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Essay / Comparison of the Aztecs and Incas - 3100
The Aztecs and Incas were the two dominant societies of the New World who welcomed and ultimately succumbed to the Spanish conquistadors in the early 16th century. Since then, they have occupied some of the most curious corners of the Western imagination. Purveyors of high and popular culture present them in various disparate ways: victims of European colonialism, incompetent militarists, heroic ancestors, barbarians or authentic practitioners of utopias and indigenous cults. The Aztecs and Incas were two pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations that roamed Latin America throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. The Aztec Empire ruled much of what is now Mexico from 1428 to 1521, when the empire was conquered by the Spanish. The Aztecs controlled a region stretching from the Valley of Mexico in central Mexico to the Gulf of Mexico and south to Guatemala. The Aztecs were great engineers and developed a diverse social, political, and religious system with Tenochtitlan as their capital. The Inca Empire stretched from Colombia to Chile and stretched west to east from the Atacama to the Amazon rainforest. The Incas did not know written language, but they had an incredible system of roads. Casco as the capital of the Inca Empire lasted only a century before being conquered by the Spanish in the early 16th century. The two Mesoamerican civilizations developed independently of each other, without cultural or religious exchange. Aztec and Inca societies were predominantly agricultural. The religions of both societies were shamanistic and heavily influenced by previous cultures. These complex polytheistic religions, regardless of their chronological exclusivity, have important common characteristics. The Incas and Aztecs both believe...... middle of paper ....... The Tlatoani of Tenochtitlan was the leader of the cult of Huitzilopochtli and thus the state religion of the Aztec Empire. He had special priestly duties in different rituals at the state level. Since Huitzilopochtli was the state religion, every person in society had to be practiced and worshipped. As Eduardo F. Elias and Robert Pring-Mill point out: “The presence of past indigenous cultures serves as a subtext to denounce the oppressive and unjust situation in contemporary Latin America. » The analysis of two Mesoamerican religions and the study of their impact on societies. illustrates that, as in many polytheistic religions, the causal effect is quite dominant. So this will be a big misrepresentation calling the Aztecs and Incas barbaric people. Their religion shows that the phenomenon of naturalistic supernaturalism, quite dominant in Europe,.