New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco
tlacuilolli.com
tlacuilolli.com
Palimpsest - a manuscript on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible.
I guess it's possible for a palimpsest's erasure to be complete to the naked eye, but for its original text to still be distinguishable outside the visible spectrum.
It’s fascinating to imagine the journey of these books throughout the years. Kept in a basement somewhere? Passed down from generation to generation for safekeeping?
Reminds me of the Sarajevo Haggadah, surviving from the 1300s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Haggadah
We will leave next to nothing.
It is relatively easy to select the best and edit photos every other day on vacations or at home for printing. It is however a major PITA to do that for hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. Thus I am still too lazy to have a look at those 20 years gap where the only pictures I took were digitized and are stored on a hard drive and remote backup.
I say trash b/c home printed photos on regular paper are never going to compete with your local CVS/Walgreens prints (which I do batches about 2-3 times per year, putting them in letters / christmas cards).
...but if I'm willing to wait for really good prints, I've had a great experience with "PersnickityPrints" who I tried after a local pharmacy print shop gave me an envelope of my wedding prints where some of the fancy B&W ones showed ~2mm chromatic aberration (hence: all the photos were misaligned / mis-calibrated).
Persnickity basically says: "you take the photo, we print the photo!" ...no auto-redeye reduction, no trying to make the colors pop, and they calibrate their machines at least once per day as opposed to once a month or whatever the generic pharmacy places do.
1) Color Laser for "tossable" printouts. 2) Walgreens + Mobile App for "5 copies to send in letters" (pick up in ~1hr, ~$0.20 per print, often less). 3) Persnickity for 8x10's, custom paper, cards, or if I'm planning ahead. (~$0.40/print, modulo shipping, etc).
One of the last Polaroid picture I took was of a little girl playing with her mom. Her husband told me several week later that it had become a bookmark that he has pleasure rediscovering everytime he grab his current book. Sometimes the smallest but meaningful gifts are the nicest.
For holidays, special events, whenever I have more than a handful of pictures to print or if I want bigger format I am doing it through the local photo print shop or online.
AI photo stuff massively improved, and all her bad photos were very easy to sort in Picasa and bring down to a reasonable 5k or so photos to put into albums over few years of retirement.
That’s a contradiction in terms.
Generally, everything that they didn't know would be useful or important. These are written on parchment, which has great durability over time, but sadly this means that very little of all the material that was written on parchment survives. This is because parchment is both very expensive and easy to recycle, which means that for most of history the second someone no longer values the material written on their parchment, they are going to wash that off and use it for something else.
The hubris and bigotry of the Spaniards (repeated elsewhere by them and other Europeans) was truly a loss for all of humanity.
It’s on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in my book (pun intended).
The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with sophisticated arts and cultures who’d built cities that dwarfed their European counterparts with building techniques and on terrain that would’ve flummoxed western builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today) and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the plague.
I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so different.
It must have been truly something to behold even by today's standards.
As the other response notes, Tenochtitlan was possibly the largest city in the world at the time, and the Aztec empire contained many other cities with populations over 10k. The Inca built a massive empire (8-12M people) centered on the Andean mountains linked together by roads and suspension bridges and built monumental architecture using masonry techniques that are impressive even today. We're just starting to get a handle on the scale of the Mayan empire, because they built their cities in parts of the Guatemalan jungle we have a hard time getting through today - some of the more recent work has found evidence of raised causeway networks stretching over a hundred miles linking large scale settlements. Go further south, and the Amazon jungle basin has been considered uninhabitable because of the density of the jungle and the poor quality of the soil, except that we've found evidence of cultivation of plants and more recent evidence of large-scale settlements and waterworks.
The Spaniards did not walk into a backwards people or somehow just miss what they were looking at - the civilizations and cities they found were advanced and obviously developed and on a scale that, even outside Tenochtitlan, would have rivaled European cities at the time for both size and sophistication.
the story of Jonah in the Hebrew bible describes a city of 100,000+ people .. and that was just one city somewhere at that time.. that was three thousand years ago in the Middle East
Cities were effectively constrained by available food and transportation costs before the steam engine, so you'd get cycles of population growth, followed by population decline.
