Ties of Blood: Mesoamerica from the Olmecs to the Mexica (by Quebrado Amaru)
Mesoamerica from the Olmecs to the Mexica
Ties of Blood: Mesoamerica from the Olmecs to the Mexica
by Quebrado Amaru
The cultural area known as Mesoamerica covers most of southern Mexico and Central America. It’s topography and ecology include semi arid deserts in the north, mountainous terrains and steamy rainforests in the south. To the east lies the Gulf Coast and the Yucatan peninsula, a limestone jetty with a system of underground rivers, where water is scarce. It shares some distinct cultural traits that were disseminated by what is known as the Olmec culture of the Gulf Coast.
The Olmecs (1000 - 400 B.C.) are considered “the mother culture” because they were the first people to develope a centralized government. They were the first long-distance traders of Mesoamerica and apparently spread “civilization” as well as their trade goods. They had a strong influence on peoples as far south as Guatemala and as far east as the Zapotec center of Monte Alban. They were the first to create the famous Mesoamerican ballgame which later was included in the cosmology of the Maya, the Teotihuacanos, the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, the Toltecs, and later the Aztecs or Mexica.
Scholars have attempted to link the Maya and Central Mexican Calendars as well as early writing to the Olmec. The recent discovery of what seems to archaeologists to be a cyllindrical seal made of baked clay at the Olmec site of La Venta has tentatively proven that the Olmecs developed the first Mesoamerican writing system.
The calendric systems of the Maya and of Central Mexico are based on a veigesimal numeric system that included the concept of zero. Zeros mark completion and are part of a cycle. The calendar is really a calendric system with a 360 day solar count with 18 months containing 20 days each. Each day has its own name. At the end of the 18 months is one small month with 5 days of fear and calamity. This was intermeshed with a 260 day ritual calendar of 20 day names and 13 numbers. These two calendars created what is known as the calendar round that functioned like two circular gears that pushed time in a spiral motion. The calendar round does not repeat any of its combination of days for a period of 52 years. The Aztecs renewed their cycle with a “new fire ritual” in which they had a runner go to the top of a sacred mountain and with a fire drill create new fire that would symbolically bring about a rebirth of the nation.
These calendric systems also had a larger concept known as “the Long Count”. The Long Count is a period of 5,126 years after which the sun would be newly created. The beginning of the present Long Count was August 13, 3,114 B.C. It will end on December 21, 2012, in the Julian calendar December 21st is the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The Maya and Aztec believed that after the completion of this 5,125 year cycle that we are currently in the era of the 5th sun.
Writing systems were directly influenced by what is thought to be a proto Maya script found on a stone monument known as a stela and a small statuette found in Tuxtla, in Chiapas, Mexico. It is called La Mojarra script after the area in which this stela was found. The Zapotecs of Oaxaca also had an early system of writing in 600 B.C. These writing systems, including the advanced writing system of the Maya, are comprised of logograms called “glyphs“ that express complete concepts, much like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese figures. Some are also syllabic and when combined create affixes, suffixes, and infixes. This system is in direct correlation with Maya languages such as K‘iche‘ which has these types of conventions in the spoken and written word. 42 Maya languages exist in the Maya area today. Many scholars believe that the “glyphs” are written in one of these, Ch’olan, which served as a kind of pan-Maya prestige speech -- a lingua franca used by the elite. Some argue that the Maya scripts varied and that the sites located in the south of the Maya area utilize Choltí, a Maya language now extinct. Its closest varient is Chortí, which is still spoken in southern Guatemala and northern Honduras.
The rise of the Aztecs as an imperial force has a short history of approximately one hundred years, yet their culture was influenced by all of the prior Mesoamerican power centers that rose and fell prior to their arrival in the valley of Mexico. It is to those peoples that we now turn in order to understand the rise of the Aztec empire.
Possibly the most successful of all city states within Mesoamerica and the influence to the later Aztecs was Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico. The Aztecs revered this city in ruins by the time they migrated into the area and named it “the place where the gods were born”.
No one has yet discovered where the Teotihuacanos came from nor where they went after the city was destroyed by fire in approx. 650 A.D. The city is organized on a North, South, East, West axis and was home to between 120,000 to 200,000 people at its height. The site rose in 1 A.D. due to the importance of obsidian mining in the nearby mines of Pachuca.
