Lexicus
Deity
Wow, proved with logic that white Europeans should rule the world, QED, amazing
Freedom of Religion: Aztecs
- Thread starter Zardnaar
- Start date
Wow, proved with logic that white Europeans should rule the world, QED, amazing
Lexicus
Deity
It also comes together when you realize that poster is vociferously opposed to the various independence movements in what is now called Spain. How shocking that they would minimize the historical crimes of the Spanish monarchy.
The Inquisition notwithstanding, the genocide committed by the Spanish in the New World colonies was actually killing on the scale they attribute to the Aztecs.
Incidentally this is not to defend Aztec practices, that was a brutal empire and others have correctly noted that their tributary states rose against them when given the opportunity to do so. Also fwiw estimates i have seen are around 1/10th of the total claimed by Thorgalaeg (so approx. 20,000 human sacrifices per year).
Any whiff of using this to justify the European conquest of the Americas is like saying the Nazis were right to invade the Soviet Union.
Thorgalaeg
Deity
^Very interesting contribution to the discussion. LoL
BTW @schlaufuchs
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www.historyonthenet.com
According to scholars numbers go from 4,000 to 250,000 yearly. Probably truth is somewhere in the middle. But you can pick 4000 if you consider that number less "racist".
BTW @schlaufuchs
Human Sacrifices: How Many were Killed In Aztec Culture?
Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering.
www.historyonthenet.com
According to scholars numbers go from 4,000 to 250,000 yearly. Probably truth is somewhere in the middle. But you can pick 4000 if you consider that number less "racist".
Lexicus
Deity
^Very interesting contribution to the discussion. LoL
BTW @schlaufuchs
Human Sacrifices: How Many were Killed In Aztec Culture?
Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering.
According to scholars numbers go from 4,000 to 250,000 yearly. Probably truth is somewhere in the middle. But you can pick 4000 if you consider that number less "racist".
250,000 every year makes absolutely no sense and would have depopulated the entire region very quickly. I also find it quite implausible that 250,000 were ever killed in one year - we are talking about a state with a population estimated at 5 to 6 million.
And the fact that this is apparently the suggested variance doesn't, like, give you any pause?
Yeah it could be 4,000 or 250k, I dunno man. Almost like it's complete guesswork lol.
Edmund Ironside
White Rabbit Object
Woah, easy there tiger, take ten seconds to read your post back to yourself before throwing big words around! Maybe actually try to provide some citations at least before doing so. Let me show you how it is done.
"Dr. Woodrow Borah an authority on the demography of ancient Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently estimated that the Aztecs sacrificed 250,000 people a year. This consituted about 1 percent of the region's population of 25 million."
"Many reputable scholars today put the number between 20,000 and 250,000 per year for the whole Aztec Empire."
Human Sacrifices: How Many were Killed In Aztec Culture?
Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering.
www.historyonthenet.com
"Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world."
Science | AAAS
www.science.org
Also a word of warning, be careful assuming the lack of archaeology evidence is itself evidence. With your logic only 50 people died at the Battle of Towton, the bloodiest battle of the English civil war (Wars of the Roses), rather then around 10,000.
Battle of Towton - Wikipedia
Whether the Aztecs did or did not sacrifice thousands of people, I don't really care. But if you are going to sling mud, try to be justified in doing so, and make sure you put in the work to actually back it up!
[edited as put in the wrong number for Towton]
Last edited:
Henri Christophe
L'empereur
I'm the only one who think the human sacrifice was nice and should come back?
Lexicus
Deity
Woah, easy there tiger, take ten seconds to read your post back to yourself before throwing big words around! Maybe actually try to provide some citations at least before doing so. Let me show you how it is done.
"Dr. Woodrow Borah an authority on the demography of ancient Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently estimated that the Aztecs sacrificed 250,000 people a year. This consituted about 1 percent of the region's population of 25 million."
"Many reputable scholars today put the number between 20,000 and 250,000 per year for the whole Aztec Empire."
Human Sacrifices: How Many were Killed In Aztec Culture?
Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering.
"Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world."
Science | AAAS
Also a word of warning, be careful assuming the lack of archaeology evidence is itself evidence. With your logic only 50 people died at the Battle of Towton, the bloodiest battle of the English civil wars, rather then 28,000.
Whether the Aztecs did or did not sacrifice thousands of people, I don't really care. But if you are going to sling mud, try to be justified in doing so, and make sure you put in the work to actually back it up!
Again, utter nonsense. The region the Aztecs actually controlled had 5 or 6 million people. And it's even funnier because 28,000 dead at the Battle of Towton is completely implausible too. According to my cursory research the estimates are in fact less than half that number. 28,000 would be over half the total engaged - like I said, completely implausible.
250,000 a year is one every two minutes, around the clock, every day. Given it was a particular process of extracting an intact heart with a very sharp obsidian blade and burning the heart in a container, I don't think the priest would ever get to rest.
Lexicus
Deity
It's 4% of the population of the whole Aztec tributary network. There's just no way that went on for over a century.
