00:00 The initial site of the great Aztec city, Tenochtitlan, was like an enchantment, with great towers and temples rising from the water, according to the conquistador Bernal Díaz, but it's important to see the Aztecs as they saw themselves and not just through the eyes of the Spanish.

04:55 The Aztecs, or Mexica, were migrants from what is now the United States, and their ancestors were migrants from Asia, but they have been present in Mexico for thousands of years and their history has been recorded through archaeological evidence, linguistic analysis, and their own written accounts.

09:40 The Aztecs saw themselves as both savage warriors and heirs to previous Mesoamerican civilizations, and they intermarried with and became acculturated with the people they conquered, leading to some feeling a sense of unity and government, while others further away felt conquered and allied with the Spaniards.

14:06 The Aztecs believed that their direct ancestor, Nana Huatsin, sacrificed himself by jumping into a fire to create a new sun and bring light to the world, symbolizing their humble origins and resilience in the face of adversity. They built an incredible city, Tenochtitlan, through strategic alliances and clever politicking, growing in power and influence, but also engaging in both great and terrible acts.

18:57 The city of Tenochtitlan was a highly organized and planned city with two great temples, neighborhoods divided by clan or kin groups, and orderly streets lined with two-story adobe buildings and beautiful flowers, as well as a zoo and aviary kept by Montezuma, although there is evidence of people being kept against their will due to physical deformities, and while the city was large, it was not as large as previously believed.

23:35 The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice as a way to show gratitude to the gods, and while this was a common practice in many ancient civilizations, the Aztecs took it to a new level of scale and intensity as they sought to maintain power over their empire.

28:20 The Aztecs purposefully performed large-scale human sacrifices to instill fear in neighboring communities and encourage them to join the empire, rather than out of a genuine belief that it was necessary for appeasing the gods.

33:10 Children were sacrificed to the god Tlaloc in certain ceremonies, and while there is debate about their identity, it is likely that they were prisoners of war from impoverished areas, and the crying of the children during the sacrifice was considered a good sign.

38:04 The Aztecs did not have direct knowledge of vast territories beyond their own empire, but they were aware of other kingdoms through long distance trade networks, with the Incas being one of the leading ones. The reason why people in the Americas were not sedentary farmers at the same time as civilizations like the Sumerians or Babylonians is because they did not have a constellation of protein-rich crops suitable for full-time farming until much later.

42:32 The Aztec Empire would not have been able to hold off the Spaniards even with more time to advance technologically, but there could have been a more peaceful outcome if indigenous people had chosen to work with the Spanish rather than against them, although the introduction of European diseases would still have caused suffering.

47:02 The colonial era in Mexico saw a sense of mutual accommodation between the Spanish and indigenous people, with indigenous chiefs continuing to rule and indigenous languages being spoken in court, but this changed in the independence era when the new republican government declared equality for all citizens and disregarded indigenous rights, leading to a decline in the well-being of indigenous people over the 1800s and their participation in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s.