Particular places reached support capacity of surrounding land until something caused systemic failure, and population decline. Think of ancient China, for example with its cyclic population growth in a unified empire, followed by some natural catastrophe or political instability -> civil war as the political system weakened.
The book "Why Nations Fail" spends a while discussing the Spanish approach to the Americas, and "Extractive" doesn't even begin to cover it.
And they also ritualistically tortured, killed and cannibalized children during the dry season. https://www.eiu.edu/historia/Thoele.pdf
That was extreme and insane to most of the native inhabitants. And it was even more outrageous to Europeans (or Asians). The Spanish weren't hero's and they exploited the natives and unwittingly spread disease but the Aztec civilization had to go and it died just as much from internal revolt than from the small amounts of European men that Cortes commanded. I have more respect for the Pueblo's than I do for the Aztecs. They survived harsher environments and had impressive self-taught farming and structural engineering skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
The Conquistadors actively tried to memory-hole Aztec/Maya culture post conquest by burning all their written content.
If you break the oral tradition by dispersing groups and you burn written records, you can wipe a culture from history. Conquistadors didn't succeed at this, but they very well tried.
They also have some original codices along with translations that are interesting to look at https://photos.app.goo.gl/zeo3Hn2Q8v81cidX9
* "The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco ...": San Andrés Tetepilco must have been Spanish, of course.
* "The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco ...": Churches would be Spanish.
* "Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history ... comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603.": At least it seems to be about Aztecs.
Why were the first two books about Spanish topics but written in the local language? If Spanish people writing, wouldn't they write in Spanish? If Aztecs were writing, why would they care to record these things? I suppose the latter is plausible if they were absorbed into Spanish society.
That San Andrés Tetepilco has a partly-Spanish name now doesn't necessarily imply that Spaniards had a role in its founding or lived there in significant numbers at the time the codices were written. The church might have been founded by a Spanish missionary, but it might also have been an Aztec convert instead. The history apparently also covers events that happened under Spanish rule, so it's not entirely about a non-Spanish topic either.
It is not. I mean, yes, the “San Andrés” part of the modern name of the settlement (from a church there built not long after the conquest) is, but its one of Itzapalapan settlements that was later conquered by the Aztecs, so an Aztec codex about its founding is Aztecs writing about pre-Aztec history.
> “The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco …”: Churches would be Spanish.
Yeah, unlike the colonization of the United States, the native peoples were still present in and often the bulk of communities after the conquest of Mexico, they weren’t simply displaced for the Europeans (not to say the Spanish were better, but the pattern of colonization was very different.) So, while the Church was built under the direction of the Spanish, it would have been built and attended largely by locals, who would record things for the same people anyone would record things about the community they live in.
Population densities in Mexico and throughout much of what is Latin America were considerably higher than in the North.
Also IIRC the number of Spanish colonists who came to the Americas during the 17th century is about the same as the number of immigrants to the English colonies on the East Coast. Considering how massive the Spanish empire was there just weren’t that many Europeans there. Trying to subjugate and assimilate the natives was really the only option they had.
The oldest (known) Christian art from America is this featherwork from 1539 made by the nephew of Moctezuma:
Semi-related, I still hold out hope for more discoveries of the Isthmian/Epi-Olmec script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmian_script
The primacy of stone is a misconception. The following applies not just to the Aztecs, but also Sumer and Babylon, Egypt, the Maya, etc: the primary writing material for all of these civilizations was not stone. It was perishable materials, including parchment, wood bark, wax tablets, papyrus in Egypt, or just drawing in a pile of fine sand to do some arithmetic. (Babylon and its fired clay is a bit of an exception, maybe. But they also wrote on wood, bark paper and cloth, among other things.)
That means we only get monumental inscriptions. I'm more familiar with the Maya, who did have a complete writing system for spoken language, and we strongly suspect the Maya had literature in the same way the Egyptians, Chinese or Sumerians did. Poetry anthologies, mythological anthologies, religious texts, and also textbooks on medicine and astronomy, etc. Obviously, they didn't carve those on monuments, they wrote them on the closest analogue to paper they had.
