it to Venice. They marveled at how well the huge market at Tlatelolco functioned and at the wealth of the city. Aztec merchants and soldiers traveled thousands of kilometers to trade or make war and yet they had no draft animals or wheeled carts. Aztec priests were astronomers and mathematicians and bureaucrats and yet they wrote everything in a pictographic form of writing that is still somewhat mysterious to scholars.

This course is taught by Professor Sonya Lipsett-Rivera.