Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects

from BBC Radio 4.

We're listening to the sounds of buskers in the heart of Mexico City today, beating

Aztec-style drums and wearing feathers and body paint, these blascoes are not just trying to entertain

passers-by. They're trying to keep alive the memory of the lost Aztec Empire, that powerful,

highly structured state that dominated Central America

in the 15th century and it was destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors led by Henan Cortez around 1520.

The Baskers would have us believe,

and you can believe it if you like,

that they are the heirs of Moctizuma II,

the emperor whose realm was brutally overthrown by the Spaniards

in the great conquest of 1521.

In the course of the Spanish conquest, Aztec culture was almost completely obliterated.

So how much do we? Can we actually know about the Aztecs that these Baskers are honouring?

Virtually all the accounts of the Azte Empire were written by the Spaniards who overthrew it,

and so they have to be read with considerable skepticism.

It's all the more important than to be able to examine what we can consider as the unadulterated Aztec sources, the things made by them that have survived.

These are the documents of this defeated people and through them I think we can hear the vanquished speak. When you look at these objects in a gallery, the workmanship is extraordinary, but that awe is just taken to another level when you look at

them at my magnification because you can see not just the consummate skill of whoever it was that

produce these things, but the hours and hours of time that must have gone into their production.

The two heads in the snake is the symbol of dualism, which was a fundamental part of the Aztec religion.

All the deities had a dual nature, male, female, birth, and dead, night, and they generation and destruction.

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