Compare And Contrast Aztecs And Mayans

Prior to the European colonization of the New World, there had thrived American-Indian tribes aplenty amidst the expanse, including those along the present-day Mississippi river, and the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca tribes associated with their respective empires. There exist numerous commonalities and differences between each of these two groups of native tribes, many of which are built upon the same or variant conceptions with regard to a specific aspect. Namely, the tribes had largely partaken in similar methods of agriculture, the majority of which had cultivated maize, a corn-like crop. Second, they had instituted social hierarchies, which, although slightly variant, had been much the same in that they placed fundamentally alike classes in the lower rungs of the caste, and regarded who ran the tribes and the empires as the elite. Further, they had all been overrun by the Spanish settlers, who …show more content…
Involving the distribution of power with regard to religion, a basis for any civilization’s culture, it had separated the groups once more. In tribes along the Mississippi River, religious power had generally been held by an esteemed few, or only one chief figure. In other terms, those in the very upper end of the caste could, in theory, control and convert those from outside the region. However, the leaders of the Mississippi tribes had not wielded this power, instead opting to maintain a lifestyle of Christianity, incidentally the religion the Europeans had desired to pursue. The contrast comes in via an analysis of the Mesopotamian religious power distribution: whereas, in the Mississippi area, tribes held the power to convert in the hands of few people, or one person at times, in the civilizations of the Aztec, Inca, and Mayan empires, there had been no such imposition in