Unfortunately, neither Mexico's meteorological climate nor Spain's religious climate at the time was conducive to preserving such fragile books.
It wasn’t just Babylon but dozens of other civilizations in the region. IIRC we have a lot more Assyrian tablets because Babylon and their allies sacked and burned the Assyrian capital which preserved their library.
On the Mayan side the destruction rate is well north of 99%. To quote one of the bishops that did a book burning party:
"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."
Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science, philosophy ...
I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.
Hopefully some indigenous scholars managed to stash some in a cave or tomb somewhere 500 years ago and we simply haven't found them yet.
Well, about that...
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.a...
Ah, that's the justification. I've never understood the official Russian "denazification" position; it should be clear to them no one now or ever is going to take it seriously, why continue with this absurd pretense?
That said, in this case it's more barbed than the article suggests. As part of denazification, the Allies did destroy books. To suggest book destruction is what typifies Nazis is absurd unless we also call the Allies Nazis.
> As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship
That said, Aztec culture was full of horrors we can now no longer even imagine, paling even before the Nazis. To the extent the destruction of codices was deliberate, much of what went on would have seemed to be a relatively necessary de-Aztecification.
Take your issues up with the editors here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
And frankly the Wikipedia article talks specifically about "Spanish" invaders, and the word "European" isn't even in the article. I'm not sure why you think that link supports the idea that someone other than the gp here turned "Spanish" into "European colonizers".
Agreed, it's 2024 after all, not bloody 2019 . . .
The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
Most of the history that we got, is what those ancestors did leave in their writings.
Today the inquisition simply consists of our beloved governments, covering up their dirty dealings, and telling a different story in the media, media dominated to the most inquisitorial extreme.
At least in Spain, videos are deleted, the monetization of certain channels on social networks is cancelled, forwarding of certain content on WhatsApp is rate-limited, and today, Telegram is closing in Spain, while all the ministers, the president and their families are involved in continuous corruption scandals, forgiven by judges who have been put in position by the same politicians.
Politicians forgiving the robbery of politicians, while TV only talks about the color of the air (if they don want to be reported and economically punished).
Journalists without a journalism career, who only look with a magnifying glass to the families of the monarchies, but totally forget forever about the families of the hundreds (thousands?) of Spanish politicians and ex-politicians.
Journalist without a journalism career, who try to tell us that life has increased a 6% (hello, do you mean that what previously did cost 1 Eur, now costs 1 Eur and 6 cents? where? basic education mathematics, please?)
The same supposedly lefty politicians, who criticize priests, are worse than priests, in this inquisitorial sense.
Something I ask myself... if the history that we got, was what the priests did write or didn't burn... what history will get about us, people in 500 years? That lies published in the media? 24 different versions of the same fact? Nothing at all if it's about ministers stealing public money? Whatever the generative AI tells them?
"Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
I dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something, but there is this tendency of picking historical eventsand judge them by todays standards, and is particularly egregious when it is only applied to just one side portraying others as innocent victims when they were actually doing the same thing.
No matter how I think about it, it seems like a more egregious act.
Pre-Colombian literature on philosophy, nature and governance would be quite a find. Hopefully there's many places yet to be searched.
To be speculative, if I was trying to hide books while being invaded, I'd bury them in a box in an old cemetery in a dry climate.
Perhaps having seen the Aztec human sacrifice, of children, the Europeans weren’t too keen to maintain these things.
I do not think what we now call human rights mattered to them in any way.
It was a different and therefore enemy religion. It was beaten and then destroyed. That was the main thing. That they also happened to sacrifice humans was maybe a moral bonus to justify it, but destroying the cultural foundation of the culture you want to conquer was quite standard and old practice. Ask the druids for example.
Once a culture lost its foundation, it becomes way easier to control.
