All about the ancient tribes
The Aztecs originated in the middle part of the Valley of Mexico, and it was from this site that their empire spread to other, more southern parts of the region. These zones extend from the coast of Chiapas all the way to Guatemala, occupying the modern territories of the states of Mexico, Veracruz, Guerrero, Puebla, and Oaxaca as well as parts of Chiapas.
Mesoamerica encompassed an area that reached from the middle of what is now Mexico to what is now Costa Rica. Both the Maya and the Aztecs had their homelands in this region. The land of the Incas was situated in the Andes Mountains, which run parallel to the western coast of South America. In what ways did the Aztecs’ environment shape their culture?
The territory that is now Mexico was formerly home to the Aztec people. They chose to construct their capital in the site that is now known as Mexico City.
Established in 1427, the Aztec Empire was a confederation of three city-states: Tenochtitlan, the city-state of the Mexica or Tenochca; Texcoco; and Tlacopan, once a component of the Tepanec empire, whose most powerful city was Azcapotzalco. Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Aztec Empire.
Aztecs, also known by their self-given name Culhua-Mexica, were a Nahuatl-speaking people who governed a huge empire in what is now the central and southern regions of Mexico during the 15th and early 16th centuries.
Nahua is the name that has come to be used for the Aztecs’ descendants in modern times. More than one and a half million Nahuas make their life in tiny villages that are spread out throughout wide swaths of rural Mexico. These Nahuas make their income primarily by farming and occasionally by selling handicrafts.
According to an old tale, the ancestors of the Aztec people originally came to Mexico City from a country to the north known as the land of four rivers and red rocks. However, the precise location of the Aztec homeland, which was more appropriately known as the Mexica homeland, is still buried in myth and mystery.
During the time that they were in power, the Aztecs farmed vast tracts of land. Corn, beans, and squash were the three most important foods in their diet. They added chiles and tomatoes to these ingredients. They also gathered a species of crayfish-like critter called an acocil, which is common in Lake Texcoco, as well as a type of algae called spirulina, which they baked into cakes.
The Aztecs, now headed by Cuauhtemoc, ultimately capitulated after 93 days of struggle on the fatal day of August 13, 1521 CE. They had run out of food and were being devastated by the smallpox illness, which had been introduced to the Aztecs by one of the Spaniards previously. The city of Tenochtitlan was pillaged, and its monuments were obliterated.
Aztecs did not had any protection to the illnesses brought by Europeans. The indigenous people were ravaged by a smallpox epidemic that greatly reduced their capacity for resistance against the Spanish. The epidemic decimated the Aztec people, causing a significant drop in their population and causing an estimated fifty percent of the people living in Tenochtitlan to perish.
The Empire of the Aztecs In the year 1428, the Aztecs, led by Itzcoatl, formed a three-way alliance with the Texcocans and the Tacubans in order to defeat their most powerful rivals for influence in the region, the Tepanec, and to conquer the Tepanec’s capital of Azcapotzalco. This was accomplished with the help of the Tacubans.
In the beginning, there were the Aztecs. Indigenous peoples who lived in sophisticated societies began settling in what is now Mexico more than 13,000 years ago. The Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, and Maya civilisations were all more technologically accomplished than the Aztecs, who went on to build the vast Aztec empire.
According to Nichols and Rodrguez-Alegrá (2017), the Aztecs achieved their goal of becoming the dominant force in Mesoamerica by employing this technique. As a result, they established an empire that was rich in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity. The Nahuas are the most numerous indigenous people in Mexico and are generally recognized as being modern-day descendants of the Aztecs.
Teotihuacán was the place where everything in the cosmos, including the sun, the moon, and everything else, was said to have originated, according to Aztec tradition. There has been a greater number of temple discoveries there than in any other city in Mesoamerica. Between the years 1 and 250 A.D., the Teotihuacan people constructed the Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon.