Aztec Facts for Kids

Get this: the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was built on an island in a lake, Lake Texcoco! At its peak, it was home to an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 people.

That makes it one of the biggest cities in the entire world at that time, bigger than London!

To feed everyone, they created amazing floating gardens called chinampas—basically little man-made islands for farming!

Forget coins or paper money- the Aztecs used cacao beans as currency! You could buy a turkey for about 300 beans.

They were so valuable that if you dropped a few, people would stop what they were doing to pick them up, just like finding a lost dollar today!

Even the famous emperor Montezuma II was known as 'The Chocolate King' because he had a stash that might have reached nearly a billion beans!

The Aztec Calendar Stone, or Sun Stone, is a huge, circular carving made of basalt rock.

It measures nearly 12 feet (3.7 meters) in diameter and is about 39 inches (98 cm) thick.

The craziest part is the weight- it weighs 24,590 kilograms—that's about 54,210 pounds! That's heavier than two or three regular cars stacked up!

The Templo Mayor, the main temple in Tenochtitlan, was a giant pyramid structure dedicated to two gods: Huitzilopochtli (War) and Tlaloc (Rain).

This massive structure was rebuilt six times as the city grew, and at its tallest, it reached about 60 meters (200 feet) in height.

Imagine a building as tall as a 20-story apartment right in the center of their city- that's a lot of steps for the priests!

The Aztecs used a writing system called pictographic and logosyllabic script, which is super different from our alphabet!

It meant they used little pictures (pictograms) to show ideas, like a drawing of a footprint for 'walking', but also signs for sounds, kind of like a secret code.

These pictures were painted in codices on materials like bark paper or deerskin, folded like an accordion map to tell their history.

The 9th emperor, Montezuma II (or Moctezuma Xocoyotzin), ruled from about 1502 or 1503 to 1520.

During his reign, the Aztec Empire hit its absolute maximum size, stretching across much of modern central Mexico.

He expanded the territory through warfare, but his reign is most famous because it's when the first Spanish explorers arrived in 1519!

The legendary Aztec Empire finally ended when the Spanish forces, led by Hernán Cortés, besieged Tenochtitlan.

This massive final battle lasted 93 days, from May 22 to August 13, 1521.

Cortés didn't win alone- he was backed by tens of thousands of native allies who were tired of Aztec rule!

The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, believing they had to repay a 'debt' of blood to the gods who created the world.

While Spanish sources gave huge, debated numbers, scholars today estimate a plausible range for the entire empire was 1,000 to 20,000 annual victims.

For big ceremonies, like the re-dedication of the Templo Mayor in 1487, some sources claim up to 80,400 sacrifices happened over four days—that’s about 14 people every minute!

Forget paper from wood pulp! The Aztecs made their books, called codices, from strips of amatl—a type of paper made from fig tree bark.

These strips could be up to 13 yards long and were folded like a concertina or a map, allowing them to paint on both sides!

These amazing books recorded everything from history to tributes, but sadly, most of the original pre-Columbian codices were destroyed by the Spanish.

We use a base-10 system (0 to 9), but the Aztecs used a vigesimal system based on the number 20.

They represented 20 with a drawing of a flag, and 400 (20 x 20) was shown with a feather or fir tree symbol!

This system was used for counting everything, especially in their tribute lists and calendars—it shows how differently they organized their world for kids!