Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Comparative studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown Nahuatl as almost the southernmost member of a family, known as Uto-Aztecan or Yuta-Nawan, which extends in a wide swath as far north as the Shoshone and Paiute peoples in modern Oregon. This reconstructed linguistic geography fits with the Aztecs’ foundation legend, by which they claimed to have come from Aztlan (’heron place’), an island somewhere unknown in the north-west. So they may have learnt their Nahuatl before they came to the Valley of Mexico in 1256, initially as vagrants and scavengers and eaters of snakes. [105]Yet they always represented themselves as a branch of the Chichimeca people, renowned hunter-gatherer nomads of the north. If this story is true, they must have learnt their Nahuatl fairly late; for the Chichimeca or Pame language is related to Otomí, also spoken north and west of the Valley of Mexico, but quite unlike Nahuatl. The Aztecs may have been like the Normans in France, settling and learning a new language before projecting it through conquest.

First squatting in the western region of Chapultepec, then chased out and enlisting as mercenaries with Culhuacán (another people who claimed descent from the Chichimeca), they accepted a very lowly billet on the lava beds of Tizaapan.

’Good,’ Coxcoxtli [king of Culhuacan] said. ‘They are monstrous, they are evil.

Perhaps they will meet their end there, devoured by snakes,

for it is the dwelling-place of many snakes.’

But the Mexicans were overjoyed when they saw the snakes.

They cooked them, they roasted them and they ate them…

After twenty-five years of this, they brought matters to a head, requesting a Culhuacán princess, presumably as a bride, but then committing a characteristic atrocity on her.

Then they slew the princess and they flayed her,

and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

Huitzilopochtli [Humming-bird on the Left, the Aztecs’ tribal god] then said:

’O my chiefs, go and summon Achitometl [the princess’s father].’

The Mexicans went off, they went to summon him.

They said, ‘O our lord, O my grandson, O lord, O king…

your grandfathers, the Mexicans beseech you, they say,

’May he come to see, may he come to greet the goddess.

We invite him.’…

And when Achitometl arrived in Tizaapan, the Mexicans said in welcome:

’You have wearied yourself, O my grandson, O lord, O king.

We, your grandfathers, we, your vassals, shall cause you to become ill.

May you see, may you greet your goddess.’ [106]

’Very good, O my grandfathers,’ he said.

He took the rubber, the copal, the flowers, the tobacco and the food offering,

and he offered them to her, he set them down before the false goddess whom they had flayed.

Then Achitometl tore off the heads of the quail before his goddess:

he still did not see the person before whom he was decapitating the quail.

Then he made the offering of incense and the incense-burner blazed up, and Achitometl saw a man in his daughter’s skin.

He was horror-struck.

He cried out, he shouted to his lords and vassals,

He said, ‘Who are they, eh, O Culhuacans?

Have you not seen? They have flayed my daughter!

They shall not remain here, the fiends!

We shall slay them, we shall massacre them!

The evil ones shall be annihilated here!’

Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc. Crónica Mexicayotl , trans. Thelma D. Sullivan

The Aztecs were then driven into the lake, but they made improvised rafts out of their arrows and shields, and when they emerged on the other side, they were inspired. It was prophesied that they must settle ‘where the eagle screeches, where he spreads his wings, where the eagle feeds, where the fish fly, where the serpent is torn apart’. In the distance, on a prickly-pear cactus, they saw this vision, of an eagle eating a snake. A voice cried out: ‘O Mexicans, it shall be here! ’ But no one could see who spoke. They knew that the reedy, but defensible, islands in the middle of the lake should be their home, Tenochtitlán, ‘place of the prickly-pear’. It was the year ome calli , ‘2 House’, 1325.

This was the origin of the vast and miraculous lake city, which so entranced the invading Spaniards when they reached it in November 1519. The Aztecs had regrouped and prospered in their lakeland home for a hundred years, and then begun to expand their domains through a series of aggressive wars. First, under Itzcoatl (’Obsidian-Snake’), 1427-40, they achieved control of the Valley of Mexico as a whole, then under Motecuhzoma I Ilhuicamina (’Heaven-Shooter’) they outflanked the territory of their resistant neighbours to the west, Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala, to reach the Caribbean coast and the central highlands to the south. Two more long-reigning tlatoani added to the empire, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs had conquered about 100,000 square kilometres of territory in the centre of modern Mexico, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, including the curious enclave of Xoconochco, down the coast on the Pacific border of Guatemala.

A single minister, Tlacaelel, presided over the first five decades of this bloody expansion. With an eye to the future, his policy was to burn all the books of conquered peoples to erase memories of a pre-Aztec past. Even though Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala had been bypassed in the Aztec advance, he imposed on them a curious agreement to conduct continual, but formally regulated, warfare, the šoci-yāōyōtl or ‘flower-war’, a regular engagement to do battle in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice. The word šocitl , ‘flower’, has a positive, ethereal value in Nahuatl imagery (for example, in šocitl in kwīkatl , ‘the flower the song’, meaning ‘poetry’, used in the verse that begins this section), but it is never free of association with the role of flowers in sacrificial offerings, just like human blood.

Familiarity with Nahuatl was spread all over central Mexico by this successful aggression of the Aztecs, but it does not seem to have happened at the expense of the languages of tributary peoples. Rather the Aztecs planted officials, especially tribute overseers, in all the major cities, and ensured that the subject peoples provided a corps of nauatlato , ‘interpreters’, to ensure effective transmission of the rulers’ wishes. Two Nahuatl speakers were among the officials from the subject Totonac territory who met Cortés when he first landed. And Nahuatl had clearly been spread by other, unknown, population movements prior to this: Cortés’s interpreter Malin-tzin, for instance, was a native speaker of the language, but she had acquired it in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 kilometres south of the border of the Aztec empire.

Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of a multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarascan, Otomí, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or to Nahuatl. But in the fifteenth century, contact between the subject lands and the centre in Tenochtitlán must have been intense, at the level of tribute-gathering, and also through the network of pochteca , ‘merchants’, who also functioned as ambassadors and spies, and were so highly placed in the Aztec hierarchy that they could offer their slaves for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli along with the war captives offered by great warriors.

K’ akichanpi millmacháyuj ,

nina ráuraj puka runa ,