Vous êtes-vous déjà demandé qui régnait sur la Mésoamérique, les Aztèques ou les Mayas ? Les Mayas furent les premiers, construisant leurs incroyables villes et pyramides dans des endroits comme le Guatemala et le sud du Mexique à partir de 2000 avant notre ère. Ils excellaient en astronomie et disposaient d'un système d'écriture avancé. Les Aztèques vinrent plus tard, dominant le centre du Mexique avec leur puissant empire à partir du 14ème siècle, connu pour leur immense capitale, Tenochtitlán. Les deux civilisations étaient incroyables à leur manière, mais elles régnaient sur différentes parties de la Mésoamérique à des époques différentes. Animation créée par Sympa.
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FunTranscript
00:00Can you pronounce the name of the Aztec capital?
00:03I admit, it's quite difficult in French.
00:06And well above my skills.
00:08Well, very well.
00:09This is Tenochtitlan.
00:11Mayan cities generally have difficult names to pronounce,
00:14like Yaxchilán.
00:16They must therefore come from the same language, is not it?
00:18Well, not really.
00:19The Aztecs and Mayas were among the most famous Mesoamerican peoples.
00:24We are talking about today's Central America.
00:27But they did not speak the same language and clearly did not belong to the same civilization.
00:31The two peoples lived at different times.
00:34The Aztecs thus dominated the region from the 14th to the 16th century,
00:38which in Europe marked the end of the Middle Ages.
00:41The Mayas preceded them,
00:43and historians estimate that they began to build their cities-states from the 3rd century,
00:48to reach their peak from the 10th century.
00:50This does not mean that the Mayas and the Aztecs did not have the slightest contact,
00:54but at the time of these interactions, the Mayas were already declining.
00:58The Aztecs therefore traded more with the descendants of the Mayas than with the Mayas themselves.
01:04The two civilizations did not even live in the same place.
01:08The Aztecs built their cities in the north of present-day Mexico,
01:11while the Mayas lived in the south, in the Yucatan Peninsula.
01:15Today, this region is also part of Mexico,
01:18but the Mayas also occupied parts of present-day Guatemala and Belize.
01:23In addition, they spoke several languages.
01:26The Mayas had a whole family of languages,
01:29some of which have survived to this day.
01:32It is estimated that 6 million indigenous people descended from the Mayas
01:36would be distributed throughout Central America today.
01:39In Guatemala, 21 Mayan languages are officially recognized,
01:43while further north, in Mexico, the number of official languages is 29.
01:50For the Aztecs, the situation is much simpler.
01:53They only had one language, the Nahuatl.
01:56This language still has about 1.5 million native speakers,
02:00mainly in the center of Mexico,
02:03which represents more than any other family of indigenous languages in the region.
02:07However, a Nahuatl speaker could not understand a Maya speaker.
02:12The two languages are completely different and did not have the same writing system.
02:17The Mayas were more advanced and used hieroglyphs,
02:20similar to those of the ancient Egyptians.
02:23Instead of letters forming words,
02:25these ancient civilizations used small representations
02:28to represent an object or a concept.
02:31When the Mayas wanted to write the word Jaguar, for example,
02:35they drew a small image of the animal.
02:38Their writing system had more than 800 characters of this type,
02:42constituting a real complex hieroglyphic alphabet,
02:45much more complex than our modern way of writing.
02:48Comparatively, the Aztecs used pictograms and ideograms,
02:53elaborate drawings representing objects, animals or concepts.
02:58Although visually impressive and requiring highly qualified painters,
03:03these symbols were not as systematized as the Maya hieroglyphs
03:08and served more as mnemonics than as a real phonetic writing system.
03:14We could therefore say that the Mayas were one of the most advanced in written languages.
03:19They also had the only system of writing entirely developed from American content
03:23before the arrival of the first Europeans.
03:26However, culturally and economically, the two societies were quite similar.
03:31Neither of them used animal traits for agriculture and transport.
03:35The key to their agriculture?
03:37You guessed it, it was corn.
03:40Christophe Colomb was the first to bring this cereal to Europe in 1493.
03:46The Mayas also cultivated sunflower, vanilla and cotton.
03:50The Aztecs produced peppers, beans and zucchini.
