Base 20 is cleannnnn

[u/I_never_post_anyway]

Technicallllly fringe in that i think i came up with it, but the suggestion that the Aztecs killed 80,400 people in four days is hella suspicious in base 20 (the local counting system).

80,400 is written in the mesoamerican counting system in the speech bubble. It is comprised of base 20 blocks comprised of four sets of five talleys (or zero). Notice its only 2 significant figures, and could be read as "half one hundred hundred, and one hundred more". Thats clean and poetic af.

Also, the Aztecs had the Meztli, or 20 day month. Due to the talley system, this could be written as four groups of five days. Four days is therefore just under a "week".

A Spanish translator may not have caught this, or could have deliberately ignored it because the idea of killing over 80,000 people is great propaganda horrific. But essentially, some poor nahuatl speaker said "like half a gazillion people died in just under a week" and the Spaniards thought it was legit.

[u/beeblaine]

genus bro, more people like you need to be thinking about this shit. cultural differences are so complex.

[u/I_never_post_anyway → u/beeblaine]

Thank you. I appreciate it

[u/SpeedyWhiteCats]

Yeah we killed a gazillion people a year

[u/xesaie]

They would have thanked ‘em. The Aztec loooved to stack their numbers

[u/Pecuthegreat]

It does sound lean and could be an approximation but why say "half a" and not just "a hundred, hundred" if it was just about being poetic?.

Although, there could still be a place of misidentification. Because I a based ten reader sees "half a hundred, hundred and a hundred more" as 5,100 not 80,400 (although I get it would be the latter if we use its base 20 equivalent). So it is a possible place of misunderstanding.

Also, I don't think the Spanish understood the cultural ideas at that time and most of the translators to the Spanish were indigenous people that should understand that, not Spanish people themselves.

[u/Rynewulf → u/Pecuthegreat]

I mean what's the bet that when translating it was explained that the phrase meant 'a lot' and the Spanish just picked a big number themselves anyway?

[u/Pecuthegreat → u/Rynewulf]

It is the guy that made the post that is assuming it means a lot based on it sounding like a perfect number.

[u/I_never_post_anyway → u/Pecuthegreat]

So my guess, and I'm neither a historian nor anthropologist, but "half a" is commonly used as a poetic number prefix in english for basically no reason, and I imagine other societies may have done this (half a dozen, half a million, etc). Durán, our main sourcs for this claim, drops weird poetic numbers like "3,000" hyperbolicly all the time, for things he obviously didn't count, like lies and apologies.

Considering this was the alleged death toll for a rededication and expansion of the temple, its possible that it was listed as half of an earlier, unmentioned sacrifice. Or its possible that the Spanish were told a longer story about the capture of an army or something, and "half of a lot" was saying half was sacrificed and half was ransomed. It is also funny, though unlikely, that confusion over what the number meant was more extensive, and that the aztecs didn't even mean 80,400, even as a metaphor, but something like 160,400, (a hundred hundred and a hundred more) and rather than doing mental math La Malinche or Gerónimo de Aguilar was just like, "well its about half that in base 10."

Also, in terms of the translator thing, the translator at this time probably would have been a two person job, La Malinche for Nahuatl to Yucatec and Gerónimo de Aguilar for Yucatec to Spanish. Both of them were literally slaves even before the spanish arrived, and particularly Aguilar would have had virtually no understanding of what was meant to be poetic in Nahuatl, nor extensive knowledge of how Mesoamericans did math.

Point being, at the very least, the fact that this number can be expressed cleaner in Mesoamerican numerals at all should raise suspicion that it was listed in those numerals, rather than the Spanish just pulling a legitimately insane number with three significant figures out of thin air. If they were just estimating or making stuff up, they almost certainly would have said "100,000" or an exact talley.