Aztec Inca Dbq

Aztec - Inca DBQ

The advancement in the Inca and Aztec was very great in religion, technology and trade throughout their empire. Religion, taking a major part in both societies, was one of the highlighting themes of empire development being the root of advanced evolving features. The Aztec Empire, taking part in a devoted polytheistic religion, they practiced many rituals the main one being sacrifice. Documents 2 and 5 demonstrate the importance of sacrifice being shown in decorations on pyramids for the purpose as well as foreign drawings. During this period of time, the Aztecs, undisturbed by any other foreign religious influences, remained very loyal, as well as afraid, of their gods for the reason that their gods seemed to have an effect on everything human sacrifice was one of the most powerful ways the Aztecs felt they could connect with their gods. However once the Americas began being revealed, Christianity began taking it's place. Because document 5 was an observation made by a foreign monk to sacrificial rituals he might have pictured it as a vicious and brutal obsession not addressing how important and vital it would have been to a native. The Inca, in contrast, worshiped a less number of gods than the Aztec did yet they were parallel to the Aztec's importance of religion. As shown in The First New Chronicle and Good Government, Incas viewed Christianity as meaningless not accepting it as a realistic religion. "And the Inca said: "Well, why doesn't it tell me? The book doesn't even talk to me!" " (Document 12) For the duration of the Incan Empire religion always remained key, shielded by the people of the empire. They had a dislike of Christianity because it was an interfering outside force not welcomed gracefully into the Incan Empire; furthermore Christianity did not convince them. Ayala, being a foreigner, describes the incident as if it were right, being Christianity, versus wrong, being the Incan religion, neglecting the significance the Inca's religion was to them.

Technology was highly advanced in both empires, tremendously organizing societies. The Aztecs presented great skills in technology through organizing time. The Aztec calendar and the activities it signifies within it on documents 3 and 4 points out some of the ceremonies and their cycles. The Aztecs linked this to the maintaining of order in society also showing how they became dependent

on the stars therefore astronomy was very developed and used as one of their main science focuses. In addition, the Aztec Empire developed a practical written language. Incas on the other hand focused on systematizing not only their society, but also their whole empire as well by means of organizational transportation. Shown in document 9, Incas specialized in stone built building for their main cities as Machu Picchu (Document 13), which was used in the vast majority of their empire. Another contributing factor to their systematic empire were the bridges used to connect mountainous areas of the empire (Document 10). This would make clear the reason why the Inca Empire grew to be so large, even with the great challenge of their location; a difficult mountainous area. Using their engineering capabilities they were able to create extensive organizational