Also it is a proof, "see, your gods did nothing to protect you, they are powerless, like you. So joining us (means working for us) is your only option"
Sure. As one of Neal Stephenson's characters observed, it's a measure of what utter shitheads the Aztecs were that when the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually got more humane. To name just one issue, the Spaniards weren't cannibals.
> Ask the druids for example.
The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were horrified by their cruelty.
Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
And I do think this extrapolates to modern cultures, from slapping a suicide vest on a toddler, to “one child” policies to “children are bad for the environment” type movements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_the_ancient...
I'm curious as well on that topic: what do we think of legal sacrifice in Rome? Should we condem their entire culture because they crucified people?
I see a strong and continous cultural and political link from Rome to the Church of Rome to Charlemagne and on through the various duchies and unified provinces to get to the modern European state that I live in today, in and old Roman settlement just below the Rhine delta.
I live by customs and laws rooted in Roman practice. Much more so than I do live in any way resembling the ways of the people who lived here before their arrival, or the ways of the people who lived in my native land before the arrival of the Catholics of Rome.
Literal human sacrifice is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Though I suppose in a broader and more metaphorical sense, Germany and Japan also practiced human sacrifice.
I can assure you that's far from the case.
If you look at what the Spanish actually did to the Aztec Empire, they basically organized a coalition of other indigenous tribes who were tired of living under Mexica domination (and having their people intermittently sacrificed), overthrew the Mexica, and installed themselves as the new suzerain. This isn't far off from what the Western countries were trying to do during the Arab Spring or Syrian Civil War, except the Western countries tried to either install a local client or pushed for elections, and neither of those plans tended to work out for the countries involved.
I disagree that Japan and Germany had their cultures eradicated. Both nations maintain rich cultural traditions and express them within the safe bounds of their nation states. What happend in meso-America was much closer to the kind of eradication of cultures the Nazis wanted to see, which was the reason they are so reviled.
And just to say I don't think it's fair to say pacifism is a fringe idea. Many of our world's states are officially pacifistic, many of our greatest philosophers have subscribed to it and there have been mass movements for peace which in some cases have resulted in decolonisation or have bolstered democratic opposition in war time.
The Aztec empire was only about a hundred years old when it fell. They were very active conquerors on top of committing human sacrifice.
> I disagree that Japan and Germany had their cultures eradicated. Both nations maintain rich cultural traditions and express them within the safe bounds of their nation states. What happend in meso-America was much closer to the kind of eradication of cultures the Nazis wanted to see, which was the reason they are so reviled.
Seven million Mexicans today are fluent in indigenous languages while between 11-23 million identify or are identified as indigenous, so clearly their cultures weren’t eradicated in the same way that the Nazis sought eradication. It’s all a matter of degree. For what it’s worth I agree that these things should be carefully targeted only at the most dangerous and problematic aspects of a culture, but of course, how else are we going to decide which aspects of a foreign culture are “problematic” except by comparison to our own cultural values? Also, cultural assimilation is never quite so targeted. How many countries can you name whose leaders don’t wear Western suits and ties or where nobody plays soccer or where you can’t find a McDonalds? (And before you say Russia, they basically transformed all of their McDonalds into a knockoff Russian brand that is still basically McDonalds).
> And just to say I don't think it's fair to say pacifism is a fringe idea. Many of our world's states are officially pacifistic…
There’s probably a single digit number of countries that don’t have a military, and one of them (Iceland) is nonetheless a NATO member with foreign security guarantees so I wouldn’t even count them as pacifist.
I'm aware. I was aware when I said I don't believe we can group them in with the Nazis. Are you saying we can?
> Seven million Mexicans today are fluent in indigenous languages while between 11-23 million identify or are identified as indigenous
I'm not ready to conflate language with the practice of a culture or the self determination of a people.
> Also, cultural assimilation is never quite so targeted. How many countries can you name whose leaders don’t wear Western suits and ties or where nobody plays soccer or where you can’t find a McDonalds?
I don't know what you're saying here.
> There’s probably a single digit number of countries that don’t have a military, and one of them (Iceland) is nonetheless a NATO member with foreign security guarantees so I wouldn’t even count them as pacifist.
