Talk:Macuahuitl

message: When was the text
"(according to a Spaniard account, it easily decapitated a horse)" added?  It's obvious that the blade in the picture couldn't decapitate anything.
:Obsidian is glass.  The edge of those blades was sharper than any metallic sword.Tmangray 19:51, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "While we were at grips with this great army and their dreadful broadswords [maquahuitl], many of the most powerful among the enemy seem to have decided to capture a horse. They began with a furious attack, and laid hands on a good mare well trained both for sport and battle. Her rider, Pedro de Moron, was a fine horseman; and as he charged with three other horsemen into the enemy ranks--they had been instructed to charge together for mutual support--some of them seized his lance so he could not use it, and others slashed at him with their broadswords [maquahuitl], wounding him severely. Then they slashed at his mare, cutting her head at the neck so that it only hung by the skin. The mare fell dead, and if his mounted comrades had not come to Moron's rescue, he would probably have been killed also."
Although this was written in the late 16th century when Diaz was an elderly man living in Mexico, we can consider his first hand account accurate. As you can see, the Spanish held a healthy respect for the maquahuitl and its cutting power. --SunWuKong 09:05, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One shouldn't assume that a first hand account is 100% accurate. Many historians recognize that a lot of New World accounts by the Spanish were over-exaggerated. One reason why the Spanish would have portrayed the Mexica as more powerful than they were was to make themselves look good for conquering them. The Florentine Codex specifically states that these particular weapons were used to maim enemies in order to capture, and not kill. It is likely that Diaz over-exaggerated the power of these weapons to make himself and his fellow Spanish look better. --147.124.147.203 (talk) 00:18, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

text: This is a picture from the Florentine Codex, representing a battle between mesoamerican indians. As you can see, there is some mutilated bodies, clearly raped by a slashing weapon like the maquahuitl. The aztecs were also so afficionated to cutting heads and putting them in a public place like trophy after the battles or sacrifices. --Ozomatli-Tepoztli 00:30, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'd value the opinion of someone who has actually seen a horse decapitated (period accounts with no motivation to exaggerate) over the ideas of modern theorists. Kortoso (talk) 17:44, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Decapitate a horse??

message: I have suggested a merger with Macana. These articles seem to have very much overlapping subject matters, almost the same; in fact they both use the same illustration on the left side, like they are both referring to the same thing. The Macana article claims to be also about other similarly shaped weapons (with or without obsidian blades) used in Mesoamerica and the Carribean, but couldn't there just be a small section in a united article about that? It seems to me like both articles are mainly about the weapon in the context of their use by the Aztecs. 
Hno3 20:07, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: More than likely these two pages should be merged. The name Macana is the name that the Spaniards gave to the weapon when they first encountered it. I do, however, intend to expand on this article soon and am gathering resources at the moment. Pyroxolotl 16:08, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I am the author of macana. I would not strongly object to merging the articles. The usual explanation for the two forms is that they are two reflexes of the same root (or was it a borrowing?), Macuahuitl being Nahuatl, and Macana Taíno. Certainly the descriptions of macanas given in Decades de Orbe Novo do not mention obsidian edges. I will be very interested to hear what you can find in other period resources. --Iustinus 22:54, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge? 

message: I understand obsidian is extremely sharp, but how would it fair against spanish steel armor?  Would it penetrate and effectively cleave through, or would it shatter upon impact?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.14.30.194 (talk • contribs) 30 November 2006.
:obsidian and carbon steel are about the same hardness (5 or so on the Mohs scale), but obsidian, being glass, is brittle. it would be ground to powder long before one could apply pressure sufficient to cut through steel. (it was in fact very difficult to cut through late european plate armor even with steel swords; one needed a heavy halberd or pollaxe or somesuch.) obsidian weapons might be effective against mail, since fragments could slip through the rings; against plate they would do nothing. 71.248.115.187 20:40, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obsidian sword vs Spanish Steel armor. 

