"It's a series without a final episode, and if you love movies, like curiosity, and are willing to explore, then it's your best partner!" —Author The Fifth Power
This series will be updated from time to time based on the films I have seen, you can think of this series of articles as a guide to the movie or as an exploration of the background of the movie, anyway, I wrote it out of hobby, you can also understand some of the stories behind the movie after watching it.
Today we're going to introduce the second episode of the series: Mel Gibson's 2005 film Revelation.
The story takes place when the Mayan Empire in mexico, Mexico, is about to collapse, and the Mayan Empire is in the midst of a poor grain harvest, and the priest orders a large number of living sacrifices to appease the gods. The protagonist, Gaguyar Bao, was captured while hunting in the forest and became one of thousands of living sacrifices.
Before being caught, he hastily hid his young son and his wife, who was pregnant with Rokko, in a dry well. Thinking of his wife and children at home, and thinking about the fate he was about to face, Gaguyar Bao, who was very frightened at first, decided not to sit still out of his instinct to survive, so he launched a rebellion among his friends, which triggered a struggle.
After successfully escaping from prison, Sima Shang dispatched elite troops to pursue the sacrifices, and this group of elite troops was led by an experienced captain who captured the protagonist, Gaguyar Bao, and in the process of hunting, a thrilling story unfolded.
First, the Mayan civilization
Speaking of the Mayan civilization, the most well-known is definitely about the 2012 end of the world, although 2012 has passed 8 years, and history has proved that the 2012 end of the world is a lie, but in fact, the 20212 doomsday theory does come from the Mayan calendar. But this is a misreading of the Mayan calendar.
The fact is that in the Mayan calendar, the epoch that began on August 13, 3114 BC will end on December 21, 2012, for a total of 5125 years. But the end of an era does not represent the destruction of the world. It just means the beginning of another new era cycle, a process that repeats itself.
Although the Maya culture is not the world's four ancient civilizations, it is one of the most important ancient cultures in the world, because its existence as one of the three ancient civilizations in Central and South America (the other two are the Inca civilization and the Aztec civilization to be introduced) is amazing. The Maya civilization existed from about 1500 BC to about the 14th century AD, because the area is located in the tropics, the vegetation of the rainforest is very dense, so they belong to the jungle civilization, and they are the only ancient civilization in the world born in the tropical rainforest.
The Mayan civilization has existed for a long time in history (nearly 3000 years), and its heyday is from 400 AD to 900 AD, but the Mayan civilization was in the Neolithic age from the beginning to its end (14th century AD), that is to say, the Maya civilization did not make and use bronze and iron from beginning to end, and at this time our China was the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui and Tang Dynasties (you can make up the situation of the two worlds, so the Maya civilization is a very magical civilization).
However, its achievements in astronomy, calendar, mathematics, etc. are very high, and it can be said that it is higher than the level of the normal Neolithic. To give the simplest example, the Maya calculated the length of the sun as 365.2420, while the modern precise measurement is 365.2422 days, a difference of only 17.28 seconds a year. The Maya calculated that the moon orbited the earth in 29.5302 days, while modern technology measured 29.530588 days. So I think the idiom "like divine help" is most appropriate here.
And although the Maya civilization had a total area of more than 320,000 square kilometers at the time and a population of 14 million at its peak, they also established more than 100 city-states. However, the Mayan civilization did not have a powerful empire like ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, China and other civilizations, and although the Mayan city-states were similar in language and writing and religious beliefs, the city-states and the city-states existed independently and did not interfere with each other. In the end, an independent empire was not formed.
The Maya civilization, though it lasted for thousands of years, was extremely inefficient due to their slowly developing labor force. For example, they never had metal tools; they never invented wheels; and they never domesticated large livestock, so the Maya agricultural production was always in the stage of slash-and-burn farming, burning a piece of land, scattering seeds at will, waiting for what could grow in the field to eat, and eat as much as it could grow. This method of cultivation is very deadly in the tropics, and it is easy to cause the land to be barren. (It is now said that food production was reduced in the 14th and 15th centuries due to global cooling, which eventually led to the collapse of the Maya civilization.)
Eventually, threatened by catastrophe and foreign invasions, the Maya died in droves and were forced to retreat into the jungle and return to barbarism. Now that the Mayan script has been lost (destroyed by the Spaniards), their descendants cannot understand the civilizational achievements of their predecessors. Historically, there were as many as 15 million Mayans, and now there are fewer than 2 million Descendants of the Maya (most of the group performances in this film are descendants of the Mayans).
Second, the Aztec civilization
Compared with the Maya civilization, the reputation of this Aztec civilization is indeed much smaller, and the reason is very simple that the Aztec civilization was almost developed at the same time as the Maya civilization, but it is normal for everyone not to understand it.
