Aztecs didn't value gold all that much. If they put through the effort to smuggle anything it would have been cacao seeds or quetzal feathers.
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Yep. Cacao seeds were used like currency.
Currency to buy what? To buy gold of course, which was a famous Aztec staple. They were very fond of it. Never heard the expressions "I hunger for gold", "as delicious as a gold ingot", "this cake must be made of gold"? All proofs of the sacred place of gold in the Aztec kitchen. It is known, look it up on YouTube.
You had me going for a second.
Got any utube videos about it?
I'm sorry, I only have a uarticle about it.
https://bigthink.com/sponsored/aztec-mesoamerican-chocolate-money/
As that article says, the Aztecs eventually realized that money that grew on trees was not the best idea.
Tangent, but I get irrationally angry when people do "go to site X and search for blah and it's the 3rd result down" when trying to convey the location of some information on the internet rather than just sharing the goddam URL.
That's not irrational.
Being frustrated sure, but being angry at someone because they just don't have a functional mental model of how the internet works is kinda pointless
Its because they're bullshitting
Thought this was KenM for a second.
Alternatively, it was made by somebody and sold to tourists. If it was actually an artifact, it would be far more likely that it had been traded north into the area centuries ago before white people ever turned up to ruin everything for everyone.
Although to be fair, I'm okay with them taking out the Aztec religions. My biggest problem there is that they forced out human sacrifice for more classical human murder and Catholicism, which is really more of a lateral move.
The thing about Aztecs and human sacrifice is that they did it to peoples that were captured on the battlefield. And the Aztecs went to war intending to capture, not kill most of the time. The killing happened after the battle.
So really, it's not all that different in terms of lives being taken from a standard war. It's just done in a different way.