The Maya
The Maya lived in southern Mexico and in Belize, Guatemala, and adjacent Honduras. In contrast to the Native Americans, the Maya kept written historical records, extending back to 50 B.C. and ending with the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.
By 5000 B.C., the Maya were installed along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. Within the next 3,000 years, they began to move inland, turning from fishing to agriculture. By about 1,200 B.C., another Native people, the Olmec of the Gulf Coast, dominated trade in Central America and began greatly influencing Mayan culture. By 1000 B.C., the Maya adopted Olmec styles of pottery and jades and also took on Olmec religious symbols. Maya culture and power reached its height by A.D. 900, when it seems to have collapsed, probably due to famine, disease, and chronic warfare among Maya city-states. A landscape adorned with spectacular stepped-pyramid temples and other structures endured, and various Mayan groups continued to prosper in varying degrees until the 16th century, when the Spanish conquistadors invaded.
Most of what is today called Mexico fell under the domination of another great Native American civilization, the Aztecs. Their own myths place their origin at Aztlan, somewhere in north or northwest Mexico, where they lived as a small, nomadic collection of tribes.
During the 12th century A.D., the Aztec tribes migrated southward, settling in the central basin of Mexico by the 13th century. Their existence was a precarious one, as they were repeatedly attacked and routed by other groups. Finally, the Aztecs took refuge on small islands in Lake Texcoco where, in 1325, they founded Tenochtitlan on the site of present-day Mexico City.
From their new base, the Aztecs evolved into ruthless and well-organized warriors. By the 15th century, they subdued and subjugated the peoples of Mexico, thereby creating an empire second in size only to the Incas in Peru. Extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and from the Valley of Mexico south into Guatemala, the Aztec empire was peopled mostly by slaves, whose work was supremely manifest in the capital.
As the conquistadors later noted, Tenochtitlan was a city as large as Cordoba or Seville; however, most remarkably, it was situated entirely within Lake Texcoco, two miles from the mainland, Four great causeways led to the city, which was watered by a system of magnificently engineered aqueducts. The streets, lined with splendid temples, issued onto great public squares, which served as marketplaces. And there were priests. Legions of black-robed holy men continually marched through Tenochtitlan’s boulevards, for the Aztec capital was the home of God himself as incarnated in the emperor, Montezuma II.
Splendid though it was, the empire was founded in blood for the purpose of shedding blood. In Tenochtitlan, the temple of human sacrifice was more spectacular than the other temples, sprouting forty towers. There were three main halls, from which various windowless chapels branched. The idols that lined its halls were molded of a paste of seeds and plants kneaded together with the blood of prisoners and slaves taken in battle. Blood was the fuel that drove the Aztec government, economy, and culture. It was said that the very ground of Tenochtitlan was black with it.