Forum: Vue


Subject: Tenochtitlan wasn't built in a day

Paloth opened this issue on Jun 20, 2009 · 34 posts


Paloth posted Sun, 21 June 2009 at 11:25 AM

The Templo Mayor was the great pyramid in the center of Tenochtitlan that had twin temples for the god of war and the god of rain. Huitzilopochtl was the god of war and was also the sun god. Tlaloc was the god of rain.

Coyolxauhqui was the Aztec moon goddess and a stone depicting her beheading (her head was cast into the sky and became the moon) was excavated at the base of the Templo Mayor, but as far as I know, she did not have her own temple in the Ceremonial Precinct.

The Incas had temples to their gods of sun and moon in ancient Cusco… That might be what you were thinking of. However, you’ve made me reassess my alignment of the roads to the Ceremonial Precinct. Every image I have of existing models and paintings shows the approach from the west and east to be toward the center of the great square and facing the Templo Mayor. Yet my approach from the west enters closer to the south end of the wall than the center. Maybe this is mistaken, but it results from identifying existing roads in Mexico City as the remnants of the old roads. I’m going to search William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and see if I can find something definitive regarding this.

In a museum in Mexico City there is a chart showing the temples and buildings of the Ceremonial Precinct, but I believe that the chart is oriented incorrectly based on the location of the entrances to the square and the placement of the buildings. It looks like someone used the famous painting by L. Covarrubias as their reference, and put the furthest temples in the painting to the north of the chart, probably so the museum visitors might more readily identify the buildings seen in the painting.  

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