andwritten books were burned as "heretical," in the process destroying irreplaceable sources of information on the indigenous civilization painstakingly collected by missionaries who spoke the now-defunct Nahua language and interviewed Indians of the pre-Conquest era (Gyles & Sayer 19-29). Details of the historical occurrence were not to be pieced together for centuries, a painstaking compilation of modern research by historians, archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists pouring over old records, oral histories and artifacts. The facts that emerge paint a complex portrait of personalities, societies and events worthy of a modern, multi-polar, geopolitical analysis.
To begin with, the very word "Aztec" is a misnomer: the term did not exist in their dialect of the Nahua (or Nahuatl)* language, it was given by later historians (Fehrenbach 55). The Nahua word for the people whose empire CortTs defeated was Mexica (approximate English pronuncia
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