Poly familiesFollow

What's your point? Why they didn't use wheels as a tool doesn't matter. The fact that they didn't, does. It means that they didn't develop a whole set of tools which derive from the wheel (pulleys and screws specifically). Without those, their technological development was pretty much stagnant (ie: they didn't get that "step ahead"). Add in no metallurgical development (which theoretically could appear without wheels, but didn't in this case), and they were amazingly primitive relative to pretty much the entire rest of the world at that time.


I don't really care about the reasons why. It's like you're trying to come up with excuses for this. I'm not placing blame here. I'm just stating a fact.

Edited, Jan 23rd 2012 6:33pm by gbaji

What a strange thread. How are poly families and aztec wheels related again?

Edited, Jan 23rd 2012 8:58pm by Xsarus

[:Place 18 wheeler reference here:]

Relevant.

Except it wasn't just Cortés and his Spaniards. They were, numerically, a small part of a larger force. Pretty much since Cortés landed in Central America, he was recruiting natives with a bone to pick against the Aztecs, including neighboring, powerful tribes.

The Spaniards numbered in the hundreds, while their allies numbered in the thousands. It was disease and Cortés's superior political maneuvering that did the trick, not a lead in technology. It helped, sure, but there was a point where the Spaniards were even chased out of Tenochtitlan by the masses when the eventually decided they had had enough of their concessionary leader.

Edit: Digg beat me to it by a long shot. I was off researching.

Edited, Jan 23rd 2012 10:21pm by IDrownFish

Also, Montezuma was just a pretty shitty leader. He decided that the Spaniards were sent from the gods and just gave up. If every time a civilization got a poor leader, it was in "decline", the US would have been collectively squatting in a mud puddle c.2001 AD.

Didn't they show up on the day a messiah was expected to return from across the sea, or some sh*t? Or did I dream that?

What? Doesn't everyone dream about ancient myths?

Postin's a good job, mate.

No, but allegedly ~10 years before the arrival of the Spanish, the Aztecs had a bunch of "omens," including fire on the water not smoke or some such stuff.

Me: The Japanese didn't invent the robot dog. It's just a toy.

My partner the programmer: No-body invented the wheel. They discovered it.

Me: How Platonic of you.

Heh, I can't exactly say I blame you for that. I'm not all that interested in most random people's on the internet sex lives either. Except Aeth's of course, 'cause his is interesting.

Why does that thing creep me out so much?

So I read page one and page three. I have a very fun idea in my head of what happened on page two and I shall live in my wonderful disillusion!

What Joph said. Plus,





Was the civilization in a period of decline? Yes. But every civilization in human history has cycled through ages of prosperity and darker ages. Christendom was, by far, the worst Dark Age of any civilization in recorded human history--no other every fell so far or lost so much. It also happens to be the longest Dark Age.

If you are going to argue that the Aztec Empire can't be considered a great civilization because it was on a period of decline, then you also can't argue that Christendom was a great society, because they were only starting to figure out how to leave the Dark Ages behind them, and wouldn't become a top competitor in the world until the dawn of the Modern period, 200-300 years later.

Most historians don't bother themselves with the dates, because there's no magic day when people looked around and were like, "Damn. We're in the Dark Ages now..."

But, generally, the Dark Ages are considered as starting when the seat of the Roman Empire moved from Rome to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Within 100-150 years of that move, literacy in the West and monetary systems had disappeared. There was no standing army remaining, Germanic tribes were the only groups with centralized power, cities were completely depopulated, etc.

When the Dark Ages end is a harder question. But most historians arbitrarily place it at the onset of the Italian Renaissance. Though there are plenty of Medieval scholars who hold that it doesn't end until the Modern period (and they have some very good arguments for why). Feudalism, for instance, persists until the 19th century.

The actual term "Dark Ages" was actually coined by Italian scholars during the Renaissance though.

They are both true. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched around the entire Mediteranean (which was, essentially, it's center). The capital of the Empire was Rome, with major cities in the Middle East and in Northern Africa.

But as the empire declined (largely due to a strong Roman indifference to military service, many insane emperors, and an economy based on slave labor), they lost their ability to really control these areas due to their military being stretched far too thin. By the 4th century, the Roman Empire was paying Germanic tribes to BE their army against other Germanic tribes. Not really all that effective.

After Constantine converted to Christianity, he remade Byzantium into the capital of the Eastern Empire (think state capitals) and intended to make it into a purely Christian city. But 6 years later, he moved the capital of the Empire there, due to the increasing risk of the West from Germanic threats. Those same tribes actually sacked Rome later.

But when Constantine moved to the East, so did all the wealthy. And they took all the wealth with them. Many scholars have concluded that, at the time of this move, there was more wealth concentrated in that one city than in the rest of the known world put together.

