a portrait of Tenochtitlan
September 3, 2023 9:25 PM Subscribe

a 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world. Today, we call this city Ciudad de Mexico - Mexico City. Not much is left of the old Aztec - or Mexica - capital Tenochtitlan. What did this city, raised from the lake bed by hand, look like? Using historical and archeological sources, and the expertise of many, I have tried to faithfully bring this iconic city to life.
posted by aniola (31 comments total) 84 users marked this as a favorite

This is pretty amazing. I'd love to see a VR walkthrough version--it doesn't seem that far out of the (main) creator's wheelhouse.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:40 PM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ooh, the photo-realistic rendering makes it seem so alive.

The logistics of keeping a city of that size running in the pre-industrial age is itself a staggering achievement.
posted by Harald74 at 12:18 AM on September 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

The overlays are just so sad. In Rome or London or Athens there's tons of stuff left from far older times than that. It's heartbreaking that those temple complexes were just obliterated.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:28 AM on September 4, 2023 [15 favorites]

When I stayed there it was in a hotel just behind the main cathedral. Right nearby was an archaeological dig site, I assume examining the foundations of one of those big main temples. Quite amazing to imagine. I am going out on a limb to say that Tenochtitlan looks a much nicer place than Mexico City.

This art is wonderful and fantastic, thanks for the link.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:09 AM on September 4, 2023

this is just amazing!
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:13 AM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

*jaw drops*

Brilliant art and research. Thanks for this!
posted by mediareport at 4:42 AM on September 4, 2023

Ab.solutely fascinating and gorgeous. Time machine bucket list.
posted by BlunderingArtist at 4:47 AM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've been wanting to see something like this and, now, here it is! Fantastic!
posted by vacapinta at 4:59 AM on September 4, 2023

Phenomenal work, there. I could have read a detailed description of Tenochtitlan, but this visualization tells so many clearer stories. Thank you for this, aniola!
posted by Thorzdad at 5:22 AM on September 4, 2023

Beautiful, the stylised lighting, long views and sense of scale are just stunning.

I know they're not everyone's cup of tea, but I had a similar feeling playing Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey for the first time some years back. Just being able to stop on top of a hill or fly as an eagle and look down to pick out detailed historical sites was genuinely thrilling. I'm pretty sure I spent more time exploring and in photo-mode setting up this same sort of pleasing landscape shot than I ever did in the main gameplay loop.

And yes, VR walkthroughs of this sort of project would be both incredible to see and a fantastic learning resource for hooking people into history / archaeology.
posted by protorp at 6:47 AM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is so stunning, but it makes me so sad. Sad that the fucking conquistadors came the fuck over there, assuming the Mexica were uncivilized savages, and destroyed everything. Look at that world! Look at how incredible it was! How can those fucking monsters have not seen that and not understood that cities existed and thrived, and just because it wasn't Europe, their world didn't count?

I am proud of my Mexican heritage and this makes me even more so, if heartbroken about what they did to that beautiful city.
posted by Kitteh at 6:55 AM on September 4, 2023 [15 favorites]

Highly recommend the account of one Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortez's men who was there when they first entered Mexico:

When we gazed upon all this splendour at once, we scarcely knew what to think, and we doubted whether all that we beheld was real. A series of large towns stretched themselves along the banks of the lake, out of which still larger ones rose magnificently above the waters. Innumerable crowds of canoes were plying everywhere around us; at regular distances we continually passed over new bridges, and before us lay the great city of Mexico in all its splendour.
...

When we had arrived at a spot where another narrow causeway led towards Cojohuacan we were met by a number of caziques and distinguished personages, all attired in their most splendid garments. They had been despatched by Motecusuma to meet us and bid us welcome in his name; and in token of peace they touched the ground with their hands and kissed it. Here we halted for a few minutes, while the princes of Tetzcuco, Iztapalapan, Tlacupa, and Cojohuacan hastened in advance to meet Motecusuma, who was slowly approaching us, surrounded by other grandees of the kingdom, seated in a sedan of uncommon splendour. When we had arrived at a place not far from the town, where several small towers rose together, the monarch raised himself in his sedan, and the chief caziques supported him under the arms, and held over his head a canopy of exceedingly great value, decorated with green feathers, gold, silver, chalchihuis stones, and pearls, which hung down from a species of bordering, altogether curious to look at.

