Is pretty lucky that us visiting Europeans didn't know there could be writing in them, otherwise we would have burnt the lot long ago, like we did with the written records of the Maya.
As European it saddens me how we almost wiped everything out back then.
Was talking to someone who identifies strongly as Christian about this recently. She said that she didn't care what had happened to the Maya, because these people practiced human sacrifice. I had to point out to her that you do not get to complain about human sacrifice after committing genocide.
1: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-skull-tower-rack-evidence-azte...
I can't find the passage in my hard copy of the book, but, from memory, the priests basically state that offering human sacrifices to the gods is the pious and proper thing to do. Castillo ends up persuaded of this, although he continues to abhor the acts they perform, of course. These priests also practiced self-mutilation, so they had noses and fingers, etc, missing. I think the point was that they were offering parts of themselves, too, as sacrifice to their gods.
There's no doubt that human sacrifice is a barbaric custom, that was historically practiced by few societies in the same scale as it was by the Aztecs. However, it is important to understand that, to them, it was not an act of evil, or even of righteous revenge towards their enemies. It was an act of worship to their gods.
My point is that we cannot apply our own concept of morality, which is probably influenced by the dominant religion of the western world, Christianity, to the manner by which people lived their life in a society that might have, for all intends and purposes, been on another planet for most of its history. If we are to judge those people, it must be on their own terms. And on their own terms, human sacrifice and cannibalism was what their faith (and therefore, their morality) required of them.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_verdadera_de_la_conqu...
[2] Bernal Díaz del Castillo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_D%C3%ADaz_del_Castillo
It's on project Gutenberg, online:
Our own culture believes in sacrificing humans to the things that we worship. We just dress it up differently.
>"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure"
- Thomas Jefferson
And that's before getting into our cultural celebration of heroic sacrifice, or other ways we trade in human lives, both our own and others.
The Australian aborigines have been around for 60,000 years. Their oral history has survived for 40,000 years.
We can't even maintain an oral history in the so-called West for 80 years.
Sometimes its a wonder we are so sophisticated at all. I guess going to Mars makes a difference. But often I wonder if in fact the oldest cultures on the planet aren't, possibly, the wiser ..
That's a rather gentle sounding euphemism for what really happened. Your statement may have been tongue-in-cheek though.