According to Us

The past several days the boy (and I) have been learning about the Mayans and the Aztecs. As is often the case when you help your children with their school, you the parent are also learning things you didn’t pay attention to when you were in school.

As everyone knows the Aztecs were a complex and violent people. Complex because they had a larger city than any found in Europe at the time. Violent because of their daily human sacrifice to help the sun-god to rise every day and their insatiable desire to fight. It has been fun to learn along side my little buddy.

As with every lesson, he is supposed to write or draw something to remind him about what he learned that day in history. He always chooses to draw a picture, and so this is what he drew:

The next step was for him to tell me about what he drew and why. The large tower looking building is of course representing the complex buildings that the Aztecs built.  There was something about the rest of this picture that is either a. really disturbing, b. shows he understood the amount of violence, or c. he is a typical boy. I Should add another choice here and that is all of the above.

So you may be wondering what you are looking at. Warning: these images may not be suitable to persons of all ages. Fortunately he didn’t realize there was a red pen close by.

This is a picture showing the human sacrifice. When I first looked at the picture I thought he drew a man lifting the sacrifice up onto the altar, and the sacrificed person was kicking and screaming. He later explained that the person is laying on the alter, and the man close by is throwing a spear at him.

This image is a close up of the violent beheading that the Aztecs might do. I personally don’t remember that being in the lesson that we read. He confirmed they didn’t say that they beheaded people, but I guess from his point of view this is how it went down.  I should mention that throughout the day as his paper set out he continued to add more beheaded images

This last close up is the real topper. If you take a close look at the image to the left of the paper you will notice that with a single sword the Aztec has swiftly removed 6 heads at once. Although they were an advanced people, I somehow think that this was a bit much. Talk about historical inaccuracies! This is pushing creative liberties to the limit. Well- maybe not quite. I got a good kick out of it.