Tireless speech-makers and lovers of verse, the ancient Aztecs were also prodigious record keepers, using a pictographic system to keep records of their history, geography, and rituals. Many of these accounts were destroyed after the Spanish conquest; but fortunately, a few survived, including those kept by the invaders.
This book by an international authority on Mexican archaeology and sociology presents a vivid history of that profoundly religious Aztec warrior society -- from its days as a primitive people, to the early sixteenth century -- when, on the eve of the Spanish conquest, a...

The subject of this book is the life of the Mexicans--the Mexica, as they said themselves--at the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time, in the early 1500s, nobody, from the arid steppes of the north to the burning jungles of the isthmus, from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the shore of the Pacific, could have believed that this enormous empire, its culture, its art, its gods, were to go down a few years later in a historic cataclysm. The period with which this book is concerned is distinguished from all others by the wealth of its written documentation. The Mexicans...