Daily Life of the Aztecs, on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest: On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest

by Jacques Soustelle

Book Overview

The subject of this book is the life of the Mexicans--the Mexica, as they said themselves--at the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time, in the early 1500s, nobody, from the arid steppes of the north to the burning jungles of the isthmus, from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the shore of the Pacific, could have believed that this enormous empire, its culture, its art, its gods, were to go down a few years later in a historic cataclysm...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804707219
• ISBN13: 9780804707213
• Release Date: June 1961
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Utterly brilliant!

I'm a bit surprised nobody has yet reviewed this incredible book. Well, I might as well be the first. The long short of it is: Anybody interested in Aztecs needs to read this book. Soustelle ably demonstrates that there was more to Aztec society then war and human sacrifice, as he leads us first through the daily life of the average citizen of the Aztec empire, and from there goes on to talk about almost everything that a citizen could possibly come in contact with, from big things like the legal and educational systems, down to little things like what they ate where they went to the bathroom. Soustelle's style is engaging and easy to read, and his immense admiration for the Aztecs is visible in nearly every sentence. In fact, sometimes it's almost too visible, as Soustelle doesn't really use the objective, detached style of writing that we modern readers are used to finding in history books. He often outright condemns both the Aztec merchant class and the Spanish conquistadors, which is a big no-no in history writing. That said, he spends most of the book examining subjects he admires, so these condemnations only occur in a few passages, and generally his enthusiasm for the subject matter is highly infectious. I'd be surprised if, after finishing this book, you didn't become a big Aztec booster. There is only one other problem that kept me from giving the book a full five stars; it's a bit outdated. While the vast majority of information in Daily Life of the Aztecs is accurate, due to Soustelle's extensive use of primary sources, certain archeological evidence and ethnographical research has contradicted, or, more often expanded on Soustelle's understanding of Aztec life. Because of this, you might want to select another more contemporary book as a companion to this one (If your library has a copy of the other Daily Life of the Aztecs, the one by David Carrasco and Scott Sessions, I recommend that one). I say companion because even though research on Aztec history has progressed since Soustelle's book was published in 1955, no modern book I have found comes close to having the breadth of subject matter or ease of reading as Daily Life of the Aztecs.