Motecusuma himself, according to his custom, was sumptuously attired, had on a species of half boot, richly set with jewels, and whose soles were made of solid gold. The four grandees who supported him were also richly attired, which they must have put on somewhere on the road, in order to wait upon Motecusuma; they were not so sumptuously dressed when they first came out to meet us. Besides these distinguished caziques, there were many other grandees around the monarch, some of whom held the canopy over his head, while others again occupied the road before him, and spread cotton cloths on the ground that his feet might not touch the bare earth. No one of his suite ever looked at him full in the face; every one in his presence stood with eyes downcast, and it was only his four nephews and cousins who supported him that durst look up.
...
[Reception by Moctezuma]

The road before us now became less crowded, and yet who would have been able to count the vast numbers of men, women, and children who filled the streets, crowded the balconies, and the canoes in the canals, merely to gaze upon us? Indeed, at the moment I am writing this, everything comes as lively to my eyes as if it had happened yesterday; and I daily become more sensible of the great mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he lent us sufficient strength and courage to enter this city: for my own person, I have particular reason to be thankful that he spared my life in so many perils, as the reader will sufficiently see in the course of this history: indeed I cannot sufficiently praise him that I have been allowed to live thus long to narrate these adventures, although they may not turn out so perfect as I myself could wish.

We were quartered in a large building where there was room enough for us all, and which had been occupied by Axayacatl, father of Motecusuma, during his life-time. Here the latter had likewise a secret room full of treasures, and where the gold he had inherited from his father was hid, which he had never touched up to this moment. Near this building there were temples and Mexican idols, and this place had been purposely selected for us because we were termed teules, or were thought to be such, and that we might dwell among the latter as among our equals. The apartments and halls were very spacious, and those set apart for our general were furnished with carpets. There were separate beds for each of us, which could not have been better fitted up for a gentleman of the first rank. Every place was swept clean, and the walls had been newly plastered and decorated.[48]

There's another account by Juan Cano which is now lost but we do have summaries (translation mine) by those who read it, including this:

There were so many riches in everything that has been said, as well in buildings as in everything else, and so much that Moctezuma gave to everyone, that Juan Cano says that it seemed to them something of an enchantment and that they could not to believe that it was true, but that they dreamed it to see the things of Mexico, of Moctezuma and of the lords, so many and such great mosques and the markets, especially that of Tlatelulco, and to see the silverware and so many things like that that were sold there and everything through its streets, and each kind of thing by itself and at very low prices, all with great order and such great polish; that the Romans never had it better. And that they had their laws and ordinances for their government well in order. And that they had five types of books, one concerned itself with sacrifices, another with marriages, another concerned the government, another about farming and sowing and how they were to be done, another concerning lords and laws of inheritance; and that in the books about government and the planting of fields there were many notable things to see.

There were Aztec and Maya codices that were later destroyed.

What a fantastic chance we had, to make peace, to exchange knowledge. But, instead of course, we grabbed as much gold as we could and burned it all down.
posted by vacapinta at 8:22 AM on September 4, 2023 [24 favorites]

How can those fucking monsters have not seen that and not understood that cities existed and thrived, and just because it wasn't Europe, their world didn't count?

Religion is a helluva drug. As are gold and silver. Combine all three and you get genocide.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:27 AM on September 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ooph. Aztec (and related) cultures are fascinating, and it’s a bitter pill that do much was erased so quickly, and the Spanish Empire was a wasteful disaster for almost everyone involved in the long run (excepting introducing chiles to world cuisine), but… the Aztec empire was structurally weak and fragmented, and they made up for this through terror and brutality, including human sacrifice and (maybe) cannibalism. The Spanish succeeded so quickly partly because there were plenty of cities willing to back them to get out from under the Aztecs, although those cities were just exchanging one brutality for another. I admire the Aztec accomplishments, but I also try to remember how ugly their government was.