I think you've done a disservice to what I said by focusing on a particular aspect that you personally disagree with. The point still stands that pacifism is not a "fringe" idea. You might not believe pacifist countries are "truly" pacifist by your definition, but the rhetoric of pacifism is part of mainstream politics in many parts of the world. You can read about various peace movements globally here:
Considering the fact that they were an aggressive, conquering empire that committed institutional mass murder, yes, they’re roughly equivalent to the Nazis. Why wouldn’t they be?
> I'm not ready to conflate language with the practice of a culture or the self determination of a people.
It demonstrates that the culture wasn’t completely eradicated, just like the cultures of Germany and Japan weren’t completely eradicated. And I think you’re kidding yourself if you actually think either of those countries had real self-determination after the war.
Besides, what makes you think self-determination is so important? That’s just your cultural value that you’re trying to impose! That’s the deeper point I was making that you’ve completely glossed over.
> I don't know what you're saying here.
Food, clothing, popular sports, etc. are all aspects of culture, and many of them are becoming globally homogenized, which represents the eradication of culture. Whatever clothing high status Chinese or Japanese or African men wore in previous centuries has all but disappeared in favor of Western suits, for instance. If anything this completely superficial and harmless piece of culture has replaced other cultural expressions far more successfully than the explicit values that the West has been explicitly trying to propagate, like “human rights” or “feminism”.
> You might not believe pacifist countries are "truly" pacifist by your definition, but the rhetoric of pacifism is part of mainstream politics in many parts of the world.
When push comes to shove, almost nobody actually believes it. The rhetoric is just rhetoric that’s usually contingent on how a specific conflict is perceived. Most of those who opposed the war in Iraq now support the war in Ukraine for instance.
So could we say the Spanish were also equivalent to the nazis? Are they equivalent to the nazis today? And did anyone need to eradicate Spanish culture for this change to take place? What about in Britain or the Netherlands?
> It demonstrates that the culture wasn’t completely eradicated
No, it doesn't. Looking closer to home I can tell you that the Irish language is still spoken despite centuries of measures taken to eradicate it. What no longer exists, however, is the culture that was present prior to the arrival of the the Christians and the British. We literally don't know their beliefs, they were perverted and silenced by those who wrote the histories and set the norms going forwards. At best we have an image.
Contrast this to Japan or Germany where our understanding goes back much further. Japan has living traditions older than the furthest date back where we can confidently talk about the practice and belief of the Irish. Neither Japan nor Germany underwent the same level of cultural eradication.
> Besides, what makes you think self-determination is so important? That’s just your cultural value that you’re trying to impose! That’s the deeper point I was making that you’ve completely glossed over.
No, quite the contrary. The people you are talking about: where do they live today? Who governs the land they live on? By what laws do they live? Are those laws more rooted in Roman legal structures or Aztec ones? The imposition of a Westphalian style state on them is exactly what I see as evidence of their loss of cultural power. The words I have to describe this are admittedly rooted in European thinking and I wish I had alternatives myself.
> Food, clothing, popular sports, etc. are all aspects of culture, and many of them are becoming globally homogenized, which represents the eradication of culture
I'm still not sure what you're saying. I agree with you here and I think it's tragic. Cultural imperialism never ended and Europe and her descendants still haven't learned to listen to others.
> explicitly trying to propagate, like “human rights” or “feminism”.
Almost every part of the world has taken on the European model of statehood. These are almost all signed up as members of the United Nations, which is again rooted in Westphalian thinking. As part of this they make commitments to human rights and to feminist actions. These have created serious change on the ground in many places.
I also want to say that it shows a bias to consider these western ideas. Many movements around the world do and have existed in support of personal freedoms and against the continued oppression. And indeed the west is not at all unified in these matters and still has far to go.
> When push comes to shove, almost nobody actually believes it.
How can you say this when there is ample evidence against it? Even in Ukraine there are conscientious objectors choosing not to fight. Again they might not be "pure" enough for you but the idea that pacifism is fringe or that you can speak better to their true belief than they can is ludicrous.
