Fifth Sun A New History of the Aztecs

In her book Fifth Sun, Camilla Townsend is brilliant on this, on the way in which they think the cosmology works. The sun rises and falls and it's actually the constant flow of blood that keeps it going.

Camilla Townsend in her wonderful book, Fifth Sun, which we've had plenty of reason to mention, she says about this that it was almost as if Renaissance Europe had come face to face with the ancient Sumerians.

We did that wonderful episode with Camilla Townsend talking about the Aztecs and Mexica, how they saw the world, and how that transforms your understanding of the process of the conquest.

I thought it's a kind of wonderful companion piece to Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun; it shows a slightly bad scholarly habit of assuming motivations without looking at the indigenous viewpoint.

our very first transatlantic guest, our first American guest on the show, we have Camilla Townsend, whose book came out last year, Fifth Sun, A New History of the Aztecs was absolutely the best book that I read last year.

the thing that's brilliant about it is that it gives you a history of the Aztecs through Aztec eyes in so far as that is possible.

Camilla's book is the fifth son, a new history of the Aztecs, honestly one of the most fascinating, eyeopening, moving history books I've read; can't recommend it highly enough.

I noted it down when I read it those Aztecs who lived through the war with the Spaniards and then survived the first great epidemic of European diseases found to their surprise that the sun continued to rise and set and that they still had to face the rest of their lives.

Camilla Townsend is the author of Fifth Sun, a new history of the Aztecs.

Aztecs referred to their ancient homeland, the place that they had migrated from as Aztec, probably it was a mythical place because they had in fact stopped in their migrations and their wanderings of the city of places. If there was one place more than another that had inspired the notion of Aztec, we don't know where it was.

They came down as part of a wave of multiple migrations coming down from the north, from northern Mexico and in fact from what is today the southwestern part of the United States.

There were periods of warfare and drought that drove people out, so pull factors towards central Mexico. That is, central Mexico had been a wealthy land full of farmers and people building pyramids for centuries. There were prior great high cultures there so they had quite a reputation. So when there were problems in the north, warfare, drought often people thought let's go down to the fabled land of the south and the Aztecs or the Mexica were probably the last major group of migrants to arrive in central Mexico from what is today the southwestern United States.