The Aztec civilization was founded by the Aztecs, who were originally a small tribe in northwestern Mexico, and in 1430 the Aztecs allied themselves with two other city-states to establish hegemony at the bottom of the Valley of Mexico, which expanded subsequently, and in less than a century, their dominance extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Their civilization was also based on agriculture, and corn was their main food (so they were also called corn civilization). And their level of construction is quite superb, they built the capital tenochtitlan city, the wealth is extremely large, the scale is spectacular, the city is surrounded by flood embankments and drinking tanks, the city center temple, palaces are lined up, of which the temple of the god of war is 35 meters high, overlooking the city. The Aztecs were exquisitely crafted with pottery, jade and crafts, fine stone statues, weaving, embroidery and feather ornaments, all of which they excelled at, and they created elaborate calendars.
There is an interesting legend about the settlement of the Aztecs. Inspired by their patron saint VeloPochetelli (God of War), they went looking for an eagle that perched on a cactus with a snake in its mouth, and when found, it was supposed to build a city there. The Aztecs found the eagle on a small island in Lake Tescoco in the Mexican Valley, so they established "Tenochtitlan", which became the famous ancient capital of The Indians, which means "land of cacti". The emblem of contemporary Mexico is based on this legend.
In contrast to the natural elimination of the Maya civilization due to low labor force and slow development, the reason for the demise of the Aztec civilization came from the European "Discovery of the New World" movement (that is, the situation at the end of the film). And the demise of the Azquet civilization stems from one of their own legends about the peoples from the sea.
In this legend, it is said that some white-skinned, white-bearded people came from the sea, taught the Aztecs all kinds of knowledge, helped them build temples, and later left from the sea, promising to come back later, these people were called "Kesar Koyoter" by the Aztecs. So when the Spaniards went to Tenochtitlan in the Aztec Empire, their white skin gave them a great advantage.
The Aztecs thought their god had returned to them according to their promise, so they set up a feast to celebrate. Unexpectedly, these "gods" destroyed them. And the style of the Aztec wars waged by the gods also brought them bad luck. The purpose of their wars was to capture prisoners in order to worship the gods, not to put the enemy to death, and they were very different from the wars of the Spanish colonists for the purpose of plunder. The two sides of these two wars met together, and the result of the former's defeat was inevitable.
In 1519, with the Spanish colonizer leader Cortez leading the invasion of Central America, the simple Aztecs regarded him as a god, but he betrayed his faith, detained the king, and plundered wantonly. In 1521, he razed Tenochtitlan to the ground and subsequently conquered most of Mexico. The Aztec Empire thus collapsed.
Third, the biggest controversy about the film - human sacrifice
Would someone say that the film "Revelation" is not about the Mayan civilization? What does it have to do with the Aztec civilization? This is because of an important plot in the film - human sacrifice.
The most shocking and controversial part of the film is the so-called maya religious activity - human sacrifice (as if in south America human sacrifice is the tradition of civilization here), and it should be corrected here that although the Maya also performed human sacrifice, it was much milder than the cruel way of sacrifice of the Azquete civilization.
Legend has it that Mayan clergy sacrificed their children to the gods for rain and fertile fields, and they would throw their children into sacred limestone caves. For the Maya, these caves were their source of water and were seen as an entrance to Hades. An archaeological team in Mexico pieced together the skeletons of 127 bodies found at the bottom of a sacred cave and found that more than 80 percent of the bones were likely boys between the ages of 3 and 11. It can be seen that the massacre of the Mayan sacrifices is not as exaggerated as the film says, and historians generally believe that the Mayan sacrifices were done privately by aristocratic rulers, not in the form of a national carnival.
In the history of the Aztec civilization, there was a king Montezuma I (supposedly the emerald-faced king reflected in the film) who invented the Crown War in order to obtain the sacrifice of the living. In 1450-1454, there was a great famine caused by drought, and Montezuma I repeatedly waged wars to obtain captives to sacrifice gods (which coincides with the background of the story).
So the civilization mentioned in the film should actually be the Aztec civilization, not the Mayan civilization (I guess Mel Gibson directly pressed the civilization in the film to the Mayan civilization in order to make the film more attractive and mysterious).
The details about the human sacrifice are too bloody, so you can check it out for yourself (in fact, watching this film is the most intuitive, this film was directly rated R in the United States that year).
Filmed in 2005, this film is a pioneering work about the ancient civilizations of Central America. The authenticity of the film restored from narrative, plot and civilization is a superb masterpiece.
In fact, this film not only tells a good story, the English name of the film apocalypto is very straightforward to tell the audience that the ultimate purpose of the director is to hope that the audience will think about the development of civilization, the collision of civilization, the demise of civilization" this very grand proposition.
After watching, people can't help but feel that in human history, there have been so many civilizations that can be called names and cannot be named; what has been left behind, nothing has been left, so there is a profound reflection and reflection on the trend of our modern civilization.
Keep digging into the story behind the film, which I've been doing all along.
From the movie "Catch the Foreigner", you can see the prison culture in South America
History Behind History Series 25 (Part 2) – The History Behind the Movie "Red Tail"
History Behind History Series 25 (Part 1) – The History Behind the Movie The Pilot of Tuskekee