Why does that matter to you? Why don’t you simply believe, as most cultures throughout history effectively believed, that might makes right and that the ability to conquer equals the right to govern? You hold a very specific set of cultural values that you arrogantly imagine to hold the status of “universal human rights” which are fundamentally rooted in Christian humanism.
> How can you say this when there is ample evidence against it? Even in Ukraine there are conscientious objectors choosing not to fight.
I never claimed that genuine pacifists didn’t exist, only that they are a fringe, which is true.
> Why does that matter to you?
I grew up in a post-colonial society and know how painful it can be. I believe that there are structures in place in the society I live in that perpetuate systemic disadvantage to the cultures of others, and that they effectively do so in my name. I am aghast at the behaviour of Europe in the past and feel a sense of responsibility to understand and fight against modern day imperialism.
> You hold a very specific set of cultural values that you arrogantly imagine to hold the status of “universal human rights” which are fundamentally rooted in Christian humanism.
I would ask you not to call me arrogant. I explained the short comings of my language. I disagree with Westphalian defaultism.
> Why don’t you simply believe, as most cultures throughout history effectively believed, that might makes right and that the ability to conquer equals the right to govern?
Why would I? I have my own set of beliefs and my own cultural background. I don't believe the Spanish were right then because they had more might. I don't believe the Nazis were more right than the people they eradicated. I believe the modern Mexican state does inherent violence to the expression of the cultures that came before it.
Do you? It seems you're arguing that the cultures that were there weren't eradicated at all and still exists happily, while also telling me to accept that they didn't have enough might to be right and that's why they had to go.
> I never claimed that genuine pacifists didn’t exist, only that they are a fringe
We might have different definitions of "fringe" then. But the original reason why I commented to you was to take issue with your claim that "everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated."
Not at all; I just didn't feel like repeating myself.
> I would ask you not to call me arrogant.
I apologize. I think the better term might be "ethnocentric", in the sense that you are using your own culture as a frame of reference to judge other cultures, in this case that of colonial Spain. Which isn't necessarily a problem--most of us do the same thing--but it's good to be self-aware about it and to understand that this inevitably leads to conflict between cultures, of exactly the type that we've been discussing. I'm just trying to get you to back up far enough to see that. More about this later.
> It seems you're arguing that the cultures that were there weren't eradicated at all and still exists happily
As I've been saying, what actually happened is a matter of degree that doesn't quite fit the term "eradication". If you took a late 19th century Prussian and showed them modern day Germany, they would probably lament that their Germany no longer exists. You would probably get a similar answer from a Meiji-era Japanese. And I think we agree you'd definitely get the same answer from a 16th century Mexica. Some version of all three cultures exist today, but all three cultures were bloodily dominated by a foreign conqueror with fundamentally incompatible values and then forcibly reshaped to fit those values. It's harder to see the parallels because you and I are closer to the values of 1940's America than 16th century Spain, but in principle it's the exact same thing.
> while also telling me to accept that they didn't have enough might to be right and that's why they had to go.
Not at all. I'm trying to take things up a level of abstraction and point out that your rejection of "might-makes-right" is, in and of itself, an expression of your own cultural values.
Let me see if I can illustrate this another way, with an anecdote from the British rule of India. In some parts of India, there was a religious custom, "sati", in which a widow would be burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The British found this horrifying. Charles James Napier was one of the British governors in India, and he enforced the British policy of prohibiting sati. When the priests complained to him that sati was simply part of their religious customs and that their customs should be respected, Napier replied, "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
At some point, this sort of thing inevitably happens whenever two cultures are incompatible enough. Let me try and pull in the last piece now.
> But the original reason why I commented to you was to take issue with your claim that "everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated."
If you'll give me enough leeway not to take the word "everyone" completely literally, I think my claim is pretty defensible. For instance, virtually everyone did seem to agree that ISIS needed to be eradicated. There are some principled pacifists who would have preferred to leave ISIS alone, but I think it's perfectly fair to consider those people a fringe, especially if they, themselves, were directly being attacked by ISIS--not just to the degree of random acts of terrorism but in the way ISIS was violently invading parts of the Middle East in their heyday.
