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avidovid t1_j3f2anf wrote

The Spanish did the world an enormous disservice by burning the records of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations, among others. These civilizations knew some serious stuff about agriculture and astronomy, it would be marvelous to better understand the genesis of their knowledge and society.

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Xciccor t1_j3fz6q7 wrote

Incas were not writing at this point. They had a knot system.

To remind people who are what, Aztecs (Mexico now) were North American in today's term, Maya were also North American, bordering Central America (Yucatán peninsula in Mexico) and the Incas were all the way down in South America in Peru.

Meso American is a weird term that does describe the Aztecs and Mayan people... Historically. But, not the Incas and it doesn't really give you the full picture of what we consider to be located where today--which makes people confused about the differences between the three.

Another quick distinction is that Peru has some extremely old cultures that most likely are the far past ancestral peoples of the Incas (with some cultures being a whopping 5000 years old at Caral), but the Incan Empire itself at its height only lasted about a century before being met with the Spaniards and disease.

Kinda same goes for the Aztecs whose ancestral people were influenced by the ancient Mayans (whose archaic age was 4000 yrs ago), though Mayans themselves also stuck around. Anyway, the Aztecs at their height only lasted about a century as well before the Spaniards and disease.

Mayans were really the older culture out of the three that at least seems to exist as a singular cultural entity between the Incas and Aztecs in archaeological records, their cities seem to have been around for millennia. But unlike the Aztecs, the Mayans had their heyday in the past and were a shadow of their former self in comparison to the newly invigorated and growing Aztec and Incan neighbours.

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timesarewasting t1_j42dzfb wrote

For people whose records were massively destroyed and deliberately, you claim to know a lot.

We barely understand the complexity of history of these people. All these statements like, their Empire lasted just a century before Spanish came, is certainly false.

Their complex and advanced civilizations are lost in the mist of time

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WyrdHarper t1_j3fxmzk wrote

And a lot that did get preserved just got held in private collections or sent to the Vatican where they’ve been locked away (at least some like the Codex Borgia have been scanned and are now publicly available digitally).

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VagueSomething t1_j3g5toq wrote

The Vatican hiding such valuable historical information and artifacts should be considered a crime against humanity.

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PiscatorLager t1_j3gnvr4 wrote

Isn't basically everything the Vatican does a crime against humanity?

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VagueSomething t1_j3gozal wrote

The list of evil and bad they're involved in is long but people tend to forget about how they're hiding human history that may have vital details to widen our understanding of many things.

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spkdanknugs t1_j3gpurt wrote

The Smithsonian and British History Museum do this as well.

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taversham t1_j3gy6tq wrote

The British Museum has already digitised and made accessible nearly 4.5 million of the 8 million objects in its collection, and the project is continuing. I don't think that's really hiding it.

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