Obsidian is a volcanic glass that was used for arrow, spear and knife points. In Pachuca the obsidian was a greenish color, extremely prized by Mesoamericans. Archaeologists have been unable to locate any royal burials at the city. There is no evidence of dynastic history in the monumental architecture or art. It is assumed that Teotihuacan was ruled by an oligarchy of warrior families. Although, recent discoveries in the pyramid of the moon or piramide de la luna would suggest that perhaps there were at least two kings in Teotihuacan. The burials were found with many jade acutrements and jade masks, much like the burials of kings found in the Maya area. This would suggest either the influence of the Maya area in Teotihuacan or a more likely theory that the idea of kingly burials and the custum of burial with jade masks is a Teotihuacan inovation. Archaeologists have discovered besides the ritual center approximately 2,000 apartment style complexes each with their own central patios built between 200 - 400 A.D. On the West side of the city, an ethnic enclave from Oaxaca was found complete with architecture in a pure Zapotec style and ceramics, which were locally made imitations of Oaxacan forms. Zapotec writing is also found in this compound. These are people that had strong ties with Monte Alban and were probably multi lingual. There is a strong possibility that they may have been ambassadors or merchants.
On the East side of the city is another set of apartment compounds known as the merchant’s barrio. There are circular structures thought to belong to peoples from the Gulf Coast and Vera Cruz. There is similar architecture to that in the Maya area. There are also Maya style ceramics and glyphs written for Maya merchants to read. Some scholars believe that Teotihuacan may have had its own writing system. Their writing has not yet been deciphered.
Teotihuacanos were also involved in long distance trade and they set up what would latter be known as the turquoise route that connected central Mexico with the American Southwest, present day Arizona and New Mexico. They traded macaw feathers, which the Hopi still use today in their headdresses, and obsidian in exchange for turquoise, which is not found in the Mesoamerican area. Each of these hard to find items would mark prestige in these societies. Teotihuacan had also established trade relations with their southern neighbors the Maya. Teotihuacan also exchanged ideas on architectural style and a distinct art that has been found in the Maya lowlands. The Maya had access to precious prestige items such as cacao (the base for chocolate), quetzal feathers, and jade. In 378 Teotihuacan warriors under the leadership of Siyaj K’ak’ (born in fire) arrived at Tikal or Mutal, as the people of the time called it, and began a new order in the Maya lowlands. That same day the ahaw, a Maya word for king, “entered the water” – this is a Maya metaphor for death, which possibly has some relation to the Maya version of the Mesoamerican ballgame and the fate of the loser. Siyaj K’ak’ did not directly rule Mutal himself, but instead he installed Yax Nuun Ayiin I, possibly the son of a Teotihuacan lord and a royal woman from Mutal.
Yax Nuun Ayiin I would begin a long line of rulers under the protection of Teotihuacan. As ahaw, he would make a move to exploit underdeveloped regions under the patronage of Mutal, including Palenque, and would build new city states that would be clients to Teotihuacan such as Copan, Querigua, and Seibal.
It would not be until 562 CE when Mutal’s rival Calakmul, the empire of K’aan or the snake, would initiate a star war, a war that was fought due to the appearance of Venus as the morning star, in alliance with Caracol, a former client state of Mutal. This defeat would plunge Mutal into a 130 year dark age in which, Calakmul, would rise as the new dominant power in the Maya lowlands. During this time very little was written on stone monuments about the exploits and reigns of any of Mutal’s ahaws within Tikal itself. This “dark age” correlates with the decline and subsequent destruction of Teotihuacan, Mutal’s patrons and overlords, in approximately 650 A.D.
Although Mutal’s Dark Age would end in 695 CE, other Maya city states would record the intrigues of their ahaws. In the 6th century, a battle was initiated for the succession to the throne of Mutal. Nuun Ujol Chaak won that battle and would be crowned the next ruler. His vanquished rival and brother B’alaj Chan K’awiil took his supporters and was made the founding ahaw of his own city state under the patronage of Calakmul. With Calakmul as his patron state, B’alaj Chan K’awiil was considered a yahaw, which means that he had to pay tribute to Calakmul. The “y” in Maya Yucatec, a language similar to Ch’olan, is a possessive aspect that signifies that the ahaw or lord belongs to someone. In the “glyphs” one would likely see the word yahaw followed by a name. In choosing to ally himself with Mutal’s rival, B’alaj Chan K’awiil, committed the ultimate act of treason against his own royal line. He even named his city Mutal because he considered himself to be the rightful king of that city, we would know his smaller state today as Dos Pilas. It became an anti-Mutal state under Calakmul.
