Visiting of the historical and cultural museums is the integral part of the enrichment of your knowledge about the way of life of certain cultural groups. The opportunity to see the cultural artifacts, while listening to the guide’s comments, helps to imagine the cultural environment of the society you are told about.
Last week my friends and I visited Brooklyn Museum in New York City. The decision to go there was based on the fact that Brooklyn Museum organizes a lot of exhibitions presenting the cultural artifacts of different societies. The exhibit visited was named Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas. Two hours spent in the museum gave us a better understanding of the way of life of ancient Indians.
Our attention was brought to the spiritual and household items of the Native Americans that inhabited the territories of modern Mexico and Peru. In particular, the guide roused our interest in the Aztecs culture.
According to the legend, the Aztecs came to the territory of modern Mexico from the North or modern United States territory and they founded their capital on the island given to them by another tribe, which populated the area at that time. The island was swarmed with snakes and living there was almost impossible. Nevertheless, the Aztecs accepted the gift and began to develop their empire. This explained the fact that the snakes took an important place in their cooking traditions.
Vaillant (1962) states that “the Aztecs and their forebears grew up on the outer borders of an intensely civilized area, in which the cultural history of the various peoples seems to have been very similar”.
Wolfgang and Beltran (1961) briefly described the Aztecs culture mentioning that “in all these tribes society was organized on cognate kinship; the unit was the clan, and each clan had a totemic name; together these clans became a tribe, bound not by the holding of land but by the ties of blood.”
During the excursion we saw the masks of the ancient Aztecs, which had a spiritual, ritual, and military appropriation. The Aztecs tribes had very strong military traditions and the conflicts arose frequently even among tribes inside the empire, especially in the later period.
Soustelle and O’Brian (1962) state,
For them death in battle, or better still, death on the stone of sacrifice, was the promise of a happy eternity; for a warrior who was killed in the field or on the altar was sure of becoming one of the ‘companions of the eagle’, quauhteca, one of those who accompanied the sun from its rising to the zenith in a procession that blazed with light and was splendid with joy, and then of being reincarnated as a humming-bird, to live forever among the flowers.
After all, the internal conflicts caused a serious damage to the political stability inside the state. When the conquistadors arrived to Mexico, the Aztecs Empire was more vulnerable to the external threats.
The Aztecs culture was largely influenced by the ceaseless war, the experience of which led to the development of military traditions. These traditions were based not only on the necessity to defeat or conquer new areas but also on the religious beliefs. On the one hand, conflicts made positive impact on the development of Aztecs military art and strengthening of the techniques of war but, on the other hand, they exhausted the resources of the state and prevented the tribes’ unity against the external threat. The positive influence of conflicts was essentially mitigated by the negative outcomes, which they brought to the Aztecs history.
In conclusion, visiting the exhibition made me think about the impact of the conflicts on my circle of communication. Interestingly, they may contribute to the right decisions but they rarely unite people. The formation and the fall of the Aztecs Empire is a bright example of social instability resulted from intestine strafes.
References
Soustelle, J., & O’Brian, P. (1962). The Daily Life of the Aztecs: On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. New York, USA: Macmillan.
Vaillant, G. C. (1962). Aztecs of Mexico: Origin, Rise, and Fall of the Aztec Nation. Garden City, New York, USA: Doubleday.
Wolfgang, V., & Beltran, A. (1961). The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas. Cleveland, OH, USA: World.