fieldbears:
fullmetalquest:
robotsandfrippary:
99laundry:
gogomrbrown:
I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
They’ve also recently discovered a lost Native American city in Kansas called Etzanoa It rivals the size of Cahokia, which was very large as well.
Makes me happy to see people learn about the culture of my country :D
Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top.
Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others.
Some additional information… With chinampas the floating gardens, the important thing to keep in mind is the ingenuity required considering the background of Tenochtitlán considering there was an immense jungle around them. The European way of progress involved cutting down the forests to make way for farms, and especially horses. The Aztecs developed chinampas to be able to grow food without having to cut into the jungle; essentially it was a raft with crops growing on them after they built it and put some dirt and fertilizer on it.
The truly important difference is the sense of hygiene. Ancient European societies had once loved bathhouses and they were common across Greece, Rome, Egypt, Turkey etc. Some of the Visigoths and the ones that ransacked Rome thought bathing made you weak. But Turkish and Moorish baths were really popular, but in Spain they were shut down after the Reconquista. When the Inquisition was around, you were suspected if you bathed because that’s what the Moors and the Jewish people did as opposed to the Christians. Suspected Muslims were forbidden to bathe which they’d do before services on Fridays. So part of it is a mistrust of water, and part of it is xenophobia.
When the Bubonic Plague hit, doctors theorized that hot water opened up your pores and that was how the disease got in. So European society collectively began to stop bathing as often. They’d wear lots of perfumes to hide their smell, but people in Europe began to believe that bathing was a way that disease spread. There were also points in European history where in large cities like London or Barcelona, people practically lived on top of each other.
Now also consider that the majority of Europe at the time when they arrived in Tenochtitlán were still using chamber pots and literally throwing their shit into the streets or into the rivers, and the Aztecs had street cleaners and civil servants. In Europe, people stepped in people’s shit and tracked it inside their homes. People of London were drinking water from the Thames that people were throwing garbage and sewage into, literally drinking from their toilets and garbage dumps at that point.
Also keep in mind that this means that people who didn’t bathe or really wash their hands were eating food with their hands.
That is how you get cholera. That’s how you get LOTS of cholera outbreaks.