Posted on 01/23/2005 2:26:53 PM PST by wagglebee
GGG Ping
So much for the reputation of "the noble savage."
Paraphrasing Team America World Police:
"Before [Europeans] showed up it was a happy place. They had flowering meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles."
Eye-witness accounts? Diaries? Letters to loved ones? Naaaaah! Ya can't trust that stuff either! They had an agenda. They made stuff up. They wanted other folks to feel reassured or envious, or whatever. Nope. Can't even trust the folks who were there.
Archeological dig? Showing that primitive stone-age cannibals were primitive and cannibalistic? And blood-thirsty? Hmmmmmmmmm. I dunno. I think we can still spin this to make the Europeans look bad, but I'm gonna need another grant ...
Yeah, let's see the revisionists spin this stuff.
http://home.socal.rr.com/picsgifs/images/helmets/pittsburgh_helmet.gif
Ping
Reminds me of the argument over the Anasazi here in our own Southwest...good evidence of cannibalism, but the politically correct refuse to admit that native american ethnicity and sainthood are not synonymous.
Obviously the imperialist running dog Europeans somehow planted this evidence in order to justify their exploitation of the peace loving agrarian indigenous peoples, who were probably also early members of PETA and the Sierra Club.
Reminds me of that stupid movie "Dances with Wolves" where they made the Indians look like they were a utipian society and the settlers where the barbarians.
>>Pre-Hispanic cultures believed the world would end if the sacrifices were not performed. Sacrificial victims, meanwhile, were often treated as gods themselves before being killed. <<
It's worse than that. Mexico was founded by the Toltecs. The Aztecs conquered them and destroyed their civilization, bu they always believed that they had only so long before the end of their civilization... In fact, they had a calendar which counted down to their destruction. They believed that the Toltec civilization was founded by Quetzlcoatl, who, although pictured as a serpent, was a man with red hair (or blond? I think it was red) and facial hair, two features unknown to them, and a shiny skin which coated his real skin. When red-headed, bearded, and armor-wearing Cortez showed up, just befor ethe expiration of their calendar, he ignited a surge in desperate human sacrifices.
Cortez' army always insisted they carried out no slaughter, that the Aztecs destroyed themselves by human sacrifice. The British authors of our history books, enemies of the Spaniards, chose instead to presume that the Aztecs were wiped out by a genocidal campaign. Far from the religion of sociologists, the Aztec culture was destroyed by its own religion.
It has been suggested that Quetlcoatl may have been a Palestinian, given the finding of some questionnably authentic artifacts, such as coinage. If so, it may be that the Palestinians who founded Mexico were traders who had themselves been involved in the construction of pyramids in Egypt. If only we knew of a Palestinian king whose people had been pyramid-builders in Egypt, were famous for wealth, and built a mighty navy, perhaps with wood from the forests of Lebanon or something like that. *cough*Solomon*cough*.
The Spaniards probably did exaggerate the sheer numbers of victims to justify a supposedly righteous war against idolatry, said David Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School expert on Meso-American religion.
You got to laugh at these "experts" who are always trying to skew history to what they want it to be, and not what is true.
These were not hunter gatherers.
These were city dwellers fed by farms.
At first the Spaniards were against the Human Sacrificies because it was the right thing to do. Then the Maya's targeted the train station and the Spaniards pulled out and declared it was none of their business.
I've never understood the enlightened view that says, "Well we have eye witness testimnony to the following events, however hundreds, or thousands, of years later we think that the testimony must not be true because we have a really good theory.......
A lot of archaeology is this way. Archaeology sometimes makes psycology look like sound science.
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