Nike of Samothrace is a beautiful winged sculpture also referred to as the Winged Victory of Samothrace is estimated to have been created between 200-190 BC. The BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike who was also known as Victoria (Victory) was not discovered until 1863. The sculpture was created to honor the Greek goddess and the sea battles of that time. On the other hand, the fearsome looking sculpture called the Coatlicue was created 1300-1500 in Tenochtitlan, Mexico. The Coatlicue was once buried because of the way it looks and Christians thought that images of the Aztec Gods were of the devil. The Christian were also afraid that if the Indian people were to see the stone images then they would start to worship them and abandon …show more content…
The children which were the stars and Coyotxauhqu became jealous and feared that now they would no longer be as important to her and decided the murder her. The children decapitated the Coatlicue which cause the new born child Huitzilopotchi to be born in armor and seek vengeance upon his siblings. He threw his sisters body down the mountain and tossed her head into the air to become the moon. This myth was used by the Aztecs as a metaphors as to why the sun, moon, and stars are how they are now, but also to show how Huitzilopotchi became the sun god telling how the sun and moon came into place. The Aztec people traveled until they found a cactus with an eagle nesting obeying Huilzilopotchli command and settled there which is now known as Tenochtitlan. After the fall of the Aztec, the work was found by Christians and reburied because of the assumption that it represented something evil. The art was not supposed to be viewed as evil but to show the Coatlicue as part human, part earth animal, and animal that represented life and death. The goddess played a …show more content…
The statue was important to not only the Aztecs but to the Spanish as well for Catholics seen she as being related to Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Coatlicue is seen as wearing a serpent skirt given the name of her meaning of the serpent skirt. Serpents meant childbirth and blood to the Aztecs which is why it is important that she wears a serpent skirt as it represents the childbirth of Huitzilopotchi and the blood from the decapitation of her head from the two serpents. In the Aztec culture, man trained to for battle while woman were the child bearers. Those who died during childbirth were believed to have become goddesses which relates to the Aztec myth. The Coatlicue’s face has been carved in many monuments to keep in touch with the earth since she was the goddess of earth and fire. The Aztecs were the largest army in Mesoamerica and took in many prisoners of war. They believed in ritual sacrifice so that their god would not desert them and their world would not come to an end. Thought to have been through four different worlds already, they believed to have lived in the final world that the gods sacrificed themselves for. The prisoners captured by the Aztec were mostly
Then the dual god Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl who was both bad and good, male and female created itself. It then gave birth to four children who represent the directions; the god Xipe Totec (north), the god Huizilopochtli (south), the god Quetzalcoatl (east), and the god Tezcatlipoca (west). These gods then go on to create water and other gods. One of the gods they created was named Cipactli, a sea monster who was part fish and part crocodile.
The religion and culture of the Aztecs played a role in the way the way they thought and fought. They worshiped the war-god Huitzilopochtli. He was identified with the sun and was called "the Giver of life" and "the Preserver of Life" (xxxix). The religion carried some ridiculous rituals such as human sacrifice along with using magicians and wizards to cast spells. In war conditions, human sacrifice played a big role because the Aztecs would not fight to kill,...
During 1325 a newly homeless Aztec tribe who were chased away by the angry ruler/father of a princess they sacrificed to the sun god, were traveling through swamps . they saw a small island with an eagle perched on a cactus eating a snake. This was told to be a sign of where the tribe was to create their new home. This new city was named Tenochtitlan. Soon this will become the capital of the Aztec empire. Tenochtitlan started out with only a temple to worship the war god Huitzilopochtli, and huts for the tribesmen.
The stone was found in 1790 by accident in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, when workmen who were excavating the earth to pave the plaza. It was discovered facedown, so it only seemed as if it was a large blank stone until it was turned over and the intricate details and deity was finally shown. It was decided to be set on the side on the Catedral Metropolitana, where it was abused and misunderstood for nearly a century. It wasn’t until 1885 and almost a hundred years of abuse by the people of Mexico, it was decided to be placed in the Museo Nacional. Although researchers at the time knew the importance of the Aztec stone, “students of Mexican antiquities, the founders of our archaeology, eagerly urged the successive governments to shelter and protect this significant monument of the pre-Hispanic past from the ignominy that it had suffered. According to chroniclers of the period, when it was displayed, the ignorant masses hurled filth and rotten fruit at the calendrical relief. Even the soldiers who at a certain time occupied the centre of Mexico—because of the constant violent tumult and foreign invasions that characteriz...
In an essay by Carrasco titled “The Exaggeration of Human Sacrifice," the purpose of nextlaoalli seemed logical, as it was believed that the gods had died in order to create the lives of plants, animals and humans, and that a ritual sacrifice of plants, animals, and humans offered a way to transmit the energy of these beings back to the gods. These types of sacrifices arguably played a minute role in the actual rituals performed to appease the gods, but rather it was in combination with the regalia and practices of the priests which contributed to the overall “barbaric” atmosphere Daz experienced in these sacrificial rituals. Although viewed by the Spaniards as cannibalistic and obscure in nature, these rituals formed a pivotal function in the religious culture of both Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire. The true purpose of nextlaoalli was misconstrued because of the numerous biases present among the collective Spanish mindset, and therefore these rituals became a target for the Spaniards to denounce the established religion under pretenses that it was paganistic, and therefore false.