03:54For all meat, they were content with fish and shrimp,
03:57while the Mayas raised ducks, as we do today with our chickens.
04:02The Aztec society was made up of nobles and rotary men, all led by an emperor.
04:08The Mayas lived mainly in independent cities, each ruled by a royal family.
04:14These two civilizations went entirely by wheeled vehicles.
04:18The Aztec merchants traveled Central America by transporting their goods on their backs,
04:23which was not a comfortable war.
04:26Contrary to our modern roads, their roads were much narrower,
04:29since they were only intended for pedestrians.
04:32The Mayas used a similar road network,
04:35including canoes that they cut into large tree trunks.
04:39However, they rarely strayed from the coast.
04:42An average Mayan canoe was 15 meters long, the size of one of our contemporary sails.
04:48The Mayas exchanged various goods, from salt to pearls.
04:53They considered meat as a luxury product, just like gold, copper and turquoise.
04:58And what currency did they use according to you?
05:01Certainly not metal and even less paper,
05:04but cocoa beans that had a fixed price on the market,
05:08which made it an ideal means of payment.
05:11The situation in our modern societies is not very different.
05:15About two-thirds of the countries have indexed their currency to the American dollar.
05:19For these pre-Columbians, cocoa beans were therefore green notes.
05:24The Aztecs also used this currency, but with a particularity.
05:28The hash coin.
05:30A hash was worth 8,000 cocoa beans.
05:33One can imagine that their exchange offices must have been a famous bazaar.
05:37As for minerals, jade was very popular in both cultures.
05:42The Mayas and the Aztecs made tools and ornaments from this material.
05:47They believed that jade brought grace and longevity to its bearer,
05:51and their jade mine was located in present-day Guatemala.
05:54Do you remember this city with unpronounceable names?
05:58The foundation of the Aztec capital reveals a lot to us about the belief system of this culture.
06:04According to legend, their god would have ordered them to build a city
06:08where they would see an eagle perched on a cactus, holding a snake in its clutches.
06:13They would have observed this scene on an island on Lake Texcoco, and would have built their city there.
06:18If you are looking for this place on a map of present-day Central America,
06:22you just need to locate Mexico.
06:25It is the very location of the former Aztec capital,
06:28thus named in reference to the Mexican people, another name for the Aztecs.
06:33The city was built on small artificial islands,
06:36and slightly exceeded the surface of the Heathrow airport.
06:40The Mayas, on the other hand, did not have a single capital as we understand it today.
06:45Their civilization extended over about forty cities,
06:48each with 5 to 50,000 inhabitants.
06:52Today, these sites would be considered small rural cities.
06:56However, the total number of Mayan cities is not yet exhaustive,
07:00archaeologists continue to discover new sites in the heart of the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula.
07:07Recently, researchers have discovered a new site in southeastern Mexico,
07:11and have named it Ocumtun, in reference to the word Maya,
07:15designating the multiple stone columns they discovered there.
07:19In the past, this city was part of the Central Maya Basin,
07:22a region today covered by a thick jungle.
07:26The Mayas abandoned their settlement in this region around the 8th and 9th centuries.
07:32Historians do not agree on the reasons for this sudden abandonment.
07:36Some evoke overpopulation, others the collapse of their trade routes.
07:41In any case, the northern Maya cities have persisted,
07:45and their descendants were still present when the Europeans met them several centuries later.
07:51The Aztecs were also present in present-day Mexico at that time.
07:55But the contact with the European settlers was fatal to them,
07:59due to the variole epidemic that brought it with them.
08:03However, the legacy of this culture persists to this day.
08:07Every time we use words like avocado, chili, guacamole, chocolate and coyote,
08:13we revive the Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
08:17These words are found in almost all the languages of the world.
08:20The Mayas, meanwhile, have also influenced modern English.
08:24Linguists support that the word shark, therefore,
08:28would come from the Mayan exoce, used to designate a fish.
08:33The two civilizations have left behind them very similar hostile pyramids.
08:38The only clue to differentiate them is that we find today much more Mayan ruins than Aztecs.
08:44Finally, as far as corn is concerned,
08:47a story circulates among the descendants of the Mayas
08:50according to which their harvest was accomplished by beating sound corn.
08:55Exhilarating, isn't it?
08:57Okay, I made that up.
09:00But you doubted it, didn't you?