Although, to be fair, they seemed to have directed most of their violence towards the upper classes of opposing city states, which is a bit of fresh air in the normal course of human behavior.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:39 AM on September 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

Really incredible images. Thanks for sharing!
posted by bananapancakes at 8:40 AM on September 4, 2023

What a fantastic chance we had, to make peace, to exchange knowledge. But, instead of course, we grabbed as much gold as we could and burned it all down.

The Aztecs and Mayans were neither peaceful or interested in peace, though.
posted by riruro at 8:47 AM on September 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

This project is fantastic, it's really great to give modern viewers a picture of what it might have looked like. I'd love to see a similar treatment for Teotihuacán. There is a partial 2d map.

Specific question about the image labelled "Looking west, towards Chapultepec". Where is Chapultepec? Is that the bosque in the upper left, way past the lake / beyond the last skyscrapers? It seemed like such an enormous hill on the hot day I walked up there ;-)
posted by Nelson at 9:34 AM on September 4, 2023

How can those fucking monsters have not seen that and not understood that cities existed and thrived

Dehumanization is a powerful force. But the conquistadors did understand about the thriving. They just wanted to claim the treasures and souls for themselves.

Also Tenochtitlan had suffered a terrible smallpox epidemic starting just before Cortés arrived, killing something like half of the residents. Disease spread faster than the invaders.

If you haven't read 1491 I highly recommend it, Mann does an excellent job conveying what it meant for 95%+ of the New World's population to have died in the time between Columbus first arriving and the first actual in person meetings in various places. The first hand accounts of explorers are full of comments about how they kept finding whole villages entirely empty. They interpreted it as God's providence, that these fully built places were provided for them to inhabit.
posted by Nelson at 9:41 AM on September 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

What a beautiful enriching piece of work, thanks for sharing! There are many maps of the city, this one from Cortés, probably the earliest western depiction. Many others were joint collaborations between Nahuatl speakers and cartographers, like this one in the Library of Congress, where you see that the sacred precinct now includes the cathedral. But to synthesize the data into this experience is amazing. And to include a Nahuatl version (and a Spanish one) of the text feels so right and proper.
posted by garbanzilla at 9:53 AM on September 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Let's not get too caught up in revisionism: the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism on a significant scale, facts that are well supported by numerous primary and archaeological sources and that can't be explained away by European ethnocentrism. It may have been a beautiful thriving civilization, but one that ruled through a good dose of terror, warfare, and brutality, just like you can admire the beauty of Chartres Cathedral while acknowledging the dark side of medieval European civilization.
posted by fortitude25 at 11:16 AM on September 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

The thing about this project is that it lets us see and imagine the Aztec’s version of Chartres and the other great cathedrals of Europe. Mesoamerica got written over so fast and so much was lost that it’s hard to get a look at the accomplishments of the culture unfiltered through centuries of Spanish Catholicism. This is an amazing project, aniola; thanks for posting it.

I’m reminded a bit of the Neo-Assyrians, who were another empire governed by terror and the threat of genocide (I mean, all empires are somewhat, but the Neo-Assyrians were extremely blatant). And they ruled unassailed until the Medes and the Persians took their shot and all the subjugated people revolted, and the Neo-Assyrians were erased from history until the 19th C, when the ruins were dug up and all that history and culture uncovered. Sadly, no such cache of history and culture has been found for the Aztecs.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:41 AM on September 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Spanish succeeded so quickly partly because there were plenty of cities willing to back them to get out from under the Aztecs.

It's worth noting that similar factors were at work in the colonization of America. While the term Indians (or even Native Americans) implies a monolithic group, the Natives of North America were no more united that the people of Europe at the time. So some Native States joined forces to battle enemy states, or course to fight with the British or French because they were (momentarily) offering better terms.

If the Natives had been truly united, European colonization might have been impossible.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:42 AM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Where is Chapultepec? Is that the bosque in the upper left, way past the lake / beyond the last skyscrapers?

Yes, that looks to be it since the cathedral is on the right side of the zócalo in that view. I agree, the hill on which the castillo sits isn't really apparent in the model render.

