Let's take the word "civilization" seriously. Where does it come from?
Let's take the word "civilization" seriously.
Where does it come from?
The Latin civis and civitas. The citizen. The civic community. The condition of living in organized, complex, urban society.
By that definition, by the roots of the word itself, Tenochtitlán stood among the most sophisticated urban civilizations in the world when Cortés arrived.
Larger than most European cities. Hydraulic engineering on a monumental scale. Causeways. Aqueducts. Canals. Dikes. Floating gardens. A market at Tlatelolco that Cortés and his soldiers described with unconcealed awe.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortés's own soldiers, wrote that some of his companions thought they were dreaming when they first saw it.
The civilization was not brought.
The civilization was destroyed.
And then the people who destroyed it rewrote the definition of the word to exclude what they'd destroyed.
That is not history.
That is the management of history.
Photo: The first European map of Tenochtitlán, printed in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1524 by the printer Friedrich Peypus.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2098352680213369262
posted by Satish Sharma at
17:08
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