Word: aztecs
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...hill where Aztec priests once studied the stars, President Manuel Avila Camacho of Mexico dedicated a great modern observatory. Tonanzintla, near Puebla, 70 miles southeast of Mexico City, was the envy of visiting U.S. astronomers because of its latitude. Harvard's Harlow Shapley explained, "All the Milky Way can be seen-not merely the 60% or less which is satisfactorily explored from most northern observatories...
Disillusion came quickly to the Spaniards themselves. At the sight of the white Aztec metropolis and its great temples amid blue lakes, green slopes and high peaks, a roughhewn, hard-bitten soldier of Cortez' army in 1519 cried, "It is like the enchantments they tell of in the Legend of Amadis! Are not the things we see a dream?" But soon he smelled the sickening stockyard stench which was wafted from the gorgeous temples, saw thousands of skulls threaded on poles in the public squares...
...Aztecs were very unlike the Incas of Peru. "The Andean peoples, to generalize broadly, concentrated on the material technique of supporting life," says Vaillant, "the Middle American peoples [i.e., Mayas and Aztecs] on spiritual, or more accurately, supernatural methods." Symbols of Inca culture were their vast aqueducts and irrigation systems. Symbols of Aztec culture were their mighty pyramidal temples...
...Aztec religion there was no ethical concept-its heaven, like the Greek Hades, was devoid of moral significance. Aztec theology held that in bygone eras mankind had been successively wiped out by jaguars, by hurricanes, by fiery volcanic rains. The Aztecs in 1519 believed that their world would in time end amid horrendous earthquakes controlled by the Sun God. So with a relentless if grisly logic, they propitiated the deities at all costs, offering up mankind's most precious possession, its own lifeblood...
...Spain. Instead, Crown & Church at first tried to make good Christians and Spanish citizens out of them. Twenty of the 190 coats-of-arms granted during the conquest of Mexico and South America were given to Indians, and Spaniards often married Indian "princesses" under the delusion that the Aztec nobility, like that of Europe, was hereditary (actually it was earned). As great a blow to the Aztecs as the Spanish conquest was the English victory over the Armada. Mexican communication with the Crown & Church was thereby weakened, and the greedy, uncontrolled colonists only after 1588 began enslaving the Aztecs...