By extraordinary coincidence, the 500 conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes arrived during the exact year when an Aztec prophecy foretold the return of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent God. Feathered...
Sculpting the landscape, the Aztecs created a beautiful ideal model, intended to bring rain to the real world. Water channel from the mountain through an aqueduct flowed around the hill, filling baths...
Our body is a flower as grass becomes green in the springtime, so our hearts will open and blossom and then they will die. The god of poetry was also the god of flowers, music and joy. But while he’...
Victims were tether ed to the center and provided only with dummy weapons. Warriors fought them to the death. Both Aztecs and their enemies were sacrificed. For the Aztecs it was an honor. But sacrifi...
As a purification ceremony, frankincense or copal may have been burnt in these huge brazier s depicting Tlaloc, the rain god. Most telling of all, the scientists found traces of albumen indicating the...
The goddess's portrayed as the decapitate d figure, two great serpents representing streams of blood flow from her neck. For archaeologist Elizabeth Baquenano, a leading expert on Aztec sculpture, the...
Over 50 different varieties of plants have been identified. Flowers and seeds were a vital ingredient of offerings which the Aztecs buried in the foundations of the Great Pyramid. So far over 135 diff...
As precious as jade is how the Aztecs describe their capital---Tenochtitlan. The Great Pyramid or the Templo Mayor as it's known honored the two most significant Gods for the Aztecs---- Tlaloc, the go...
To pacify the forces of nature, the Aztecs turn not just to the gods but to their own sophisticated technology. They had seen the eagle land on a saltwater lake, 32 miles long. To build a city here an...
In this remarkable story we see not only the idea of Teotihuacan as the primordial origin of the Aztec sun, we also see the participation of the gods and their self-sacrifice so that human life can th...
At the edge of the valley 30 miles north, the Aztecs came upon an abandoned place called Teotihuacan. People had first settled in this place a thousand years before the Aztecs came, but it long since...
When the Spanish conquistador s first saw the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, it was so beautiful. They thought they were dreaming. They called it the Venice of the Americas. At the height of the Aztec...
Modern Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. Once it was a wilderness area. A valley of saltwater lakes and swamps, surrounded by mountains and active volcanoes. At the beginning of t...
