Colin Schultz; Updated by Meilan Solly:
Despite its nearly 1,000-year history, Oxford in many way feels like a product of our time. You can still enroll at the English university. You can still attend Merton College.
The Aztec civilization of central Mexico, on the other hand, feels anchored in the more distant past. Archaeologists dig up Aztec ruins, and museums stage exhibitions about the Mexica, as the Mesoamerican people are also known. But the dawn of the Aztec civilization, marked by the founding of the city of Tenochtitlán at Lake Texcoco—now Mexico City—didn’t arrive until 1325, 229 years after teaching began at Oxford. A 1428 alliance between Tenochtitlán and its neighboring states of Texcoco and Tlacopan cemented the Mexica’s dominance, giving rise to the Aztec Empire.
Spanish forces and their Indigenous allies captured Tenochtitlán in 1521, bringing the Aztec Empire’s reign to a close after less than a century. The White House, whose cornerstone was laid in 1792, has been standing longer than the Aztecs presided over their capital.
This comparison isn’t intended to pit civilizations against each other. But it offers an interesting way of thinking about just how skewed our understanding of history really is. Most people have timelines in their heads that are distorted and compressed, and they don’t always match up with reality.