[Aztlan] Only 50/year sacrificed at Tenochtitlan?--Indigenous counting and its representation

[Jerry Offner]

And we're back...to Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism. And the Mayanists thought they had it rough with the transient Apocalypto thing. A flash by now already in the can. Not even on pay cable anymore. 

For Aztec specialists, it is by now an ongoing Apocalypto of several centuries. What about Aztec accomplishments in other areas? It would be nice to see those also, even if less frequently than the cannibalism thing. There has been, for example, a recent study on Aztec accomplishments and expertise in land surveying and mathematics. Three Aztec specialists from different fields worked on this for quite some time:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=aztec-math-uses-hearts-and-arrows

but it does not get this kind of attention and even the URL involved has to mention hearts and arrows. Hmmm.... And which study tells us more about the Aztecs in their own terms that we didn't already know? 

Still, this latest effort, apparently by a Maya specialist 

http://www.precolumbian.org/talk0109.html

boldly moonlighting into the intricacies of Nahua culture, ethnohistorical sources and historiography (a bit thicker jungle than most people know), seems to be one of limiting the largest claimed numbers to more realistic, or at least smaller, ones. 

Such an inquiry travels very, very well worn ground but there is always a chance of better understanding, especially with in depth research into the culture itself. Perhaps the investigator could consider or has considered the indigenous numbers reported as emanating from a vigesimal  (20-base) system and as being transcribed from a Nahua writing system that had sometimes positional notation and sometimes notation based on iconographic representation and sometimes both working in combination--i.e. perhaps the investigator could understand the culture in its own terms--you know, the anthropological thing. 80,400, for example...how did that number get read? (20 x 20 x 201, maybe they slipped a digit or position or two or misread a glyph or two?; even the Spanish source using 136,000 = 20 x 20 x 20 x 17 seems vigesimally based;  or 80,000 = 20 x 20 x 20 x 10;  20,000 = 20 x 20 x 50 and so on for the other numbers). If skull racks, some of which we know were in stone, were in fact being reported on or otherwise prompting these numbers, should not the numbers have three dimensions or factors, rather than four or five and how do you choose the right factors from the reported numbers?; what are the skul count dimensions of the existing stone skull racks, etc.).  Another approach to consider is that 20 or 400 or 8000 in Nahuatl could mean--very roughly translated "a bunch" "a whole lot", "innumerable", "golly, really a whole lot" or as they say in Texas "a ton of") in the same way we might say in English "there must have been a thousand of them there" or "that must have cost them a million dollars." I don't see any evidence of these issues in Lloyd Anderson's kindly presented report, but perhaps it was present and he could elucidate further. Perhaps the investigator could write the list briefly about her investigation of this aspect of the data. It is a problem that needs solving or at least some measure of convincing constraining of the range of possible answers and I hope she and others continue to work it up. Probabl
y we'll find that It wasn't as bad as we thought and that it was worse than we imagined--like so many other things in life.

As for savagery, here is a deliberately obscure fact about one of our respected icons of civilization, Julius Caesar.  While mopping up remnant Gallic resistance, following the seige of  Uxellodunum believed to be near modern Dordogne in France, Julius Caesar ordered the hands cut off all the surviving warriors. Quite cruel and quite a burden on the relatives of those who did not choose suicide.   (I don't however, think this is why Caesar famously said "the entirety of Gaul is divided into three parts").  And Western civilization has got a million more where that came from...creepy gallows humor included.  
   
The Aztec, in their seemingly unending Apocalypto, have by now suffered through "modern" interpretations of nutritional cannibalism, battlefield cannibalism and absolute cannibalism-deniers just in recent times so maybe this study will help convince us we have had by now our fill--at least for a while.  Rergarding the Aztecs--what else is on our plate?  

Oh well, I seem to have an appetite for different information regarding the Aztecs and we can leave it at that. As those Romans always said: "De gustibus non disputandum est." 

Jerry Offner



Jerry Offner
ixtlil at earthlink.net