Awesome project though! Anyone know if source files are available?
posted by cosmologinaut at 12:03 PM on September 4, 2023

There's an email in the very bottom right corner of the page you could reach out to if you want to find out.
posted by aniola at 2:10 PM on September 4, 2023

This is fantastic. I also enjoyed the Fall of Civilizations podcast on the Aztecs. The episode is also available on YouTube as a documentary.
posted by kneecapped at 3:18 PM on September 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read an alternative history novel recently called Black Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt which was set in Tenochtitlan in 1521 but where Spain never fell to Christianity and the colonizers of the Americas were Islamic. He gave some nice descriptions of life in the city and these images were a nice supplement to that.
posted by knapah at 6:48 AM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is extraordinary, thank you. I always knew Ciudad de México was built on top of Tenochtitlan but I never really understood how, and this is so clearly and beautifully visualized.

the Aztec empire was structurally weak and fragmented, and they made up for this through terror and brutality, including human sacrifice and (maybe) cannibalism

You guys. The human sacrifice angle is pretty exaggerated. I mean, they absolutely did, but this idea that they were just constantly mowing through thousands of human victims is Spanish propaganda used to justify the brutality of their invasion, and if you still think it's true, you need to be reexamining that. According to this article, the total number of sacrifices found in excavated sites is in the hundreds. They were killing less people than the Spanish Inquisition was at home.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 10:11 AM on September 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

knapah, just wanted to note that the title of the book you mention is Red Smoking Mirror. It sounded cool so I went to look for it but was confused when I didn't see that title anywhere.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:16 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

You guys. The human sacrifice angle is pretty exaggerated.

Eh, there is a lot of debate in the scholarly literature about it. Looking over publications from the last 15 years, the one-time consensus that perhaps 1% of the regional population was sacrificed yearly seems overblown, and some of the reports of conquistadors (who are, as you can imagine, not exactly trustworthy) are clearly wildly exaggerated (one would have had 4 priests sacrifice 80,000 people in a day, which would be physically impossible), and so much information has been lost that certainty is impossible. However, analysis of many archeological sites, records, estimates of populations, and the like have most estimates that, at it's height, the Aztec Empire sacrificed somewhere from the low thousands to perhaps 20,000 people per year, with some significant spikes such as the dedication or rededication of major temples, at the end of major military campaigns, etc. So the high estimates of a quarter million sacrifices a year are almost certainly grotesquely high, but the claim that it was a few hundred is almost certainly off by at least an order of magnitude.

There is ample evidence that the bodies were also displayed publicly to help keep tributary cities in line.

There is also ample evidence of ritual cannibalism, although some claims that human meat was a significant source of protein for the culture is probably nonsense, and based on ideas from mid-century meat-eating academics that, since the central Mexican region was fairly short of sources of animal protein, they must have been malnourished, ignoring the ample sources of vegetable protein. However, at least some Aztecs ate human meat on at least some occasions. The Aztecs were not, to our modern sensibilities, nice people.

Of course, Medieval and Early Modern Europeans were also not nice people. They fought spectacularly bloody wars and displayed the mutilated bodies of executed people to help keep the populace in line. Similarly, there are other cultures which practiced mass human sacrifice. The Aztecs are more unique for the artistry and aesthetics of their blood-letting than the sheer numbers. It's also worth keeping in mind that at least some of the sacrifices, at least some of the time, were enemy combatants captured instead of killed specifically for sacrifice, rather than just being killed during or after a battle as is more common in human societies (also, as I pointed out above, their is evidence that a lot of the sacrifices were fairly high-status people, which is a change from the normal course of slaughtering the peasants and letting the nobles off).

Additionally, the particular Aztec relationship to human sacrifice does not mean that they did not reach significant levels of cultural, artistic, and social achievements (I read that the Azteks independently developed pretty much every type of textile known in Europe at the time and possibly some that weren't) or that we shouldn't feel sorry for the sheer amount of information on this fascinating culture that was ruthlessly bulldozed by the Spanish in their efforts of conquer the Western Hemisphere. Basically, it's OK to feel a bunch of ways about the Aztecs.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:35 AM on September 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

knapah, just wanted to note that the title of the book you mention is Red Smoking Mirror. It sounded cool so I went to look for it but was confused when I didn't see that title anywhere.

Thank you for the correction! There's an obsidian mirror in the book that probably snuck into my memory and caused the error.
posted by knapah at 3:37 PM on September 7, 2023

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