YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Barnhart

lines on the record: 262
first: 2024-09-30
most recent: 2024-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together, and its hydrofluoric acid, and that will burn through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn't care whether servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these together. And I think they're fused together. I asked the city of Cusco if I could take some core samples. And they said, go away, Gringo. Don't touch our walls. So this actually, this next time I'm going to go try to talk to the more Quechua authorities in a place called Oleantaitombo. And maybe I can convince them. Right now, they just think I'm a weird ass Gringo who wants to put holes in their wastels.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the show Breaking Bad. I don't know if you ever saw that show, but there's a point in which they're trying to dissolve a body and they're using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. Hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating. It won't go through plastic. And you can also bring it inert parts and then combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes. And they also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, I see things like the crystals in the andesite are almost stitched together along the seams. Like there's the andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven't. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. Like it's just melted like somebody took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too. I haven't been able to prove it. This is one of these, you know, end of my archaeological career chapter. So I'm either going to prove myself wrong or prove it. But I think they used acids. My dad's a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there's no way there's no naturally occurring acids. But my current theory, actually I got the idea.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has to be bullshit. That is, there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody's got a hammerstone. I personally think it's acids. I think they melted them. Together. And there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones, which I've done a number of times. I'm going back next month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500, you know, to a thousand-year-old walls are still there.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot large weights. There's a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the US, who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota single-handedly, showing how you can move big stones. So I think Wally's already figured out how to move them. It's the perfectly fit, so carefully fit together that you couldn't even put a diamond between the stones. That's the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archaeological wisdom that you'd find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammerstones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what day of the dead is all about. And I love Day of the Dead. You know, Halloween's this creepy thing where they're all monsters. But Day of the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar and we talk about who they were and how they lived and we put things on the altar that mattered in their life and we remember them on that day and it turned something that was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was like their puppy, and it died, you know, less than a year ago when we got to it that one of them just grabbed up a bone and he was like, Was like little bitty bones. Yay. Like, what a weird attitude. That's your dead dog there. But they just, they have a different relationship with the dead.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every Maya person, if we find a grave, they're like, yeah. That bones, cool. Can I touch? They're not spooked about it at all. They think it's exciting. I one time has helped out a physical anthropologist in town in Copan to get an osteology collection together of various animals. So if we got bones from an excavation, we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection. This family said, well, our family dog died last year and buried him in the backyard. Do you go dig him up? And so we were like, okay, yeah, I mean, we do need a dog. We'll go dig up your dog. And they were like, but the kids really want to help you. So their kids came out.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to this day, if you do an excavation here in the United States, Native American people don't like it. They don't like their graves, which is fine enough. I wouldn't want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they'd keep the And they'd pull the bones out occasionally and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Repainted it and then put it back in, articulated in the skeleton. But they didn't mummify. They on purpose would grossly float the bodies so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Inca's for sure mummified people and even did some of that kind of Egyptianesque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They put like straw inside the cavity and mummify them. But the Maya didn't do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster and then they'd get back in there. It was jungly, so I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in there to get the bones. They'd open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red cinnabar. One that I was in in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different times. And the last couple times they only took the skull out.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've been elevated. We didn't steal them. We have given them a new place of honor. And you're welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That pissed everybody off. For some reason, the Inca owned everybody's llama instantly. And he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day, just sent to Cusco. They'd also take their mummies. That was a weird thing. Everybody mourns their dead, but the Inca just like ceased to accept it. They would just, the mummies were still there. Okay, he's dead, but look, he still got clothes. He's at the party. Let's put a beer in front of him. They just kept people as mummies. And so the ancestral mummies of every town, part of being absorbed into the empire was, okay, your most important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful house in Cusco, but they would physically bring those mummies to Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their beliefs.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have rock art that progresses to make it seem like a progression from people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones. So it was still in that archaic period, at least that they became friends.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles. And they had that essential hearts and minds. There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire. For some reason, everything was owned communally except the llamas. The llamas were the kings. And so that was one thing that some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas, but, you know, you don't own your llama anymore. And people are really attached to their llamas. To this day They are like family members, so it'd be like everybody walked in and said, everybody's family dog is now mine. It like really upset people on an emotional level”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They couldn't at the end they were at least 10 million people and there was just no way to do that Without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part, they'd send the Kipukumayuk, the guys who would weave the, or not the Kipus as accountants, and they would go through and say what everybody did, okay, you know, you're a good farmer, you're going to farm. You are a good weaver, you're going to weave. All the men here are going to take a turn at being part of the army. And they sent independent people kamaix to every community had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other and they all had to independently send their kipus back to Cusco. And if they were accounting discrepancies that were called the Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roads and in the same way that the Roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure and then every place they took over they'd create certain key pieces of Roman architecture that kind of made that city Roman and they'd rename it something. The Inca did the same thing. They had certain signature.