/lit/ - Literature

>>16787031
>>16786406
>>16786439
cont:

Most impressively he designed the watering system for the baths and gardens at Texcotzinco, a retreat for the royalty of Texcoco (the city he ruled), which sourced water from a spring in the Sierra Nevada mountain range around 5 miles away, with the aquaduct transporting the water at times reaching 150 feet aboveground, and brought it to another adjacent hill where it flowed into a series of branching channels and pools to regulate the flow speed, with the water then travelling over another aquaduct over a large gorge between the peaks of that hill and Texcotzinco itself, wherin the aquaduct formed a circuit around it's peak, the water flowing into various shrines and displays, and being directed into artificial waterfalls to water the plants in the gardens at the hill's base, with different sections of the gardens mimicing different biomes with their specific plant life

These sorts of large royal gardens weren't unusual, and were also academic in nature: Different plants were experimented with in terms of the conditions they could grow and for medical properties, and were also used to stock medical herbs, and most impressively, into formal taxonomic systems, beating Carl Linnaeus to the punch on a binomial taxonomy scheme; see pic. We have multiple surviving documents on Aztec botany and medicine, and a large amount (over 85% per some studies) of herbal treatments are medically effective by today's standards. Their surgical and dental medicine was also pretty advanced, with them practicing both preventative denstriy with multiple instances of teeth brushing a day and multiple recipes for types of toothpaste, dental washes/rinsese, and breath freshners, but also corrective dental surgeries for a variety of conditions and ailments. In the context of non-dental surgeries, they had recorded surgical techniques for removing eye tumors and masses as well as the first recorded instance of intramedullary nails as a surgical treatment for broken/fractured bones, again before 19th century Europeans popularized the practice

The Spanish were pretty keen on documenting and adapting Aztec botany and Medicine, with multiple Spanish people asserting asserting it's superiority: Cortes claimed this, as did Francisco Hernández de Toledo, the Spanish royal court physician and naturalist who traveled to Mexico specifically for this purpose, and ascademic Botanical gardens first show up in Europe not long after Conquistador accounts talking about them were published (their accounts are filled with many instances of praising Aztec and other Mesoamerican civilization's societies, laws, order, art, archtecture, etc, often lamenting that their religious was so barbaric in comparison)

Another random example is that the modern birth control pill was synthesized from a plant used by the Aztec and other Mesoamericans as an aborficant, among other things. If you want me to go on or post sources/citations, let me know

2/2 for now.

>>15657675
>>15657664
I'd do my typical long infodumps but I don't have time for that right now, maybe I will latter.

Feel free to ask me questions about Mesoamerican intellectualism or society/history later too

>>14784987
>>14784938
shit forgot my file

Again, Sorry for all the derailing posts OP >>14784583

Also to be clear here other Mesoamerican civilizations had scripts of varying complieixites and degrees of phonetic/syllabic basis: The Maya script was a true, formal written language under even the strictest definition of the term, contrary to how it looks the glyphs are made up of subcharacters representing nearly every spoken sound in the language to form words (though there is a set of entirely logogrammic glyphs too), while the Epi-Olmec and Zapotec scripts are more in between Aztec and Maya in terms of how heavily they are based on the language; while Teotihuacano and Mixtec are even more purely pictographic AFAIK then Aztec

Alternatively, if you were asking "it's debatable up for interperation because they didn't have writing?"; then the answer to that is, well, I guess also the above, but moreso that most of the sources those researchers are pulling from were written in Nahuatl using European scripts, during the early colional period: The first 3-5 decades of the Spanish colional period still had Mesoamerican socities and political institution mostly intact (many city-states and kingdoms were also still unconquered), so you had a brief period where sort of like Japan you had traditonal societies modernizing and using European technologies but still keeping their prexisting social, cultural, etc traditions, though obviously there was some degree of Spanish cultural influence at play even during these early decades, such as distorting accounts about religion and their pantheon to have christanized elements such as associating Quetzalcoatl with jesus.

In any case there's literally hundreds of Nahuatl documents from this period.

>>14784992
To be honest i'm not sure i';m informed enough on teotl metaphysics to sustain a long disscusion about it, but maybe me making a thread on it will get the other anons in the archived links I posted to show up

I guess I will

>>14784987
>>14784938
shit forgot my file

Sorry for all the derailing posts OP

Also to be clear here other Mesoamerican civilizations had scripts of varying complieixites and degrees of phonetic/syllabic basis: The Maya script was a true, formal written language under even the strictest definition of the term, contrary to how it looks the glyphs are made up of subcharacters representing nearly every spoken sound in the language to form words (though there is a set of entirely logogrammic glyphs too), while the Epi-Olmec and Zapotec scripts are more in between Aztec and Maya in terms of how heavily they are based on the language; while Teotihuacano and Mixtec are even more purely pictographic AFAIK then Aztec

>>14784992
To be honest i'm not sure i';m informed enough on teotl metaphysics to sustain a long disscusion about it, but maybe me making a thread on it will get the other anons in the archived links I posted to show up

I guess I will