The Western half of the Empire was essentially abandoned. The Byzantine kings still claimed authority over it, but they had literally no power there--there was no infrastructure for them to use to enforce their will, and the Germanic kings now in place were often at odds with them (for instance, Germanic Christianity wasn't the same form as Byzantine Christianity). You had some Germanic kings (like Charlemagne's forefathers) who tried to make the Byzantine emperors happy, but they never really took orders from them. And while some of the kings married Byzantine princesses, the Eastern empire never increased their hold over the West.

And a significant part of that was that they didn't really want the West. At all. Europe had pretty much nothing to offer Constantinople--its lands weren't fertile and all the natural resources it had could be more economically gained closer to Turkey. It was a backwater land of illiterate, uncivilized peasants. Byzantium had the massive libraries, bath houses and academies worthy of the New Rome.

In the 8th century, Charlemagne created the Holy Roman Empire by conquering areas of what is now France, Germany and Italy. THINK about that for a second. He essentially reconquered it from the other germanic tribes that had settled there. And he was "emperor," crowned such by the pope who was directly trying to mirror the Byzantine empire. Charlemagne's biography, for instance, was written in the style of Augustus (and would be complete plagiarism by today's standards).

The Dark Ages continued from here. Europe grew slowly over time, but they just continued to establish feudal systems and 95-97% of people lived in squalor, tied to the land and barely surviving. There were a few Renaissances, but you didn't see any significant change until the Italian Renaissance. The Modern period, brought on partially by the Enlightenment, are the first time you ever see any signficant change in the way people organize themselves. While Europe certainly got better in those 300 years, the experiences of the common man (still 90+%) remained largely unchanged.

And one of the leading causes of the French Revolution was that the position of the peasants became quite a bit worse.

Sure. But when someone is arguing that a civilization is "advanced" (one of the three most advanced in the world, in fact), pointing out that said civilization was conquered with the modern equivalent of a dozen national guardsmen who got lost on their way to the store to buy beer kinda *is* relevant. Pointing out that the specific culture representing said civilization at the time of said conquest was just the current "top dog", but was still so rife with social and governing problems that it was relatively trivial to topple them is also relevant.

I would also perhaps point out that hinging your claim that a given practice (polygamy in this case) is perfectly normal because it was practiced by of "one of the three most advanced civilizations in the world" by highlighting a specific culture/state/whatever within that civilization, which was brutal, had huge problems, and was near collapse, pretty much entirely because they happened to have one really big agrarian city is also somewhat silly. Clearly that *wasn't* such a huge thing, was it?



Possibly. Lots of other impressive looking ruins were present in South America and had been abandoned since long before the Spanish arrived. But even if the next guys had kept it going, so what? They'd have had the same problems the Aztecs had for pretty much the same reasons. The only way to maintain such a large city with such limited technology was to brutalize every tribe for several hundred miles around and work them to death just to produce and transport enough food and goods to keep it from collapsing.

The Spanish were mostly in awe of the city, not because it was some paragon of design, or engineering, or represented anything that they couldn't have done if they'd wanted to. They were in awe over the fact that people with such limited tools would actually expend the massive effort to build and maintain it. It's the same sort of awe people have when looking at the pyramids in Egypt. It's not like we couldn't build such structures if we wanted to. We're just impressed that they did with what they had at the time.



If said civil war allowed some other culture to so completely conquer them *and* anyone else who might normally have risen in their place in the same area, then yeah it was certainly a contributing factor. The idea that the Aztecs specifically would have just continued on thriving if only the Spanish hadn't arrived is absurd. Now if you want to expand that from the Aztecs specifically to "Central American civilization" as a whole, then absolutely someone would have filled the void.

But they'd have been just as lacking in advancement, right? And if we're to look even more broadly at the pattern of civilization in Central and South America you can absolutely say that relatively speaking the Maya were significantly more advanced than either the Aztecs or the Incas. So the whole was clearly in decline and had been for centuries before the Spanish arrived.

That was far back enough that pretty soon History Channel will be doing stories about that bygone era, as soon as they can tie it to aliens or pawn shops.

It's no longer a channel about history, it's about buying or selling or having delusions about history.

Given his whining about "revisionist history", I'm guessing he got them from a textbook c.1978 or so.

The funny part is that no one would debate that the Europeans were more technologically advanced. I bet most would agree that they had a more advanced civilization in general terms. But Gbaji's precious Eurocentrism is so easily threatened that he'll go to lengths to insist that, for instance, a wheel isn't a wheel. Because -- God forbid -- if he agrees that they HAD invented the wheel but just hadn't really utilized it yet instead of "Haha, dorks never even invented the wheel", we might not think they were all proto-human troglodytes and how are we supposed to feel superior then?

Strong words from a scrimshaw carver in an igloo.