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We backwards project what it was, but it was probably Mid 1200s, when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler, came in, but it was the ninth one is Pachacute, who really started being an empire builder.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cusco in their language Quechua means naval or belly button. And it's up in the mountains. But there's four quarters. They called their empire Tiwan Tinsuyu, the land of four quarters. And the center of those four quarters was Cusco.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agricultural terraces and storage units, and every month with the agricultural excess, they would have big parties and everybody would eat. So people lived well in the Inca Empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was bloody at first, like most of them are, but once they started taking over, what they did is they empire built. Everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get the resources, but everybody they raided, they turned them into the Inca Empire, and they created this incredible Mitah system where you took turns working and they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of, let's say, 5,000 people. The Inca would roll up with an army of 100, 200,000 people and say, you know, would you guys like to be part of the empire or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire? And if your mayor here agrees, then he can have a town, he can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month, a big work crew would show up and they'd start building.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there would have been an Aztec empire. I think they would have finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate, and everybody hated the Aztecs. So it wouldn't have lasted forever. They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before. Revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would have gone on forever because they were really community oriented. Once the Inca took over, like no one in the Inca Empire starved. They built architecture. Everyone was safe. It was a society that could have lasted a long time.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and messed everything up. They had the Maya surrounded and they were about to take over the whole Yucatan.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In certain deer hunting rituals things for sure, but the Aztecs know they just liked eating humans. It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like, you guys could either send us, you know, a number of quetzal feathers every month, or we could eat you.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone. And that's what Spaz is the Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma, who was their captive, and then try to murder all of them. And it was all Pedro Alvarado's fault for freaking out about eating humans.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They really did. They really did. In fact, that's what caused the, have you heard of the Noche Tree Stay, the Sad Night? Night that the Aztecs really go nuts on the Spanish and kick them out. It's all triggered by this one guy, Pedro de Alvarado, who's left in charge by Cortez. As Cortez goes to the coast and tries to talk to the new force, talk him into being for him, which he does. But Pedro Alvarado's left back in town in charge, and they're doing another one of these huge Aztec buffets and parties to honor them. And it happens, the guy says, you know, hey, do you like dinner? Like, oh yeah, it's a nice dinner. Well, it's humans. You're eating humans. See, I told you they were good. And Alvarado just freaks out and he has the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the party, women, children. Nobody has weapons. He just murders.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy Sahagun, who was a very responsible chronicler that was pretty specific that there was a distribution thing. Like the elites got butts. The butts were the best part. So the butt cheeks, those are the best parts to eat. And then like,”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After the sacrifice, then they would eat them. And this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started. But then it was just kind of the thing to do when Cortez got there. They were still having certain special feasts that involved humans. And it really upset the Spanish that they would be tricked into eating human. Like, hey, you liking dinner? That was a human.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, while the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea, like there was a horrible drought that went on that almost ruined the entire valley. And they came to the conclusion that it's because we haven't been killing enough people. We've got to bump this up. And then when they did, and they decided out on the Slash Collins, it rained again. So it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that. They ate people as well. They really did.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, with their hand. They were really just surgical about it. They'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up, and just...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's mostly hard extraction, sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple so everybody can see it and they had a specific stone where they would bend them over so their rib cage would come out and they'd use like a thick obsidian knife and they had a really just tried and true way to do it. They'd stab it in a certain place close and then they'd push down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage and they just make a place where they could just rip it right out.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody. They did it so much and so successfully that they didn't have any enemies nearby. So they decided this one poor sucker group not that far away called the Tlash Collins that they were never going to make peace with them, so that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the Tlosh Collins and haul them back for sacrifice. Cortez met those guys and he was like here are people who hate their guts. I'll just use these guys. So, you know, we say, oh, Cortes took over the Aztec world. It was Cortez in twenty thousand super pissed off Tlescollins.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was absolutely religious in nature. And the Aztecs were of the opinion that the war god demanded people were captured and sacrificed. And it had to be valuable people. There was a lot of, before they made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles that they would have and they'd take captives. In fact, all around Mesoamerica, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Maya were certainly influenced by the Aztec at the end, so we get a skewed perspective from the contact period accounts because the Maya were much more violent and sacrifice oriented in their post-classic rendition, but in the classic period it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves. We know that the Maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper. And the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they'd commune with their ancestors. Cut it, and then dance so the blood splattered. But it was them cutting themselves. It was different than killing a bunch of other people for it. It was an auto sacrifice, we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other people should die. It was a self sacrifice thing.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they spent money on things like flower gardens. All of the causeways leading to the Aztec capital had beautiful flower gardens and they had a museum and they had an aquarium and a zoo, and they had an opera, and they had a ballet. And these things existed together. There was not in the Aztec mind any conflict between witnessing someone's heart getting ripped out one moment in the evening we'd go to the ballet.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would hypothesize so. I mean, you know, I think it's one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures, you know, knowing what our human capacity is. And the Aztecs, when I said that statement, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people's hearts out. They had this just grotesque violent bent. But in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry, or the poetry of famous statesmen that had come before him.