Mesoamerica

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tual¡± in which they had a runner go to the top of a sacred mountain and with a fire drill create new fire that would symbolically bring about a rebirth of the nation.
These calendric systems also had a larger concept known as ¡°the Long Count¡±. The Long Count is a period of 5,126 years in which the sun would be newly created. The beginning of the present Long Count was August 13, 3,114 B.C. It will end on December 21, 2012, in the Julian calendar December 21st is the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The Maya and Aztec believed that after the completion of this 5,125 year cycle that are currently in the era of the 5th sun.
Writing systems were directly influenced by what is thought to be a proto Maya script found on a stone monument known as a stela. It is called La Mojarra script after the area in which this stela was found. The Zapotecs of Oaxaca also had an early system of writing in 600 B.C. These writing systems, including the advanced writing system of the Maya, are comprised of logograms called ¡°glyphs¡° that express complete concepts, much like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese figures. Some also are syllabic and when combined create affixes, suffixes, and infixes. This system is in direct correlation with Maya languages such as K¡®iche¡® which has these types of conventions in the spoken and written word. 42 Maya languages exist in the Maya area today. The ¡°glyphs¡± are written in one of these, Ch¡¯olan, which served as a kind of pan-Maya prestige speech -- a lingua franca used by the elite.
The rise of the Aztecs as an imperial force has a short history of approximately one hundred years, yet their culture was influenced by all of the prior Mesoamerican power centers that rose and fell prior to their arrival in the valley of Mexico. It is to those peoples that we now turn in order to understand the rise of the Aztec empire.
Possibly the most successful of al...