Ahuitzotl was the eighth Aztec ruler, the Huey Tlatoani of the city of Tenochtitlan, son of princess Atotoztli II. His name literally means "Water Thorny" and was also applied to the otter. It is also theorized that more likely, the animal called ahuitzotl is actually the water opossum, the hand symbolizing its prehensile tail, which otters notably lack.
Cuitláhuac or Cuitláhuac was the 10th Huey Tlatoani (emperor) of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan for 80 days during the year Two Flint (1520). He is credited with leading the resistance to the Spanish and Tlaxcalteca conquest of the Mexica Empire, following the death of his kinsman Moctezuma II.
Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, variant spellings include Motewksomah, Motecuhzomatzin, Montezuma, Moteuczoma, Motecuhzoma, Motēuczōmah, Muteczuma, and referred to retroactively in European sources as Moctezuma II, was the ninth Emperor of the Aztec Empire, reigning from 1502 or 1503 to 1520. Through his marriage with queen Tlapalizquixochtzin of Ecatepec, one of his two wives, he was also king consort of that altepetl.
The Aztecs were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Aztec culture was organized into city-states (altepetl), some of which joined to form alliances, political confederations, or empires. The Aztec Empire was a confederation of three city-states established in 1427: Tenochtitlan, city-state of the Mexica or Tenochca; Texcoco; and Tlacopan, previously part of the Tepanec empire, whose dominant power was Azcapotzalco. Although the term Aztecs is often narrowly restricted to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, it is also broadly used to refer to Nahua polities or peoples of central Mexico in the prehispanic era, as well as the Spanish colonial era (1521–1821). The definitions of Aztec and Aztecs have long been the topic of scholarly discussion ever since German scientist Alexander von Humboldt established its common usage in the early 19th century.
Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl was a nobleman of partial Aztec noble descent in the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, modern Mexico; he is known primarily for his works chronicling indigenous Aztec history.
Francisco Javier Clavijero Echegaray, was a Mexican Jesuit teacher, scholar and historian. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish provinces (1767), he went to Italy, where he wrote a valuable work on the pre-Columbian history and civilizations of Mesoamerica and the central Mexican altiplano.
The Ramírez Codex, not to be confused with the Tovar Codex, is a post-conquest codex from the late 16th century entitled Relación del origen de los indios que hábitan esta Nueva España según sus Historias. The manuscript is named after the Mexican scholar José Fernando Ramírez, who discovered it in 1856 in the convent of San Francisco in Mexico City.
Aztec codices are Mesoamerican manuscripts made by the pre-Columbian Aztec, and their Nahuatl-speaking descendants during the colonial period in Mexico.
The Aubin Codex is an 81-leaf Aztec codex written in alphabetic Nahuatl on paper from Europe. Its textual and pictorial contents represent the history of the Aztec peoples who fled Aztlán, lived during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and into the early Spanish colonial period, ending in 1608.
Oconahua is a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. It has some 2,000 inhabitants. It is a Delegation of the municipality of Etzatlán.
Mesoamerica, along with Mesopotamia and China, is one of three known places in the world where writing is thought to have developed independently. Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are a combination of logographic and syllabic systems. They are often called hieroglyphs due to the iconic shapes of many of the glyphs, a pattern superficially similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Fifteen distinct writing systems have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, many from a single inscription. The limits of archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was the earliest and hence the progenitor from which the others developed. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and the most widely known, is the classic Maya script. Earlier scripts with poorer and varying levels of decipherment include the Olmec hieroglyphs, the Zapotec script, and the Isthmian script, all of which date back to the 1st millennium BC. An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script.
The Codex Azcatitlan is an Aztec codex detailing the history of the Mexica and their migration journey from Aztlán to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. The exact date when the codex was produced is unknown, but scholars speculate it was crafted some time between the mid-16th and 17th centuries. The name of this important Mexica pictorial manuscript was suggested by its first editor, Robert H. Barlow, who erroneously interpreted the anthill on page 2 as the glyph for “Aztlán.” In the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where it is housed, it is known as Histoire mexicaine, [Manuscrit] Mexicain 59–64.
Atotoztli or Huitzilxochtzin was a daughter of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma I and Chichimecacihuatzin I, the daughter of Cuauhtototzin, the ruler of Cuauhnahuac.
The History of the Mexicans as Told by Their Paintings is a Spanish language, post-conquest codex written in the 1530s. This manuscript was likely composed by Father Andrés de Olmos, an early Franciscan friar. It is presumed to be based upon one or more indigenous pictorial codices.
Tlatelolco was a pre-Columbian altepetl, or city-state, in the Valley of Mexico. Its inhabitants, known as the Tlatelolca, were part of the Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people who arrived in what is now central Mexico in the 13th century. The Mexica settled on an island in Lake Texcoco and founded the altepetl of Mexico-Tenochtitlan on the southern portion of the island. In 1337, a group of dissident Mexica broke away from the Tenochca leadership in Tenochtitlan and founded Mexico-Tlatelolco on the northern portion of the island. Tenochtitlan was closely tied with its sister city, which was largely dependent on the market of Tlatelolco, the most important site of commerce in the area.
Duke of Moctezuma de Tultengo is a hereditary title of Spanish nobility held by a line of descendants of Emperor Moctezuma II, the ninth Tlatoani, or ruler, of Tenochtitlan. Since 1766, the title has been attached to a Grandeza de España, or a place in the Spanish peerage — the highest honor accorded to Spanish nobility.
Chimalpilli II was a Tlatoani (ruler) of the Nahua altepetl (city-state) Ecatepec, in 16th-century Mesoamerica.
Codex Chimalpopoca or Códice Chimalpopoca is a postconquest cartographic Aztec codex which is officially listed as being in the collection of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia located in Mexico City under "Collección Antiguo no. 159". It is best known for its stories of the hero-god Quetzalcoatl. The current whereabouts of the codex are unknown. It appears to have been lost in the mid-twentieth century. Study of the codex is therefore necessarily provided only through copies and photographs. The codex consists of three parts, two of which are more important, one that regards the pre-Hispanic history of Central Mexico, the Anales de Cuauhtitlan and the other that regards the study of Aztec cosmology, the Leyenda de los Soles.
Mesoamerican codices are manuscripts that present traits of the Mesoamerican indigenous pictoric tradition, either in content, style, or in regards to their symbolic conventions. The unambiguous presence of Mesoamerican writing systems in some of these documents is also an important, but not defining, characteristic, for Mesoamerican codices can comprise pure pictorials, native cartographies with no traces of glyphs on them, or colonial alphabetic texts with indigenous illustrations. Perhaps the best-known examples among such documents are Aztec codices, Maya codices, and Mixtec codices, but other cultures such as the Tlaxcaltec, the Purépecha, the Otomi, the Zapotecs, and the Cuicatecs, are creators of equally relevant manuscripts.
Statues of Tlatoque Ahuitzotl and Itzcoatl are installed in Mexico City. They are collectively known as the Monumento a los Indios Verdes. The statues are verdigris due to the effects of weather. They are around 3 meters (9.8 ft) to 4 meters (13 ft) tall and their plinths have inscriptions in Nahuatl. The statues were created by Alejandro Casarín to represent Mexico at the 1889 Paris Exposition.
