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The tower was maybe five meters high, its diameter should have been about 4.7 meters.
But it wasn't stones that gave the building its shape, but human bones, skulls.
Because the tower was part of the "Huei Tzompantli" (about "wall or frame of the skull" in the indigenous Nahuatl), on which the Aztecs made their human sacrifices to the god of war Huitzilopochtli in their capital Tenochtitlan.
New finds in Mexico City, which the Spaniards built on the ruins of the Aztec metropolis, confirm that this is really the building.
Archaeologists have discovered 119 more human skulls in a newly discovered section of the wall, not just of men, but also of women and at least three children.
The National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico City announced that the number of head bones recovered so far has increased to more than 600.
Remnants of the "Wall of Skulls" in Mexico City
Source: via REUTERS
"He lifted the still twitching warm heart to the sun": Depiction of victims from an Aztec codex
Source: Getty Images
The newly excavated, extreme north-eastern part of the skull wall is about 3.5 meters below today's street level.
It is dated to the years between 1486 and 1502, which corresponds almost exactly to the reign of the Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl.
It is known of him that after his accession to the throne he completed the main temple of the city, the foundation stone of which had already been laid by his predecessor Tizocic.
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In 2015, city archaeologists accidentally came across the remains of the cult site under a house in the old town.
A description is preserved in the report of a Spanish conquistador who took part in the conquest of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés in 1521: “At one end and at the other of this beam there were two towers made of lime and skulls, without any other Stone, and the teeth pointed outwards, if you can describe it that way. ”A frame made of wooden poles was attached to this beam, and skulls were stuck on cross beams.
Given the number of more than 72,344 people who are said to have been sacrificed by Emperor Ahuitzotl during the inauguration ceremony alone, what has been found so far is probably an exaggeration.
The old American artist Berthold Riese from Bonn described how the bloody ritual took place:
“In a complex ritual, the prisoners of the sacrifice were first led individually up to the temple platform.
There four priests stretched the doomed man over the sacrificial stone and held him by his limbs so that the fifth and actual sacrificial priest could cut open his chest and tear his heart out of his body.
He then raised the still twitching warm heart to the sun, while the other priests rolled the body of the victim down the stairs. "
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For a long time it was assumed that the victims were prisoners of war brought in in so-called flower wars against neighboring states.
For the inauguration of his temple, Ahuitzotl is said to have organized about three campaigns in order to collect enough victims.
New studies on human bones correct this picture.
It is true that most of those killed were younger men of war age.
But there are also women and - as the latest finds show - children among them.
Above all, isotope analyzes have shown that most of the dead had spent the last years of their lives in Tenochtitlan.
The victims were probably slaves who had lived in the Aztec capital for some time before they were selected as "suitable" gifts to the gods.
The thesis that the human sacrifices of the Aztecs were only "ritualized executions", as they are assumed for the older Maya culture, is once again invalidated by the new discoveries.
Bloody ceremonies are documented for most cultures in Central America, but in the Aztec empire they happened on completely different dimensions.
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