Thirteen years later Nuun Ujol Chaak captured Dos Pilas – the Anti-Mutal and ejected his brother as the ruler, but he did not have him killed. Thus, the true ahaw of Mutal ruled Mutal and installed a subordinate lord, a yahaw, in Anti-Mutal. He ruled both these states by the same name for five years until Calakmul, the empire of K’aan came and took back its client kingdom and replaced the “yahaw” of Anti-Mutal with the exiled brother B’alaj Chan K’awiil. Thus, the rival brothers were again pitted against each other.
In 679 CE, Nuun Ujol Chaak was defeated, in a way, by his brother and auxillary troops from Calakmul. His lineage, however, would be allowed to remain in power and Nuun Ujol Chaak’s son, Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, Mutal’s greatest ahaw, would come to the throne. B’alaj Chan K’awiil would join the ahaw of Calakmul in a ritual dance celebrating the end of a 52 year cycle of the calendar round. This same year he would send his daughter, Lady Six Sky, to forge a new dynasty at distant Naranjo, which is close to the original site of Mutal or Tikal.
Four years later, B’alaj Chan K’awiil, returned to Calakmul to witness the accession of his new overlord, Yich’aak K’ak’ (Fiery Claw). On the 5th of August, 695 CE, the decisive battle for control over the Maya lowlands would send warriors supplied by Lady Six Sky, the blood cousin of Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, to aide Calakmul and Yich’aak K’ak’ (Fiery Claw) in war against Jasaw and his troops.
Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, would be victorious in this battle, at a place called Yellow Rabbit and would “bring down the flint and shield” of Calakmul, meaning that Jasaw captured Yich’aak K’ak’ (Fiery Claw) and the image of the patron god of Calakmul, [yahaw maan].
Maya armies, like all Mesoamerican troops, carried their patron gods with them into battle and attempted to capture the king as well as the patron god of the opposing forces. They would also try to reach the temple structure dedicated to that god and set fire to it.
Jasaw Chan K’awiil I was later paraded through the causeways of Mutal on a jaguar skin litter – much like a Roman triumph. He let blood, which means that he pierced his own body so that he could bleed on paper to burn with copal (pom) incense. By doing this he was able to conjure up his own patron god as part of a ritual celebration of his victory. It may be assumed that Yich’aak K’ak’ (Fiery Claw), the fallen and captured ahaw of Calakmul, was humiliated and then sacrificed in an elaborate ritual.
This incident would spark the decline of Calakmul’s wider control over the area and prove Tikal’s or (Mutal’s) rebirth as the dominant military power over the Maya lowlands, bringing it out of its Dark Age.
In fact, Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, re-adopted the symbols of power from the once mighty but now fallen Teotihuacan, the one time patron state of Mutal, including the war serpent (Waxaklajun ub’aah K’aan) (18 images of the snake) to legitimate his rule. Tikal or Mutal would see unprecedented growth and would eventually decline and the ahaws and their subjects would abandon the great cities of the Maya lowlands in approximately 900 A.D. This is known to scholars as the mysterious Maya collapse. Although attempts might have been made to consolidate the Maya area as an empire, they would never be united.
Meanwhile, in central Mexico, another great state, the Toltecs, emerged in a place known to us as Tula and to ancient Mesoamericans as Tollan (the place of the reeds) in about the 11th century A.D. The spread of the Toltec state is described by the mythical succession battle between Quetzalcoatl (plumed serpent) and Tezcatlipoca (smoking mirror). The myth reveals that Quetzalcoatl was defeated by Tezcatlipoca in a battle for succession because he had lost the support of the people of Tollan. He had gotten drunk and had committed incest with his sister. He was exiled from Tollan and said to have gone to the Gulf coast and built a raft made of snakes, whereupon he and his followers sailed into the east. Another myth, from the people of the ancient city of Chichen Itza, in the Yucatan, speaks of the arrival of K’uk’ulk’aan (the plumed serpent) who with his followers arrived at Chichen Itza, defeated the ahaw, and took control of the ruling dynasty. The name Q’uq’umatz means plumed serpent in K’iche’. Q’uq’umatz is one of the creator gods in the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh or book of council. The spread of the plumed serpent cult and the Toltec conquest of areas as far south as the highlands of Guatemala and as far east as the Yucatan peninsula evidences the push to regain economic inperial control that Teotihuacan once had. The Toltecs may have been the descendants of Teotihuacan and inheritors of their cultural traditions. The Toltec Empire fell in the 13th century and the inhabitants formed scattered settlements around the lake in the Valley of Mexico. They would be known as the Tolteca-Chichimeca.
The Aztecs, the last great civilization of Mesoamerica, migrated to the Valley of Mexico in the late thirteenth century. They came from Aztlan, a mythologized homeland which probably existed somewhere in the American Southwest. We think this because Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, is part of the Uto-Azteca language family spoken by some of the indigenous peoples in that area. A 19th century French scholar gave the Mexica, which is what the Aztecs called themselves, the name “Aztecs” due to their claims to have migrated from Aztlan. The Mexica were led by an oracle god Huitzilopochtli (hummingbird on the left) who would later be the Mexica god of war and conquest – their patron diety. Upon their arrival in the valley of Mexico the Mexica were assigned a place to live by the original inhabitants, the Acolhua – these people were the decendants of the Toltecs and barbarious peoples from the North, the Chichimecs – the Tolteca-Chichimeca. The Mexica inhabited a dismal piece of swamp land and were later directed by Huitzilopochtli to found a city at a place in which they saw a cactus growing out of a rock with an eagle perched on top. They found this sign on an island in the middle of lake Texcoco and built their city Tenochtitlan (place of the rock, cactus) there. They would design their city in four quadrants and assign 4 calpullis or clans to each district. The founders of the city were made subordinate client kings to the Acolhuas and were forced to pay them tribute and supply them with warriors as their allies.
The Mexica overlords, the Acolhuas, built an empire, known as the Tepenec empire under an ambitious military leader Tezozomoc, who used his patronage with the Mexica to wage war against neighboring city states. Tezozomoc soon waged war against Texcoco, another Toltec-Chichimec city state on the edge of the lake. Their leader or tlatoani was bound in marriage to a Mexica noblewoman. Tezozomoc assassinated the tlatoani of Texcoco and sent the dead tlatoani’s son, Netzahualcoyotl, into hiding.
After Tezozomoc’s death, his son Maxtla would ascend the throne and would block the causeways leading into Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital with his guards, fearing that the Mexica, who had blood ties with Texcoco, would rebel against him. Meanwhile, in 1472 CE, Netzahualcoyotl snuck into Tenochtitlan to live with his Mexica relatives. He sought vengence for the murder of his father and asked his uncle, the tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, Itzcoatl (obsidian blade serpent), for help. Thus, because of blood ties, as Maxtla had feared, Tenochtitlan allied with Texcoco. These two then allied with another city, that despised the rule of Maxtla, named Tacuba. They were from then on known as the Triple Alliance and managed to route Maxtla, capture him, after which Netzahualcoyotl received his just vengeance and sacrificed Maxtla with complete pomp and circumstance. The next Mexica ruler, Moctecuhzoma I, would expand the Aztec’s empire and bring most of Southern Mexico under his overlordship.
It is perfectly clear from the long political and imperial history of Mesoamerica that blood ties to both the gods and to other powerful elites was the glue that held Mesoamerica together as a region. I do not have the space to write about the importance of ruling lineages, which will probably be the subject of a forthcoming article.
Bibliography
Coe, Michael D. Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs, Thames and Hudson, New York: 1994
Coe, Michael D The Maya, 5th edition, and Hudson, New York: 1993
Martin, Simon and Nicolai Grube, Chronicles of the Maya Kings and Queens, deciphering the dynasties of the ancient Maya, Thames and Hudson, NY, London: 2000
Townsend, Richard F. The Aztecs, Thames and Hudson, NY, London: 1992
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Featured January 9 , 2008
