Nahua

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The Nahua are about 2 million people, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Mexico , which have in common besides other cultural aspects language, Nahuatl is. They should not be confused with any other people of the same name from the Peruvian rainforest who have only recently come into contact with civilization.

The name is derived from the name of the Nahuatl language , which itself means “good sound, correct pronunciation”. The Aztecs called the speakers of their language Nahuatlaca (singular Nahuatlacatl , from nahuatl + tlacatl "human"), "people who speak well, understandably". Nowadays the Nahua usually refer to themselves as Macehualtin (singular Macehualli ), "farmers, simple people", their Nahuatl language, however, as mexicano ("Mexican") or mēxicatlahtōlli ("language of the Mexica = Aztecs ").

Nahua ethnic groups

The Nahua are several ethnic groups in Mesoamerica who speak or used to speak different, mostly understandable Nahua dialects: Speakers of different dialects of the Central Nahuatl in today's Mexico City area and in several states of Mexico ( State of Mexico , Durango , Guerrero , Michoacán , Morelos , Oaxaca , Puebla , San Luis Potosí and Tlaxcala ); Spokesman for regional t -variants of the Nahuatl on the isthmus of Tehuantepec (in Tabasco and Veracruz ); as well as the south-living nawat-speaking Pipil (today only in remnants in the west of El Salvador , earlier also in neighboring areas of Guatemala and Honduras ); as well as the former Nicarao (from Rivas in Nicaragua to the north of Costa Rica ).

The most famous historical Nahua ethnic groups included the Aztecs and the Tlaxcaltecs who were enemies with them .

Historical lists of the Nahua tribes, essentially going back to the Spanish missionary Bernardino de Sahagún ( Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España ) , are usually limited to the ethnic groups in the high valley of Mexico and its southern and eastern neighboring areas, i.e. speakers of the so called " classical Nahuatl ", from which the dialects of the central Nahuatl with around 50,000 speakers arose today. We find such a historical list e.g. B. in the 14th edition of Brockhaus (1895), whereby the Aztecs (Mexica), who inhabited Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco , are not mentioned again:

  1. the Tepaneca , the inhabitants of Tlacopán (Tacuba), Azcapotzalco and Coyoacán , who occupy the flat land to the west of the [former] Great Lake of Mexico ;
  2. the Acolhua with the capital Tetzcoco ( Texcoco ) on the east side of the Lake of Mexico;
  3. the Chalcas (an association of tribes or cities - the Chalcas in Chalco and the Nonohualca in Tlalmanalco ) and the Xochimilca (in Xochimilco ), the inhabitants of the southern part of the high valley of Mexico;
  4. the Huexotzinca , Tlaxcalteca and Chololteca , the inhabitants of Huexotzinco ( Huejotzingo ), Tlaxcallan ( Tlaxcala ) and Cholollan ( Cholula ), the plateaus in the east of the two great snow mountains that border the high valley of Mexico in the east;
  5. the Tlalhuica , with the capital Quauhnahuac ( Cuernavaca ), who inhabit the hot valleys in the south of the mountain range that borders the high valley of Mexico.

literature

  • Nigel Davies: The Toltec Heritage. From the Fall of Tula to the Rise of Tenochtitlan (= Civilization of the American Indian , Vol. 153). University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1980, ISBN 0-8061-1505-X .
  • Miguel León-Portilla : La filosofía nahuatl, estudiada en sus fuentes. UNAM, Ciudad de México 1959.
  • Silvia Limón Olvera: La religón de los pueblos nahuas. (= Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Religiones , Vol. 7). Editorial Trotta, Madrid 2008. ISBN 978-84-8164-972-7 .
  • James Lockhart: The Nahuas after the conquest. A social and cultural history of the Indians of Central Mexico, sixteenth through eighteenth centuries . Stanford University Press, Stanford 1992. ISBN 0-8047-1927-6 .
  • Michael E. Smith: The Aztlan Migrations of Nahuatl Chronicles: Myth or History? . In: Ethnohistory , Vol. 31 (1984), No. 3, pp. 153-186 online (PDF; 3.3 MB).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brockhaus Konversationslexikon, 14th edition, Volume 12, p. 160. Leipzig 1895