The ironic thing is that death rates that high, and probably much higher, were inflicted by the Europeans when they showed up.
Thorgalaeg
Deity
But 250,000 only, not one more.
sophie
Break My Heart
^Very interesting contribution to the discussion. LoL
BTW @schlaufuchs
Human Sacrifices: How Many were Killed In Aztec Culture?
Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering.
According to scholars numbers go from 4,000 to 250,000 yearly. Probably truth is somewhere in the middle. But you can pick 4000 if you consider that number less "racist".
Woah, easy there tiger, take ten seconds to read your post back to yourself before throwing big words around! Maybe actually try to provide some citations at least before doing so. Let me show you how it is done.
"Dr. Woodrow Borah an authority on the demography of ancient Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently estimated that the Aztecs sacrificed 250,000 people a year. This consituted about 1 percent of the region's population of 25 million."
"Many reputable scholars today put the number between 20,000 and 250,000 per year for the whole Aztec Empire."
Human Sacrifices: How Many were Killed In Aztec Culture?
Human sacrifices Aztecs were a part of their religious ceremony that they believed properly appeased their gods to spare them from suffering.
"Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world."
Science | AAAS
Also a word of warning, be careful assuming the lack of archaeology evidence is itself evidence. With your logic only 50 people died at the Battle of Towton, the bloodiest battle of the English civil war (Wars of the Roses), rather then around 10,000.
Battle of Towton - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Whether the Aztecs did or did not sacrifice thousands of people, I don't really care. But if you are going to sling mud, try to be justified in doing so, and make sure you put in the work to actually back it up!
[edited as put in the wrong number for Towton]
lmao thank you for quoting back at me the **** I read before I made my post. I do love men who assume I just say whatever the f—-without thought.
Yes human sacrifice at scale obviously happened. No it was not a holocaust death camp worth of killing every year. And no the European ritualized mass slaughters are not rendered the more civilized because they did them Europeanly.
Edmund Ironside
White Rabbit Object
Its even funnier as you either deliberately of accidently misunderstood the point I was making. Do you need to find thousands of dead bodies to conclude that thousands died at the battle (whether it is lowest estimates of 9000, or the highest 28,000), even if we have only found 50 dead bodies? That means we have only found .5% of the total dead.
I mean, ideally, yes? Isn't that the whole point of evidence vs. theorycrafting?
If the range provided is excessive, and people are taking the upper end of the range as a point in their argument . . . isn't that wishful thinking?
In every other thread at have to categorically prove X, Y and Z, often via a signed affidavit from the perpetrator, before it gets common acceptance (and even then, it often doesn't lol). Why are we so accepting here? Where's the concrete evidence? And if we don't have any, why are we treating the numbers as though they're infallible?
Lexicus
Deity
I didn't misinterpret your point at all. But @schlaufuchs simply never claimed that we can only assume the number of dead is equal to the number of skulls we've found, so your point was based on a strawman anyway.
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
You can find scholars to defend absurd numbers for just about any figure in history. That doesn't make those figures more credible, it just makes inattentive people (and, in this case Spanish nationalists trying to whitewash spanish history) fall for shock value over logic.
At 1% (or more) of the population of Mexico per year, the Aztecs, who were around for more than a century, would have wiped themselves (and most other Mexican people) out long before the Spanish arrived. Which we know they didn't, because they were still around when the Spanish arrived. We also have zero archaelological evidence of the kind of mass depopulation that sacrifices carried out at that rate eould entail - the population collapse in Mexico is under the *Spanish*, not the Aztecs. And we have plentiful evidence of that one.
The 250 000 claim is, purely on the face ot it, farcical, and those who quote it in their argument make a joke out of their claims.
At 1% (or more) of the population of Mexico per year, the Aztecs, who were around for more than a century, would have wiped themselves (and most other Mexican people) out long before the Spanish arrived. Which we know they didn't, because they were still around when the Spanish arrived. We also have zero archaelological evidence of the kind of mass depopulation that sacrifices carried out at that rate eould entail - the population collapse in Mexico is under the *Spanish*, not the Aztecs. And we have plentiful evidence of that one.
The 250 000 claim is, purely on the face ot it, farcical, and those who quote it in their argument make a joke out of their claims.
sophie
Break My Heart
There’s a pretty substantive difference in the evidence one would expect to find between, “a single event in which thousands died in a day” and “millions and millions of people being slaughtered in a very concentrated area over the course of a century.”
You get that, right? Like we have extremely clear evidence of the scope and scale of the Black Death and the mass eradication of Indian populations following the European arrival. We have comparably very little evidence that 2% of the total population of Central America was being ritualistically culled in giant temple complexes every 5 years for a century.
You get that, right? Like we have extremely clear evidence of the scope and scale of the Black Death and the mass eradication of Indian populations following the European arrival. We have comparably very little evidence that 2% of the total population of Central America was being ritualistically culled in giant temple complexes every 5 years for a century.
