Hey all.
I was wondering how much civilisations like the Aztecs and Incas knew of the world, before the Spanish arrived. I know they had no clue as to where the Spanish were from (“We thought this was the whole world, for we knew of no other”), but how far did their knowledge of the Americas strech? Were they aware of each other?
Thanks in advance for answers.
Most people don’t realize how young the Aztec and Incan Empires were. As recently as 1400, both the Aztecs and the Incas were minor tribes in the wilderness. The Incas formed the main part of the Empire by conquering the Chimus in the 1470’s, the Aztecs did theirs by conquering the Totonacs in the 1480’s. So both powers were mainly concerned with consolidating their own nations rather than looking beyond their borders for new lands.
The Aztecs did manage to develop a fairly extensive trade network, but this was biased towards the north, e.g. they were getting turquoise from what’s now the southwestern US. Even then, it’s possible to receive traded goods via a series of intermediaries without you knowing much, if anything, about the area from which they derive.
Jared Diamond (in Guns, Germs and Steel, 1997; Vintage, 1998, p262) argues that the north-south geographical barriers in Central America prevented any contact between Mesoamerica and the Andes. He points to the fact that one area had the wheel, the other a domesticated beast of burden (the llama) and yet nobody ever yoked the two together as suggestive that the seperation was absolute.
Who had the wheel?
ibid., of course. The Incas, meanwhile, had the large domesticated mammal (the llama) that might have conceivably trained to pull a cart.