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Introduction - The Aztec Empire & Aztec Poetry
The most famous of the Nahuatl speaking peoples were the Aztecs, who ruled a mighty Empire centered in the Valley of Mexico. The Empire was ruled by the Triple Alliance cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopán, and these three mighty cities exacted tribute from a vast region which stretched from the Caribbean to the Pacific, with somewhere on the order of 12 to 15 million inhabitants (Berdan 2005:181).  Image adapted from Berdan (2005:xii). The wandering people who became known as the Aztecs founded their
mighty city of Tenochtitlan in either 1325 or 1345, and their armies
soon after began to bring other city-states and tribes into their
budding hegemonic empire (Berdan 2005:8). At the height of their
power, Aztec armies and cities contained hundreds of thousands of
people, but it took the Spanish only three years, from 1519 to 1521, to almost completely destroy the mighty Empire. By the seventeenth century, the native population of central Mexico had fallen to just over 1 million (Berdan 2005:181). The Aztecs left behind magnificent temples, legends of human sacrifice, intricate artifacts, and had a profound impact on the development of post-Colonization Mexican culture. Nahuatl Poetry The Aztecs also left behind a long tradition of epic and lyric
poetry, with themes ranging from glory in war to the meaning of beauty
and life, recorded in the various codices produced shortly after the
conquest. This website explores the tradition of poetry in the Nahuatl
language, beginning with a sub-page, linked above on the left, dealing with Aztec poetics and stylistic and
literary devices, how the Aztecs structured their poetry, the interconnectedness of Aztec poetry, song, and ritual, the different types of poetry, and how they used repetition, parallelism, nature imagery, and metaphor in their poems. The first sub-page also discusses the history of Aztec poetry, the extensive oral tradition that predates the conquest, and the effects the Spanish Conquest had on Aztec poetry and literature. The Aztecs experienced a disaster of tremendous magnitude with the arrival of the Spanish, and their poetry reflects the great change they experienced.The third sub-page of this website contains a collection of Aztec poetry, in the original Nahuatl with facing translation. These poems were chosen for their representational value and interest, reflecting the intellectual culture in which they were produced, and are accompanied by brief poetic analysis. These pages are followed by a conclusion page, and a bibliography which includes recommended links for further exploration of the fascinating literature of the Aztec and Nahua peoples. Return to top. |
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