Word: montezuma
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...latter-day Magellan could still be "the first to burst into that silent sea." No atomic-age Hernando Cortés would pose as a god to a modern Montezuma. Geographically, the world had been pretty well raked over. The only sizable blanks remaining were near the Poles, and they were mostly wastes of ice & snow...
...haunted and deserted for centuries, the mysterious limestone cities of the Maya crouch in the Yucatan bush and the Guatemalan-Honduran jungles. They were already in ruins when Hernando Cortes marched into Mexico 400 years ago to teach Montezuma's Aztecs a Spanish lesson. The names of those deserted cities echo with a kind of distant, mournful music: Tikal, Copan, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Mayapan...
...Montezuma Fiction...
...regret to find that in its Dec. 31 issue TIME has fallen into the somewhat common error of referring to Montezuma as "Aztec Emperor of Mexico." Montezuma II was not an "emperor" and did not rule over an "empire. . . ." Montezuma was only one of the two chiefs of Tenochtitlan, the ancient Mexico City. Both these chiefs had but limited powers. . . . The "Aztec Empire" was only a loose confederation of nations tributary to Tenochtitlan but not integrated into a single, or even several large, governmental systems...
...Montezuma, Aztec Emperor of Mexico, is said to have sighed: "The Christians must have a strange disease which only gold can cure." Most jewelry from the era before Columbus went to cure that disease-nearly all of it melted down for shipment to Spain as bullion. The few surviving objects were mostly buried deep in ancient tombs. Last week Mexico's Institute of Anthropology and History announced the discovery of 200 prehistoric gold ornaments in Oaxaca. In Brooklyn, the museum of art opened a small, comprehensive show of pre-Columbian gold, silver and jade from the Americas...