The Apex of Regional Civilizations - Essay Example

Lecturer’s and Number Submitted The Apex of Regional Civilizations In the documents, Duran (1993) extracts the 16th century history of the stable Aztecs their mythical origin to the destruction of the empire by Spain by describing the court life of the elite, common people and life during war, flood, and drought. This document looks into the origin of the Aztecs into their Spanish conquest according to the Nahuatl chronicle that disappeared from historical perspective. According to Duran (p. 251-8), the conflict between the Europeans and the American Indians was purely based on the Spanish accounts of morality acts dramatizing the eternal conflict of good and evil, a religious war.

In this context, the war was not inevitable.The Chronicle of the Incans also present the views of the Incan economy and redistributive early civilization. Nevertheless, as illustrated by Cieza de Leon’s, the document is an historical narrative of the events of the Spanish conquest of Peru and the civil wars among the Spaniards. The parallelism coming forth from the Aztec and Incan (Americans) and the European (Spanish) civilization is that while one was convinced at unionizing their cultural identity, others were rocked into civil wars allowing the Europeans to conquer them.

The similarities in the way Duran and de Cieza view indigenous American civilizations begin by the modes of their colonization by Spain. The civil war and lack of coordinated cultural views and hypocritical combination of Christianity and their prehispanic religions amount to some of the similarities in the two documents. In conclusion, the presence of the strong American Indian empires in the 16th century was disrupted by European civilizations and civil wars among them. This made it easy for the Europeans (such as Spain) to introduce religious wars as an excuse f conquering them.

Duran and de Cieza gives an illustrative accounts of how the indigenous Americans, Aztecs and Incans, lost their civilizations.Works CitedCieza, de L. P, Onís H. De, and Hagen V. W. Von. The Incas of Pedro De Cieza De León. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. Durán, Diego, and Doris Heyden. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.