Psychologically, we tend to hold suffering due to other people in a different place as suffering due to nature, and we're very good at rationalizing non-involvement. It's baked deep. I think the heart of the question is whether we will act in order to stop an atrocity. The default is 'no'. People will then come up with a variety of reasons, increasingly sure of themselves, that they should do nothing. A failed effort is implicitly part of their goal, since it allows confirmation bias.
OTOH, we can all think of instances where we suspect that only violence will stop an atrocity. There's nothing at the root of the concept we object to. Sometimes the violence needs to be immoral or contain collateral, even. The reasonable second-guessing is whether the intervention will help. That will be a function of capacity and willingness to sufficiently invest. See: people in my first paragraph.
I don't know the Aztec numbers, nor pretend to. I am not sure that arguments about the scale really matter, given that they're all atrocious. Just pulling off of headlines, ISIS was killing about 9k people annually in Iraq, roughly a population of 40 million, which I think is in the same wheelhouse as what Zard was asking about. AFAICT, there was the understanding that intervention was warranted, even if we then disagreed on the mechanism of intervention. We had an old (odious) poster with pretty good personal experience with UN Blue Helmets, and was thoroughly contemptuous of them. He was hard to handle, but I do believe that that experience really shaped his view. But even that can fall under 'under-investment'.
But to highlight how we view interpersonal violence differently than natural evil, and even how we heuristically divide them, in the first year of the pandemic Sweden had roughly 6,000 more covid-related deaths than Israel. Let's call these sacrifices to the gods of economics and freedom. I think it's interesting how we can both see those deaths as a variant of callous interpersonal violence AND as a 'natural evil'. But, we never thought about using any type of force against Sweden. That said, the wholescale of suffering with regards to covid in the population will be different than if religious self-appointed police are culling a similar number of people. Heck, even the DALY calculation will be different.
If there was a serial stalker in our city breaking into old ladies' houses every week, and who played Russian Roulette with their frontal cortex after tagging all their family on Facebook ... we would lose our minds. But the average Boomer woman has a ~1/6 chance of having Alzheimer's when she's 85, and we barely shrug. Obviously different, but not different enough to explain the scale of our indifference.
OTOH, we can all think of instances where we suspect that only violence will stop an atrocity. There's nothing at the root of the concept we object to. Sometimes the violence needs to be immoral or contain collateral, even. The reasonable second-guessing is whether the intervention will help. That will be a function of capacity and willingness to sufficiently invest. See: people in my first paragraph.
I don't know the Aztec numbers, nor pretend to. I am not sure that arguments about the scale really matter, given that they're all atrocious. Just pulling off of headlines, ISIS was killing about 9k people annually in Iraq, roughly a population of 40 million, which I think is in the same wheelhouse as what Zard was asking about. AFAICT, there was the understanding that intervention was warranted, even if we then disagreed on the mechanism of intervention. We had an old (odious) poster with pretty good personal experience with UN Blue Helmets, and was thoroughly contemptuous of them. He was hard to handle, but I do believe that that experience really shaped his view. But even that can fall under 'under-investment'.
But to highlight how we view interpersonal violence differently than natural evil, and even how we heuristically divide them, in the first year of the pandemic Sweden had roughly 6,000 more covid-related deaths than Israel. Let's call these sacrifices to the gods of economics and freedom. I think it's interesting how we can both see those deaths as a variant of callous interpersonal violence AND as a 'natural evil'. But, we never thought about using any type of force against Sweden. That said, the wholescale of suffering with regards to covid in the population will be different than if religious self-appointed police are culling a similar number of people. Heck, even the DALY calculation will be different.
If there was a serial stalker in our city breaking into old ladies' houses every week, and who played Russian Roulette with their frontal cortex after tagging all their family on Facebook ... we would lose our minds. But the average Boomer woman has a ~1/6 chance of having Alzheimer's when she's 85, and we barely shrug. Obviously different, but not different enough to explain the scale of our indifference.
With ISIS another reason to destroy their caliphate was that this was spreading across parts of the Middle East and Africa and even the Philippines and Central Asia (not territorially there I think) and they were using this territory as a center for promoting terrorism worldwide so it wasn’t even just limited to humanitarian concern for locals there.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
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- 15,374
That may seem kind of comparable, because the government in Cambodia at the time was indeed led by crazy people who wanted to kill a subset of their own citizens whom they accused of being disloyal and having ties to the neighboring country.
Like the aztecs they killed other people inside their empire but not seen as part of their ethnicity/group.
But there is a difference. In Cambodia (as in other contemporary cases) it is a matter of nationalism gone crazy that eventually gets resolved with the destruction or driving away of the targeted portion of the population, or defeat of the group in power. Genocide or regime collapse.
In the Aztec Empire it was an essential cultural matter likely to continue for centuries without outside intervention. Slaughter was not a means to some end but the end in itself, whatever the religious narrative justifying it. Absent the overthrowing of aztec religion, a central part of its culture, it would go on. In their belief system that slaughter had to continue for ever. I think that's actually worse than genocide.
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