History of the Western Hemisphere

While a powerful Tollan on the highland plateau and its political ideology was expanding from the western plateau into the Maya heartland in the 4th century, Maya kingdoms were also forming hegemonic political relationships with each other. Two of the most important political and military powers in the Mayab were Yax Mutul and Kanul. Kanul did not just exert power and influence over semi-independent vassal kingdoms but territorial satellites of the Kan or 'Serpent' dynasty. While Yax Mutul's vassals kept their kingdoms' emblems intact, those under the control of Kanul bore the Serpent emblem of its capital. So unlike other hegemonies in the Maya region, Kanul was a territorial empire. It is possible that many of the realms bearing the Kan emblem had possessed it since the preclassic as we will see. Kanul was one of the oldest dynasties in the Maya world, probably going back to the first millenium BC to the earliest Maya kingdoms in the Peten/Putun region, specifically t...

"Th e explanation of how the Aztecs happened to have travelled so far from their homes is contained in a description of Costa Rica written in 1572 by Juan de Estrada Ravago. After picturing the wealth of the country in gold, he states that the great King Montezuma sent his armies more than six hundred leagues to collect tribute consisting of many and very fine pieces of gold. 'I have seen,' Estrada adds, 'the remnants of his soldiers and armies, who are called Nahuatatos.' This picture is further amplified by a statement of Yñigo Aranza, governor of Veraguas in 1595. 'There are in the land called Duy,' he says, 'more than six thousand Indian warriors, and it is reported that they have traffic with the Indians from Mexico who remained there when word reached them of the first entrance of the Spaniards, they having gone there for the tribute of gold which that province used to give to Montezuma.'" Lothrop, Samuel K. "The Sigua: Southernmost ...

Any reader should not overanalyze my choice of the 9th century. This was just a fun little exercise in historical mapping and a birds-eye snapshot in time of the urban landscape in the 9th century Western Hemisphere. It's not thorough, it's not exhaustive, and it leaves out plenty.  But also know that in the 9th century, Mesoamerica was on the eve of the arrival of new expansionistic hegemonic states in the tradition and aesthetics of Teotihuacan on the central plateau in Xicocotitlan with a reiteration or even an outright reintroduction of Toltecized warrior elitism in the Maya area, based in Chichen Itza. For reference on late middle horizon history, see the history gathered by Fernando de Montesinos and Blas Valera on the political comings and goings of the rulers of Wari with possible reference to Tiwanaku and beyond (but do note: this is a controversial take). At around the year 1000 both Wari and Tiwanaku collapsed or rather disintegrated into warring and competing states...

One of the bird's-eye-view books which I always recommend (with some caveats) to people on where scholarship stands on our understanding of the civilization of the Western Hemisphere, is Charles C. Mann's "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus".  Besides Spain and its history in the Indies, the history and civilization of the Western Hemisphere is among the most misunderstood, ideologized, politicized, distorted, dismissed, and glossed over in world history. We need to go back to the medieval mind of the Castilian warrior adventurer who first laid eyes upon this world. When the societies of the Antilles, Mesoamerica, Peru and the great vast interiors were unveiled to the Iberian imaginary, many of those Iberians had been Jews and Muslims just a generation or two prior. Indeed many continued practicing Islam until it was explicitly outlawed, with the last remaining practicing Muslims expelled from Spain in the early 1600s. By then Mexico and Peru had lo...

With his plans for expansion continually blocked by alliances among the Chichimec states, Moteuczoma I turned his attention toward the rich lands to the south, toward the lands of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs and ultimately, beyond to the wealthy kakaw-producing Maya land the Nahuas called Xoconochco (Soconusco) in Chiyapan and Quauhtemallan (Chiapas and Guatemala). A schematic map of Mesoamerica in the 1400s and early 1500s. The valley of Coaixtlahuaca is one of the major fertile valleys of Oaxaca. One of the richest realms and largest market in all of Mesoamerica (Anahuac) was precisely the Mixteca state of Yodzocoo in Huaxyacac (Oaxaca). Yodzocoo was known to the Nahuas as Coaixtlahuacan. Merchants from all over Anahuac met there to trade with each other before the rise of Tlatelolco in the late 1400s and early 1500s, whose famous market would draw as many as 60,000 people at peak time: the population of a medium-sized European city at the time. Yodzocoo was, in the mid 1400s, perhaps t...

Alexandre Tokovinine, in a lecture on Classic Maya poetics discussed a very interesting set of translations of a classical Maya text. https://youtu.be/HoulAvhaULQ?feature=shared&t=1169 Apparently, the only possible translation of a set of glyphs would be "COZCAPETLATL" or BEJEWELED MAT (LORDSHIP) "The vassal of... Cozcapetlatl" And that the author of this short commemorative text used two different types of serpent glyphs. One of them a common Maya style one and one of them in a central Mexican style as we would see on Teotihuacan and Toltecized depictions. Could this be further proof that the there was a Nahua religious and political tradition as far back as Teotihuacan? This points toward that conclusion. This seems to be from Yax Mutal's stela 31 which was dedicated in 445 CE, some generations after the first large-scale military entrance of Teotihuacan (Tollan) into the Maya world in 378 CE.

If it's one thing that historians of the Western Hemisphere lament, it is the vagueness of maps for pre-Mexica and pre-Inka Mesoamerica,  and Peru. You can throw in the Mississippian zone as well. Yes part of it is the relative lack of written sources compared to East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.But even so, what does remain is a very rich archaeological record where remains, objects, and architecture speak with some academic cajoling. The sources we do have range from vague to very descriptive in Mesoamerica but descriptive enough to allow us to map centuries before the arrival of Europeans the the Americas. In the Andes it gets a bit more complicated. Here you do not have a tradition of books but rather of objects called khipus. These were more akin to accounting ledgers. There are sources that presume to describe with some level of detail the exploits of Wari (pre-Inka) kings. Juha Hiltunen wrote a very long, extremely dense (kudos!) but well-argued book titled "The A...

Unlike the medieval revivalist traditions since the 19th and 20th centuries, Mexico may be the only place with authentic medieval romanesque and gothic Christian architecture outside of Europe and the Levant (crusader buildings) This wonderful book by Luis Weckmann speaks on the wonderful late medieval tradition in early mendicant architecture in Mesoamerica. In chapter 39 titled "Romanesque, Gothic, and Mudejar Survivals in Religious Architecture", Luis Weckmann explains how there is no clean-cute cutoff between what is considered Medieval and what is considered Renaissance. Some place it at the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, some at the arrival of Columbus in the Antilles in 1492. The more accurate response would be that it was a gradual process lasting many generations. It was a process of shifting geopolitical balances that changed the old order of the middle ages. It led to the downfall of the merchant republics of Italy, the lessened critical power...

Reminiscing to myself, how time flies.The last time I was on this blog site, I was a high school know-it-all kid and now a thirty-something adult knows better than to say he knows anything at all. From writing my musings on scholasticism and Aquinas (remembering the near-pristine "Summa Contra Gentiles" at my high school library which I promptly sullied with my grubby teenage hands). All of it probably living still, somehow, in internet land but which is as good as oblivion to us mere mortals. Two decades, ideological universes, world travels, loss and anguish, extreme joys and a marriage later, here we are back to where we started.  I won't go on too much, this is mainly a journal entry for myself. I will be posting my-you guessed it-musings on history, culture, and why not, maybe even politics and world affairs on this blog. See ya'!