Feeding the gods: human sacrifice in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan

The priest made a cut with a sacred dagger and pulled out of the victim another beating heart. Thousands of such sacrifices were made in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan.

They were for the sake of the favor of the gods. Feeding the gods is a sacrificial ritual, which is the key to the spiritual world of the Mexicans in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The priests carried the body after the ritual to another ritual space, where they laid it face up. Armed with many years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge and obsidian blades more acute than today’s surgical steel, they cut in a thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, skillfully decapitating the body.

Using their sharp blades, the priests cleverly cut off the skin and facial muscles. Then they added a new skull to the pyramid from the skulls of the previously sacrificed gods.

After years in the sun and in the rain the skulls began to split, losing teeth and jaws. The priests cleaned them and replaced them with new ones. These skulls were seeds that would ensure the continued existence of mankind. They were a sign of life and rebirth, like the first flowers of spring.

But the Spanish conquistadors, who came to Tenochtitlan in 1519, saw everything differently. For them, the pyramids of skulls and the whole practice of human sacrifice testified to barbarity and justified the campaigns that ravaged the city in 1521. The Spaniards destroyed the Templo memorial and the pyramid of skulls in front of him.

The conquistadors wrote about the zappantli and its towers, that in these pyramids there were 130,000 skulls from the skulls standing in the temple. But historians and archaeologists knew that the conquistadors were inclined to exaggerate the horrors of human sacrifices in order to demonize the culture of Mexicans. After a lapse of centuries, scientists began to look for these lost “towers from skulls” and found them.

The skulls made their way along the sides and were threaded on wooden poles, which by the time of their discovery had already rotted under the earth’s layer, many were broken, like many skulls when these pyramids were destroyed by the conquistadors.

Archaeologists found out that it was not a pyramid, but rather a wall of skulls and it really was an impressive structure. Its length reached 35 meters, width 14 and height 5 meters.

B383AE Aztec (Mexica) offering of decorated skull mask made from decapitated slain warrior from the Templo Mayor Museum in Mexico City.. Image shot 2004. Exact date unknown.

In total, two walls of skulls were discovered, which were created by the Aztecs between 1486 and 1502 years. Also near the temple were found several towers of skulls inserted and fixed with mortar.

The height of these towers reached 2 meters and 5 meters in diameter. To build one such tower, the Aztecs needed several thousand skulls.

Human sacrifices occupied a particularly important place in Mesoamerica. Many of the region’s cultures, including Maya, believed that human sacrifices feed the gods. Without this, the sun would cease to grow, and the world would end. And the sacrificial victims earned a special, honorable place in the afterlife.

Archaeologists found that 75% of the skulls discovered during the excavations belonged to men, most of whom were between the ages of 20 and 35 years old. 20% were women, and 5% were children.

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