What "general terms" though? This is kinda where the argument started, isn't it? Someone insisted that the Aztecs were among the three most advanced civilizations in the world (ok, a subset of a region claimed to be so), yet aside from "they built a really big city", there was no justification for the claim. I'm honestly curious in what areas we're ascribing advancement to the Aztecs. Cultural? There was nothing particularly special about them. Ethical? They were a brutal regime by all historical accounts. Philosophical? That's questionable and incredibly subjective. Religious? By modern accounts, their religious practices make everything ever done by Christianity look like a day at the beach.

Can't you acknowledge maybe just a tiny bit that maybe the reason people today have a desire to attribute some sort of cultural advancement to them is part guilt over them getting wiped out, and partly to attempt to ascribe some sort of innate balance to the concept of "advanced" in the first place? There's a tendency by many people to assume that equal achievement must be present, so if a culture is less advanced technologically, well they must have been more advanced in some other way. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that.




You're projecting. I listed a set of things which pre-columbian American civilizations had not yet achieved relative to old world civilizations. You zeroed in on one example (the wheel) and insisted that somehow because they'd made round pieces of wood and affixed them to toys that this meant that they were just as advanced! Bit of a stretch, right?

The "invention" of the wheel somewhat does involve learning how to construct wheels sufficiently strong and large that you can use them as a tool for moving objects while expending less energy. Anyone can realize that sliding things is easier than carrying them, and that rolling things is easier still, and that round objects roll better than other shapes. This requires no special inventiveness. We can bicker over exactly what "inventing the wheel" means, but can we at least agree that the native Americans at the time were certainly less advanced in this area (and all areas of engineering) than the Europeans of the day?


And isn't that all that really matters here?

No, we can't. That's the point. You are using a Eurocentric value system to criticize a different culture with completely different needs.

Guess what! Aztecs had very little use for wheels. Wheels in the European world at this time were used primarily for two things--transport of goods and people (if wealthy) and for farming equipment.

Aztecs lived in any area of the world that is, in many areas, mountainous. And it is almost universally covered in Jungle. It's also even more split by rivers and streams than Europe is.

In that context, the wheel is absolutely useless for transporting goods between urban centers. Your roads are built according to the terrain (which is universally true of the time, and remains largely true today). Wheeled transports, be they wagons or carriages, cannot function in this environment. That renders the wheel useless in its most important capacity.

Cities of the time utilized complex urban planning that European cities were only starting to utilize. They placed their buildings according to the land's resources and structure, and actively changed the terrain where needed. The result was that boats were more than sufficient for transporting goods around the largest cities. And because they included farmable land in this equation, they never had to transport agriculture too far (And, again, the wagon would have been useless in doing so anyway).

Their urban planning was so sophisticated that they turned mountains into extremely efficient agricultural systems by implementing terraces, simultaneously allowing for easy irrigation. They CREATED farmland in ways Europeans had never done. At this time, Europeans are only a few centuries past the Agricultural Revolution (and had not innovated much beyond it). Their ingenious new systems (heavy plow, horse-shoes/harnesses, and the three-field system) were more than 10 times more inefficient than the Aztec's system. They were subject to the lay of the land, and the typical peasant was forced to work multiple patches that were often an hour's walk from each other.

Finally, we come to wheeled farm equipment. Let me first note that the vast majority of ploughs in this period were still wheel-less, despite the wheeled plow having been introduced 500 years earlier. Because it wasn't widely available, and required a team of farm animals to use (which very, VERY few farmers could afford).

Guess what? Would have been completely useless in the Aztec's empire. For one, the wheeled plow was only an advancement because of northern European soil. The Roman Empire's farming methods, a millennium earlier, were more efficient than the current European methods. Yet they used wheel-less light plows. The wheeled plow was only an advancement because Northern European soil was tough.

And we come back to a previous statement. The Aztecs created their farmland. They didn't need a wheeled plow, because their own tools were more than sufficient because they controlled the land itself. Furthermore, a great deal of their farms didn't need our idea of a plow at all, as they built islands in lakes. Plows would have been USELESS here. And that farming technique alone was one of the most efficient in the world, requiring vastly less work and producing a great deal more food.

Wheelbarrows were only JUST starting to become less rare in Europe. And they still wouldn't have had much of a place in Aztec society for previously mentioned reasons. A small boon to urban life, but that's it. And since they weren't even being used in Europe for those purposes yet, it's not fair to condemn them for that.

So, no. The wheel wouldn't have, in any way, "Advanced" Aztec society. It would have been nearly useless. And inventing useless objects is never a sign of an "advanced" civilization.

Were you going to admit to your fear of losing your Eurocentric sense of superiority yet?

Not to shine a spotlight on your tunnel-vision here but the Inca didn't decide to start terraced farming in 1525 AD either.

Edited, Jan 30th 2012 6:22pm by Jophiel