Illuminating the Empires

I think that the comparisons of other empires do help historians in their search for a true historical narrative. However I do think there can be problems with objectivity and interpretation of historical accounts if historians try to generalize entire groups or societies. This especially applies to the ancient Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas. I do not believe Conrad and Demarest fall into this trap however, because although they point out similarities between the Aztecs and Incas, they do not try to lump both of these peoples into one historical narrative. Certain similarities between these two civilizations are striking like the necessity of the perpetuation of cult worship to the expansion of their empires. The Aztecs used the cult of human sacrifice to justify their invasion of other tribes to take as prisoner for sacrificial rituals. “Although initially it gave the Mexica a driving inspiration for victory, the cult of endless war and human sacrifice was basically ill-suited to any stable political structure. It demanded constant warfare, sacrifice, and expansion, preventing any attempt to consolidate and secure the realm. While it was initially a brilliant ideological adaption to the early fifteenth-century political and military environment, the imperial cult became a destructive burden in the late years of the empire when the Mexicas’ need was for stabilization rather than expansion, for consolidation rather than conquest” (Conrad and Demarest 58). The Incas on the other hand, had a “mummy” cult in which their dead kings and ancestors were treated as though they were actually living. “The last of our dominant themes is a pan-Andean religious tradition of cults of the dead---the belief that the spirits of the dead play an active and crucial role in the world of the living. In particular, such cults eventually came to manifest themselves as a tradition of formalized ancestor worship that ‘formed the core of Peruvian religion’” (Conrad and Demarest 89). This “mummy” cult expanded the Inca empire and like the Aztecs, was their own downfall. Using these comparative methods, help bring us a better picture of Aztec and Inca civilizations without bias from Spanish historical accounts and are still fairly authentic.