Aveni, Anthony F. Skywatchers, 50. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
Ridpath, Ian, ed. Norton’s Star Atlas and Reference Handbook (20th ed.), 4.
New York: Pi Press, 2004.
Ruggles, Clive. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, 22. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Aztec Sacred Geography
The Aztec (also known as the Nahua, or Mexica) empire—the last of the great Mesoamerican civilizations—dominated the highlands of central Mexico at the time of the arrival of Hernando Cortйs in 1519. It had risen to power following a series of military conquests just a century or two earlier and maintained economic control by extracting tributes in the form of foodstuffs and raw materials (as well as personal services) from conquered populations. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, situated at the center of present-day Mexico City on an island approached along three long causeways, had an estimated population of 250,000. The mass sacrifices to their war and sun god Huitzilopochtli, which took place at the great Templo Mayor in the center of the city, are legendary.
The landscape around the Aztec capital is characterized by strings of mountains and towering volcanoes that surround and dominate flat valleys, creating obvious associations between mountains, clouds, rains, fogs, thunderstorms, springs, and rivers. Under the valley floors and mountain slopes are numerous caves created by ancient lava flows. And before time took its toll and the suburbs of Mexico City spread through the landscape, the terrain was also peppered with magnificent human constructions, both the temples of the Aztecs themselves and the conspicuous remains of earlier temples dating back to the Preclassic period (at least as far as the mid-first millennium B.C.E.). This combination created, in the Aztec mind, a vibrant perceived world strewn with the abodes of powerful spirits: mountains were sources of water and rain; caves were entrances to the underworld; and the huge ceremonial center of Teotihuacan with its enormous pyramids, a thousand years old by this time, was itself seen as a magnificent creation of the gods.
Tributes to the gods had to be made in the appropriate place but also at the correct time. One of the most critical actions was to appease Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, and persuade him to send water for the year’s maize crop. Petitions to Tlaloc were timed in relation to calendar festivals and often involved the sacrifice of children. Thus on the first day of the month Atlcahualo (in the 365-day calendrical cycle or xihuitl), or around the middle of February in the Gregorian calendar at the time of the Conquest, the bodies of sacrificed children were thrown into caves close to mountain sanctuaries, since the water was thought to remain there, inside the mountain, until released by the gods as rain. On the summit of Mount Tlaloc itself, at an elevation of more than 4,000 meters (13,000 feet), was a shrine containing an idol of the rain god where the nobles from Tenochtitlan and adjacent cities converged during a great festival in the month Hueytozoztli, at the end of April. Here, a young boy was sacrificed while, in a complementary ceremony taking place at a nearby lake, a similar fate awaited a young girl, who was appropriately dressed in blue.
Many different calendrically timed rituals such as these, taking place all over the Aztec empire, generated a network of relationships in people’s minds between sacred places in the landscape (particularly mountains), the activities that took place there, and the timing of those activities. Evidence suggests that those perceptions were reinforced both by the positioning of temples in the landscape and by solar alignments deliberately built into those temples. It has been proposed that the Templo Mayor was (at least approximately) aligned upon Cerro Tlaloc on the horizon to the east, that the sun would have risen more or less behind that mountain on the equinox, and that two prominent mountains on the eastern horizon from Cerro Tlaloc itself, across the next valley, aligned with sunrise on two important days when mountain ceremonies were taking place on that peak. More recent work suggests that the later phases of the temple were in fact oriented upon sunset at the feast of Tlacaxipehualiztli, which coincided with the Julian vernal equinox in 1519 and was duly recorded by the chronicler Motolinia. Whatever the details in this case, the combination of ethnohistorical accounts relating to the nature and timing of ceremonies, archaeological evidence of votive offerings at sites such as mountain shrines, and archaeoastronomical data on orientations and alignments makes a convincing case that many relationships such as these were real enough in the Aztec mind.
See also:
Sacred Geographies. Cacaxtla; Horizon Calendars of Central Mexico; Mesoamerican Calendar Round.
References and further reading
Aveni, Anthony F. Skywatchers, 235–244. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Boone, Elizabeth H. The Aztec Templo Mayor, 211–256. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987. Carmichael, David, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves, and Audhild Schanche, eds. Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, 172–183. London: Routledge, 1994. Carrasco, Davнd, ed. To Change Place: Aztec Ceremonial Landscapes. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1991.
Iwaniszewski, Stanis√aw, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico: A Reconsideration.” Latin American Antiquity 2 (1994), 158–176.
Ruggles, Clive, and Nicholas Saunders, eds. Astronomies and Cultures, 253–295. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993.
, Ivan. “Astronomical Alignments at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, Mexico.” Archaeoastronomy 25 (supplement to Journal for the History of Astronomy 31) (2000), S11–S40.
———. Orientaciones Astronуmicas en la Arquitectura Prehispбnica del Centro de Mйxico, 383–405. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologнa e Historia (Colecciуn Cientнfica 427), 2001. [In Spanish.]
Babylonian Astronomy and Astrology
Ancient Babylonia occupies a pivotal place in the history of modern scientific astronomy. In great part this is due to the conscientious nature of the astronomical observations that were made there and the meticulous way in which they were recorded for generation after generation. In time, the existence of a huge, cumulative database of past observations made possible the development of mathematically based rules for predicting future events. The Babylonian legacy of careful observation and recording combined with mathematical modeling went on to influence developments in ancient Greece and beyond. The other reason ancient Babylonia is so important to modern historians of astronomy is the fortunate choice of medium on which many of the ancient astronomical observations (along with many other documents) were recorded. The method used was to press wedge-shaped marks into smooth, damp tablets of clay using a stylus. Subsequently, the tablets were dried in the sun or fired in kilns for permanence. Clay tablets do not tend to disintegrate with time like (say) parchments or papyri and are unaffected by subsequent fire, so they frequently survived the looting or destruction of buildings and other cataclysmic events of history. The Babylonian cuneiform script was deciphered in the nineteenth century. In short, many high-quality records have survived, and they can be read.
The ancient city-state of Babylon lay some 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of modern Baghdad. Its power and influence came to cover all of lower (southern) Mesopotamia—the region of modern Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down to the Persian Gulf—in the eighteenth century B.C.E., after which it followed a turbulent history under a succession of dynasties until its conquest by the Persians in 539 B.C.E. Subsequently, Babylon became part of greater empires: the Persian until 331 B.C.E., when it was conquered by Alexander the Great; then (after Alexander’s death) the Seleucid Empire; it ultimately fell to the Romans in 63 B.C.E. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to C.E. 75.