Was ISIS a "culture", or just a radicalized mass movement of murderous fanatics? They considered themselves a caliphate. I'm sure the Aztec priests who hauled unwilling victims to the top of a pyramid and cut out their still-beating hearts on a regular basis also had a certain self-regard, just as I think the Spanish probably considered them a bunch of murderous fanatics. And look, I agree that the Spanish in total did a lot of terrible things in Mexico, but I don't think eradicating a religion that is centered around hauling unwilling victims up a pyramid and cutting out their still-beating hearts was a bad idea, just as I don't think it was bad for the British Empire to prohibit sati or to (eventually) stop the slave trade, even though the slave trade was a long-standing practice of many west African cultures. That's not the same as endorsing everything they ever did, any more than I endorse everything the Allies did in the Second World War.
My point here is that there are always going to be limits to cultural relativism, and that almost every culture in the world is eventually going to try and reshape other cultures to be more compatible. And when it comes to my personal preferences, I think I am actually much more on the "just leave other cultures alone" side than most people. But there's always going to be some limit to that, and even the decision of where that boundary lies is just going to depend on your culture. There's no neutral middle ground outside of anyone's cultural values here.
What about male genital mutilation?
And in general no, like the other commentor said, the german or japanese culture was not eradicated. Just forced to stop their imperialistic aggression.
And the spanish christians you are defending here, did destroy all the other cultures they conquered down to their root and language. Making them slaves. Taking everything of value. Installing a racist regime, with white people on top. Whatever the atztecs did, the spanish did not do better.
If they would have been motivated by freeing the people from the aztecs, then they just could have done so. But maybe that was not what the were after, but rather the gold and power?
What we know, we know mostly from the romans.
B) The romans practiced ritual murder (among other things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice to me.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20726130/
And yes, I can go on, but why? The point was not, that the druids were saints. (Btw. many of the christian "saints" were pretty bloody as well)
Yes, this is also how the early Christians felt, which is why they eradicated Roman paganism once they became the dominant religion within the empire.
"this is also how the early Christians felt, which is why they eradicated Roman paganism"
does sound a lot like it to me. Because why make that argument at all, when they in fact not just eradicated the pagans? (which just means non christian religion btw. they were and are quite diverse)
> the person above made its point that the christians only eradicated other cultures/religions, when they were cruel and sacrificing humans
I have two objections to this.
1. I am not an "it".
2. The inclusion of the word "only" fundamentally changes the point to something completely different from what I said.
Its importance and size are massively over-emphasized though. We aren’t even sure if that were that many books left there when it was supposedly destroyed.
Obviously that isn't to say it wasn't a tragic event, just that in terms works that were forever lost has been vastly overstated in public consciousness.
One thing that we definitely lost forever was all the notations made by contemporary scholars as the Library was a mecca of intellectual thought for hundreds of year... Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.
> for hundreds of year > Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.
It’s heyday supposedly lasted ~100 years. It was unavoidable though because how unstable rhe ancient world was. Basically you had to have an extremely stable central authority willing to dedicate enough resources to it for hundreds of years for that to happen. While in reality libraries like this rarely survived for longer than a few generations. Decentralization seems to be a lot more sustainable longterm (e.g. 50 medieval monasteries instead of a single massive centralized library)
It was a little prologue that the monk wrote to justify its preservation. I don't have it in front of me so I'm paraphrasing, very roughly, but it quoted a catholic scholar (I don't remember who, maybe even a saint) and used that quote to argue that to fight the devil and save their souls they must know the devil's work.
I thought it was interesting and it seemed to me like the author/editor of this codex knew what was needed to be said to justify the creation of that text, in a political climate like the one above. Even in those times people had to navigate a bureaucracy and play politics to do what they thought was the right thing in the name of humanity and intellectual curiosity.
I believe many of these catholic priests were serious scholars, but they still had to be careful about what was put in writing and how it may be used against them by their enemies and competitors within the church.