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By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)
After 1400, the Mexica (Aztecs) inherited fragments of the Earlier, Mayan/Anunnaki-directed worship of Sumerian Lords with new, Tolan names they had learned as laborers in Teotihuacan. From these fragments, the Aztecs developed their own ideology and social system at Tenochtitlan.
Centuries after Thoth / Kukulkan’s departure, central Mexico entered a long aftershock. City-states (altepetl) competed for land, tribute, and water. Each ruled by a tlatoani and noble council, each surrounded by farmland, each seeking dominance. Coordination persisted—but only locally, only temporarily.
When Toltec centers declined after 1100 CE, waves of migrants entered the Basin of Mexico. Among them were the Mexica—late arrivals, mercenaries, outsiders—who settled on an island in Lake Texcoco and founded Tenochtitlan. They inherited symbols without schematics, calendars without sky-masters, pyramids without living science.
Earlier cultures had aligned labor to celestial cycles. The Mexica aligned society with perpetual war.
TENOCHTITLAN’S FLOATING GARDENS, TENDED BY ITS POOR, GAVE MILITARY LEADERS WEALTH, CONTROL & TRIBUTE
When the Aztecs left Teotihuacan and relocated to Tenochtitlan on Lake Texcoco in the mid-thirteenth century, they knew little about planting food crops. “The area was already settled by several city-states, heirs to the remnants of the Tiahuanacan and Mayan civilizations, which subjected the Aztecs and left them only the most infertile land to till.
“The Aztecs, however, made a technological breakthrough which enabled them to increase their crop output enormously—cultivation on artificial islands (chinampas) on the lakes and intensive agriculture accompanied by the rise of an aristocratic class which enforced labor on the lower Aztec classes.” The Aztec fighters won hegemony over the Valley of Mexico and helped extend their empire to what’s now Guatemala. [Harman, 166]
Earlier cultures had aligned labor to celestial cycles. The Mexica aligned society with perpetual war.
Tenochtitlan grew into the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas—over 200,000 inhabitants—carefully planned, gridded, canal-laced, and divided into four quadrants. It functioned as a political capital, a religious center, and a trade hub exporting gold, turquoise, cacao, cotton, pottery, tools, weapons, foodstuffs, and slaves. This was not a primitive society. It was an administratively sophisticated one.
But integration relied on coercion.
Intermarriage, gift exchange, monumental art, and imperial ideology bound city-states together—but always under the shadow of military intervention. Warfare remained constant: to suppress rebellion, seize resources, expand territory, and above all, capture bodies. Every male is trained for war. Jaguar and Eagle warrior elites dressed as predators, living metaphors for a society that fed itself on conquest.
Human sacrifice exploded in scale not because the Mexica were uniquely “violent,” but because they governed a broken system. Blood replaced knowledge. Hearts replaced calculation. Tribute replaced trade.
The Flower Wars institutionalized the capture economy. Warfare supplied sacrificial victims the way agriculture supplied maize. The Sun no longer answered—but priests insisted it still demanded payment.
At the Templo Mayor, Mexica priests reenacted cosmic battles remembered dimly from earlier epochs and earlier Anunnaki rivalries. But the coordinators were gone. Only the script remained. Priests claimed the gods demanded more blood, more fear, more obedience—the universal reflex of administrator classes once oversight disappears.
Yes, there was cooperation:
Farmers worked chinampas.
Merchants grew wealthy.
Artists produced refined metalwork, mosaics, ceramics, and sculpture.
Slaves could sometimes buy freedom.
God-impersonators lived in luxury for a year.
But all of it rested on the ever-present threat of ritual death.
A Mexica captive, climbing the steps, might have wondered: Why do the gods never return?
The answer lay buried beneath an earlier stone.
The Mexica did not invent sacrifice; they maximized it. They transformed lineage ritual into a state spectacle. Where kings once bled themselves, now entire populations bled to sustain the Empire. This was not continuity—it was degeneration. When the Spaniards arrived in 1519, they did not encounter the builders of Teotihuacan or the astronomers of Palenque. They encountered a society already hollowed out by ritualized violence, ecological strain, and accumulated enemies. Cortés did not conquer a civilization at its peak. He toppled the last regime of a long-failed experiment. Steel, smallpox, siege warfare, and internal revolts finished what the gods’ absence had begun.
Yet beneath Tenochtitlan—beneath Mexico City today—remain sealed tunnels, mica-lined chambers, and waterworks from an earlier age, when Mexico functioned not as a sacrificial engine but as a planetary operations hub.
The Mexica were not the origin of Mexico’s greatness. They were its epilogue. The Mexica demonstrate that cooperation can exist within a system of domination, but only instrumentally. Love, artistry, trade, and family life persisted—but they served a war-theological machine. Once fear becomes the organizing principle, cooperation no longer scales upward. It collapses inward.
A civilization that lives by the sword does not die because of the sword. It dies because the sword replaces intelligence. Spain was not morally superior—only technologically greedier and better fed. A larger predator entered a weakened ecosystem.
MEXICO TIME CHART c. 3000–1500 BCE
Early agricultural societies, maize domestication, and village cooperation
c. 1200–400 BCE
Olmec horizon; monumental stone, shared iconography, early coordination systems
c. 100 BCE – 550 CE
Teotihuacan apex; urban planning, astronomy, engineering, and continental influence
c. 600–1100 CE
Toltec inheritance; partial knowledge retention; system fragmentation
c. 1100–1400 CE
Competing city-states; militarization; ideological hardening
c. 1400–1519 CE
Mexica empire; Tenochtitlan dominance; ritualized warfare and sacrifice
1519–1521 CE
Spanish invasion; internal revolts; disease; siege; collapse
Post-1521 CE
Colonial extraction replaces ritual extraction; domination continues under new symbols
REFERENCES
Primary Sources:
Harman, C., 2017, A People’s History of the World, Versa
Macquire, K. (2023). History of Mexico: The Mexica (Aztecs). YouTube video lecture. Used for political structure of altepetl, Triple Alliance formation, population estimates of Tenochtitlan, military organization, social mobility, ritual practice, and the fall of the Mexica empire.
Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs (3rd ed., 2012).
Standard archaeological synthesis on Mexica urbanism, economy, warfare, and religion.
Ross Hassig, Aztec Warfare (1988).
Authoritative on military organization, Flower Wars, and capture-centered warfare.
Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (16th c.).
Indigenous Nahua testimony recorded under colonial conditions; invaluable but biased and fragmentary.
Diego Durán, History of the Indies of New Spain (1581).
Early colonial narrative; mixes observation, hearsay, and Christian moral framing.
William T. Sanders, The Basin of Mexico studies.
Environmental limits, chinampa systems, water management.
Jeffrey R. Parsons, research on lake systems and hydraulic management in central Mexico..
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