The Aztecs were a Mesoamerican people that lived in the area of central Mexico in the 14th, 15th and 16th century. It is said that Aztecs came from a place called Aztlan. Aztlan was the Aztec's homeland, nobody knows exactly where it was, but it is believed that Aztlan lies somewhere to the north of Mexico. Some experts claim that Aztlan is a mythical place. According to Aztec legends Huitzilopochtli, their god of war and of the sun, told them to leave Aztlan and to wander until they saw an eagle on a cactus budding out of a rock and eating a snake. The Aztecs traveled many years to find the legend that Huitzilopochtli had told. They left Aztlan in the 12th century. They built their settlements in the Valley of Mexico by Lake Texcoco. There were other Indian tribes living in the area when the Aztecs arrived. The Aztecs called their settlement Tenochtitlan. By the time they settled after two centuries of voyage they called themselves by a different name, the Mexica, but the term Aztec has been used as a ...
I wanted to consider all of the ancient literary heroes and legendary warriors that we have gone over this semester as well as some that we didn’t before deciding on the two I felt complimented each other, and many great names came to mind. Perseus, Prometheus, Theseus, Hercules, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, William Wallace, and Beowulf just to name a few. But even more prevailing then these are Achilles and Cuchullin. When looking at the first works of mythology that came out of Europe we can see that there are two noteworthy mythological figures that are the most alike despite the fact that their stories come from completely opposite ends of the region. Through the stories of Cuchullin and Achilles not only do we get a
The Aztec civilization was a very complex society that was feared and known well for their various gory sacrifices done to please their many gods in their polytheistic religion. The much feared civilization began by the exile of one of the two Toltec leaders, which lead to the decline of the Toltec state that was later replaced by Mexica, or the Aztecs. According to the Aztecs, the land chosen to build their main city was chosen by the portrayal of an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its mouth. Through military might, the Aztecs managed to become the most powerful civilization in the mid-fourteenth century. They maintained their power through military might and the fear they caused other civilizations because of the human sacrifices they performed on their captured victims.
Carrasco shows that sacrificing was key to the Mesoamericans. Their entire belief is through world renewing, world making, and world centering. Both Aztecs and Mayans revolved their society around structures that they thought was centered around the universe. Each one believed that their society revolved around the universe. Sacrifices such as autosacrifice, removing the heart while the person was still alive was a daily ritual with the Aztecs, and Mayans. The purpose for public sacrificing was to feed the gods and make the them happy with their people. The type of people sacrificed was the beautiful and the captured warriors after a war. The beautiful was sacrificed because the gods didn't give any distinct quality to be remembered for such as a disfigured face.
This is a copy of the sculpture of Athena Parthenos, dressed in battle attire, that was originally created by Phidias during the period of 447-39 B.C. The statue of Athena Parthenos was to be constructed, not of bronze, but of gold and ivory. The face, arms, and feet of the statue were to be made of ivory and the clothing, of thickly plated gold. The statue was an enormous size that towered thirty-three feet tall. The costly nature of the materials out of which it was designed was intended to overwhelm the viewer, creating a sense of religious awe.
The opposition between the “male” state and the “female” opponent regularly appear in stories associated with the establishment of Aztec authority and is underscored by the frequent interpretation of the Coyolxauhqui myth as a battle between the sun and the moon. She became prominent in the mythological story of the legend of the virgin birth of Huitzilopochtli. Her mother, Coatlicue already had four hundred children which Coyolxauhqui was the head of them, and when Coyolxauhqui discovered that her mother was pregnant she urged the other children to join in to kill their mother because she had dishonored them. When Huitzilopochtli was fully born he protected his mother by decapitating Coyolxauhqui, but keeping her head intact, and getting rid of all the other children. Archaeologists founded the stone of Coyolxauhqui, an enormous stone monolith carved in low relief at the base of Huitzilopochtli’s side of the temple at the Temple of Mayor. The carving was originally painted is eleven feet in diameter, and her head and limbs are separated from her torso and organized in a pinwheel shape. She is shown as a decapitated and dismembered naked woman and thus she represents shame and dishonor in the Aztec society, because nakedness was a form of humiliation and defeat.
White Tezcatlipoca: Also referred to as the Plumed Serpent, a reference to his sibling and rival Quetzalcoatl, and patron god of the Cholula Aztecs.
...en, In their religion they were assumed to accompany the sun on its expedition but this time/instead from its place at midday down to where it sets in the western sky. It was believed by the Aztecs that after four years these deceased women warriors would returned to earth to become frightening ghosts that haunted crossroads and tried to snatch up young children and infants. http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/index.php?one=azt&two=ask&tab=ans&id=1
What make the statue of Nike of Samothrace unique is that the sculpture has the appearance of weightlessness and flying. “The sculpture probably celebrates the naval victories-nike means “victory” of Eudamos, an Admiral in command of the fleet at Rhodes, over Antiochos the Great and the Seleucid forces in 190 BCE” (Davies 159). A better description of this is as followed “The Nike is designed to seem as if she is just landing in a fierce headwind, her great wings still aloft. The body twists slightly as if to maintain its balance, while the sheer chiton, heavy with sea spray, both clings and billows dramatically” (Nike of Samothrace).
portrayed biting his tail on Aztec and Toltec ruins. Quetzalcoatl is carved into the base of