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again, I think I could draw a parallel to what happened in Europe. You know, the famous Henry V moment in Agincourt where his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France's aristocracy with the Longbow. Like up until that moment, Europe had a very wars for the elite classes kind of attitude. And then after France lost half their aristocracy, then I was like, maybe we should be hiring from the villages. The same sort of thing happened with the Aztec that there was a... Mesoamerica really didn't have huge standing armies, but the Aztec put this army together, and they intimidated people. They didn't actually have to use it a lot. It was used to great effect in the valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mesoamerica, it was mostly the fear factor.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then right next to the temple on either side were the two temples of the warriors. One was the Eagle Warrior clan, the other one was the Jaguar warrior clan. And they were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess, you know, probably an analogy between like the Navy and the Air Force. They had a good natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic warriors dressed up in all of their finery. And they would come at people with these two forces. And it was very unlike...”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They worshipped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templomayor. It had two temples up on top. One was Tatlak the rain god, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself, but then the other one was Huisilaposhli. He was, that translates the hummingbird on the left. But he's the war god. I love that he's a hummingbird. Maybe, you know, he's fast and he comes from the magical side or something.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they were very much like they had an attitude like Attila the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized. And the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know, we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us. And if you work for us, you'll be just fine. They'd go to every town they'd go to. The first thing they do is they'd show up with a bunch of merchants. There was a merchant class who were also military. They were really the people who assessed where they were going to attack next. They'd go in with a bunch of Aztec products and say, we'd like to trade with you. But all the time they were assessing their military prowess, what products they had that they could take. And then soon after the poach Teka were there would come the military.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, Well, I don't know. That's the place. So they build up an island, they go to that island, and then they just start piling up lake mug until they make a whole city there in the middle of the island. They make an island city. And all of this occurs in about a hundred years, so they show up about 1,300. The capital of Tinoshtlan, as they called it, is really established. And from there, they quickly take over the entire valley. They make what they call the triple alliance, which is the two other big communities of the lake are now their allies, but they're not really allies. The Aztecs were brutal. They were just, those guys agreed to shut up and let the Aztecs run the show. And then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down into the Maya area, everywhere they go, they rename everybody's towns and make them pay tribute.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'd go in and they'd kill whoever you wanted killed. Now you're the king of this area. So one of these kings that they were working for really liked them and decided I'm going to make the Aztecs part of our ancestry. I'm going to give them my daughter to marry the head of the Aztecs. And the Aztecs sacrificed her. And that really pissed that guy off. So he took his whole army and ran the Aztecs out for a while. They say they live in this horrible desert section eating lizards. But then one of their priests say we're going to walk around the lake. And my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital. They see that, but it's out on an island in the lake.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is now Mexico City. It's all dried up. But those guys were too civilized to fight with each other. But they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff. So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics. Of the Valley of Mexico.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Chikimostak, and that all the people who spoke the language Nahuatl came from the cave, and most of them went early to the valley of Mexico, and in the Aztecs story they were just the lost tribe, they were the last brothers to come in. But then they show up late game and they become mercenaries. They just start working for communities in the Valley of Mexico. And this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico. And they make themselves this indispensable group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. All the civilized communities around Lake Teshco, which is in the middle of”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know almost every one of the cultures we're talking about now, we have two different versions of the answer to that question. We have the archaeology version, and we have the Aztecs themselves. The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story, where they say that they came from a place well to the north called Aslan, and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero's journey where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter the birth of the war god that they'll worship after this and how they stepped into the valley of Mexico as the last, the lost brothers of everyone in the valley of Mexico. They said that they all came from the north near Aslon as a place, a cave with seven different passages.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steamrolled by it The Aztecs did this neat thing called the new fire ceremony every fifty two years which was the biggest their calendar would go. They'd burn down perfectly good temples, and they'd burn down their houses sometimes, and they would just everybody in society would perform this what they called the new fire ceremony. And they would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the Maya decided at the end of the ninth Baktun that it was time to renew the world.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when they abandon these cities that were independent still, they all left, both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn't be just as simple as spoils go to the victor. It's such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the Copon Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to note that that ninth period, that ninth four hundred year period ends right then. And I think a lot of people, you know, I can't prove it archaeologically, but I think a lot of people said, we're coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we're doing. When you talk to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya, say, you know, what happens at the end of a big cycle here? They say cycles are a time of renewal and transformation that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles, that change is coming. We can either be part of it or we can get stuck.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The teeth are the telling part. They get this thing when you're growing up and you're not getting enough food seasonally. It shows up in the enamel of your teeth. It's called dental hypoplasia. And if somebody's seasonally starving, it gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of Maya before they left Copan, even the rich people are seasonally starving. So there's a problem there for sure. But I also think it's a weird thing. It was not an empire. It was a group of independent city-states like Greece. Some of them were allied, some of them were enemies. There was a huge civil war that settled out about the end of the classic period. So if it was Europe, you know, the victors would have taken over. The losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went.”
2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source