Cempoala

Cempoala or Zempoala was a very important city mésoaméricaine of the Kingdom Totonaque. Nowadays, it is an archaeological zone located in the State of Veracruz, with the Mexico.

Its name comes from the Nahuatl Cempoal (twenty) and Atl (water) that is to say Twenty water , perhaps because this city had a great quantity of channels of Irrigation and aqueducts which distributed the invaluable liquid through the many gardens and surrounding fields. Moreover, it was located at the convergence of many rivers.

The city was populated approximately 1500 years before the arrival of Spanish and one finds an influence Olmèque there. The Totonaques settled later and developed there the city which counted up to 25.000 - 30.000 inhabitants. The current archaeological vestiges date from XIVe and XVe century. One finds there the Grand Temple , similar to the Temple of the Sun of Tenochtitlan, and on which one also practiced the human sacrifices. There are also the Temple of the Small Faces , covered with faces and writings, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and the Temple of Ehécatl , the god of the wind. In the middle of XVe century, the Totonaques were demolished by the armies Aztèques of Moctezuma I and had to pay a heavy annual tribute by sending several hundreds of children to Tenochtitlan either to be sacrificed to the gods, or to be used as slave. Also, when the Conquistadors of Hernán the Cortes arrived, they could be easily combined with the Totonaques against the Aztèques.

At that time, Cempoala was a prosperous city. It was the center religious and commercial most important of all the part is Mexico. Spanish called it Vicious Ville because of the many festivals and the enormous gardens and orchards in which it abounded, without counting the festive and merry character of its inhabitants. Later, it was known under the name of Nouvelle Seville for its resemblance, according to Spanish, with this Iberian city.

After the victory of the Cortes and its takeover on the News-Spain, Totonaques realized of the consequences of the Spanish conquest. They were driven out and had to leave the city. They were then converted with the Christianisme, prohibited to practice their old and reduced worships in Esclavage to work in the fields of Canne to sugar of the new Spanish lords.

About 1575-77, an epidemic of Variole decimated the population of the city which was completely abandoned about 1600. The rare survivors left for Xalapa, and Cempoala fell into the lapse of memory, until the Archéologue Francisco del Paso there Troncoso the redécouvre.

In its immediate surroundings, new populations occupied little by little the places, until forming a new hamlet named El Agostadero , which while still growing became San Jose of Montaña . At the end of the Mexican Révolution was born a movement anticlerical which found in the Governor Adalberto Tejeda serious representing. It prohibits the communes from bearing names of saints or with religious connotation, and the hamlet took again its ancient name of Cempoala. Nowadays, it is an historical center protected and managed by Instituto Nacional de Antropología E Historia (INAH) of the Mexico. The archaeological zone is to approximately 350 km of Mexico City

Sources

Random links: