Any history experts among us? I watched Apocalypto last night, and the scene where they were sacrificing one dude after another. They cut the heart out, throw it on the hibachi, and then cut his head off and roll it down the steps.
Looked like there was 1 sacrifice every 4 minutes while a hungry crowd watched with delight.
I know there were human sacrifices in that culture, but was it really like that?
Man, I’m glad I didn’t live then (well, if I did, I’m glad I don’t remember)
Gus
It’s my understanding that Gibson was confusing the Mayans with the Aztecs, who really were that bad. (Not an expert.)
The Mezoamerican empires were pretty bloodthirsty, and expanded largely at the expense of weaker neighboring people. Such has it always been.
The Mayans practiced human sacrifice, but apparently not nearly on the scale of the Aztecs. The Aztecs genuinely would have practiced sacrifice on the kind of scale shown in the movie.
See here
The Aztecs are alleged to have sacrificed 80,400 victims over the space of 4 days in 1487 at the inauguration of the Great Temple at Tenochtitlan. This is probably a great exaggeration, but I would think hundreds to thousands at a single sacrifice would have been possible.
True, but the Aztecs waged war not merely for territory, but specifically to capture victims for sacrifice. The instituted what amounted to a continuous Reign of Terror to keep subject people in line. They initially refrained from an all-out war of conquest against neighboring Tlaxcala in part to have a continuing nearby source of captives to sacrifice.
Here’s a bit more on Mayan practices specifically:
Mayans mostly sacrificed high-value captives by decapitation, or sometimes evisceration, although they did later practice cutting out the heart.
This National Geographic video has some remarks on the subject, but doesn’t really add much to the above.
Possibly. But he had a Dr. Richard Hansen as a technical adviser, so it’s more likely that what he did was deliberate, as his goal was not to strive for precise historical accuracy.
I think the OP can get pretty much what (s)he wants be reading the wikipedia article on the film-- in particular the sections about Inaccuracies and historicity.
I was mostly amused at the idea that you could have a solar eclipse and full moon within the same 24 hour period. Physically impossible-- a solar eclipse can only occur during a new moon, for obvious reasons.
Actually, from the lecture by a Mayan archeologist that gave a tour of Chichen Itza, the Mayans were peaceful and didn’t practice human sacrifice until they were assimilated by the Toltecs. The two cultures morphed into a new, more violent group, but still less so than the Toltecs.
Wasn’t it the other way around-- the Toltecs were assimilated into the Maya? But that guy sounds a bit like a Mayan apologist, if you ask me. I know you say you heard this in a lecture, but do you have a cite to support it? Just wondering…
There’s some question to what extent the Toltecs represented an actual ethnic group rather than just the spread of cultural influences from central Mexico into the Mayan area.
The Mayans were once idealized as peaceful philosopher-kings, in contrast to the bloodthirsty Aztecs. However, it is now apparent that they also were quite warlike and practiced torture and sacrifice of captives. I haven’t been able to find when the earliest evidence for these practices was, but I would be surprised if they were entirely absent before influence from central Mexico became prevalent. Certainly, though, they increased later on.
I’m sorry, I don’t. I visited Chichen Itza in 1993. The story was that the Toltecs usually killed whomever they invaded, but found the Mayan culture “worth saving.”
You’re very likely correct, when you say he was an apologist. He did paint a very rosy picture. He even made the story of the children raised to be sacrificed sound civilized.
I’ve heard many different renderings, it’s likely they are only guessing what actually went on.
Wow,
thanks for the replies everyone. Some interesting reading here.
I had no idea what the film was about when I watched it.
Kinda blew me away, especially the way they were sacrificing the men at the top of the temple. (I thought I was having a bad day when the city upped my property taxes by $200 a year :))
I was always well aware we humans were a torturous, murderous bunch, but I never realized to what extent.
Regards
Gus
On the value of historical advisors to Hollywood productions, by Kathleen Coleman, advisor to Gladiator (scroll down a bit)
PBS recently did a fascinating series call “Secret Files of the Inquisition”. If you get a change to see it, you can see what the Europeans were doing at about the same time. I forget the exact statistics, but I was shocked at the number of people who went thru that system. I may have the numbers wrong, but I think it was on the order of 50,000 and about 10,000 were burned at the stake.
It must be remembered that the Mayan civilization was on fire by the time the Spanish arrived. Small Pox was no help, but by first contact almost every Mayan city was already abandoned or turned into a hastily constructed fortress…archaeologists are still not entirely sure why.
One of the illustrations in this page from the Florentine Codex depicts a scene of Aztec human sacrifice similar to those in the movie.
John Mace, I should have said “conflating” rather than “confusing.”
And similarly, we don’t have the greatest info on Mayan culture in general. You can look at a carving and tell it was a human sacrificie, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the frequency and such.
One of the inaccuracies of Apocalypto is that it appears depict the time of the collapse of the Classic Period Mayan civilization, which happened in the 8th and 9th centuries AD. In particular, the movie shows the ecological destruction that many believe was in part responsible for the collapse. However, this movie also shows the arrival of the Spanish, which in this area would have taken place in the early 1500s.
This is one of the problems I had with the apparent background “message” of the movie. It seems to attribute the Mayan collapse to internal factors: overexploitation of resources and perhaps to an abhorrent religion. Yet it muddies that message by ending with the arrival of the Spanish. Once Europeans came, all the native societies were doomed, even the ones that were not in decline like the Aztecs and Incas. The “noble savages” of Jaguar Paw’s village living in harmony with nature were just as screwed as the degenerate inhabitants of the cities who were destroying their environment.
After listening to the commentary by Mel and Farhad, I got the sense that they used elements of Mesoamerican culture/history and modified them to fit into their vision of the movie. They weren’t striving for 100 percent accuracy.