message: I just went through this article and I noticed that in one part is states that the last authentic Macuahuitl was destroyed in a fire sometime in the 1800s.  Later in the article it also says that no actual Macuahuitls were ever found and the existence of it was derived from purely anecdotal facts before the sixteenth century.
Could someone please clarify this?  Fallenangei (talk) 17:26, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: One macuahuitl was destroyed in the fire of the Real Armería de Madrid in 1884 (cf. Ross Hassig). Hassig and Cervera Obregón published that there is no known surviving examples of macuahuitl. Never the less, this document of the Moctezuma : Aztec ruler exhibition of the British Museum in 2009-2010, mentions a 120x800mm macuahuitl, found in Mexico City, excavated in the late 19th or early 20th century in course of construction of city infrastructure, lent by the Museo Nacional de Antropología de México, from the Mexican National Collections since excavation and ownered between 1933 and 1945 in Mexican National Collections... Also, Cervera Obregón published, in his article of Arqueología Mexicana n°84 and in Arms & Armour n°2 (p.137), a drawing of a macuahuitl supposed to be in the MNA collections, first published in a thesis of a mexican archaeologist named Morales and drawn by Francisco González Rul. I've asked Cervera Obregón by mail where was that artefact, and he told me that Felipe Solís (MNA director at that moment) said it was lost, but Cervera Obregón also said that he heard that someone asked to Alejandro Pastrana if he could make a reproduction of this weapon for the Moctezuma exhibition... So, the mistery goes on! El Comandante (talk) 19:47, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradictions? 

message: The purpose of a "Popular culture" section is to summarize the subject's relevance to popular culture as it is told by reliable sources, and not to simply list appearances without context. This article currently makes no effort to do what is preferred, and instead does what is explicitly discouraged by the relevant guidelines. On top of that, a recent project-wide Request for comment concluded that entries are not "self-sourcing". Rather, for inclusion they require inline references to third party sources that discuss their relevance to portrayals of the topic in popular culture. The section currently references no such sources. The section needs to be completely rewritten, or removed. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 12:11, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Replying to 's message on my talk page here because it concerns this article: The purpose of "Popular culture" sections, as with any other sections in Wikipedia articles, is to summarize what reliable secondary sources have said on the matter. The two YouTube gameplay videos aren't that and neither is the Final Fantasy wiki. The TwoCentsTV might very well be. I'm not sure which GamePro issue you are talking about because it is not cited in the article. If no reliable source think it's worth to mention that the macuahuitl is featured in Mortal Combat, then we can't do that either. If you can find such a source, then please cite it. If it's a good source, it will probably also say why the macuahuitl is important for Mortal Combat. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:58, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

text: If it's "gained sufficient notoriety in recent times to appear where it hasn't before", then great, we should try to actually say that, drawing from a source and clarifying what we mean by "recent" (2010s? 1990s onward? 20th century?). Throwing out a few examples with no context - is the macuahuitl prominent and significant in any of these, or just something a background character is holding in one scene? - doesn't tell the reader any of this. --McGeddon (talk) 15:43, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Popular culture 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hi. I stumbled across this article and was struck by how good it was. And how it was a fine example of Wikipedian collaboration. I assessed it as B class and edited this page to reflect that. But it has niggled. The article is better than that. I think that it should be a good article. So I have returned and given it a light copy edit and IMO it is nearly ready. However, it seems inappropriate for me to step in at this late stage and nominate it. Can I encourage one of the editors who have done the heavy lifting to nominate it. Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 11:28, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good article nomination? 

message: First, Wikipedia's own article on "ring armour" asserts that there is no proof such a thing ever existed. Is what is meant here "mail"?
Second, am I correct in interpreting the IPA notation to produce something like "MAH-kwah-weech?" I'm not so clear on the "tl" sound. The audio file on axolotl and the one on voiceless alveolar lateral affricate are difficult for me to reconcile. The former sounds more like a "t" sound, the latter much more like how the Nahuatl IPA guide describes it. 108.34.206.74 (talk) 04:56, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Ring mail", pronunciation 

message: It seems like an original macuahuitl is currently housed in the Templo Mayor Museum, however I can’t find much information about it Implacable18 (talk) 02:38, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Only surviving macuahuitl 

message: a series of wars in Mesoamerica after the invention of the basic city states. 43.242.178.4 (talk) 15:24, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Macuahuitl Wars