Scraping Metal

This golden disk found in Peru is an contains
an inscription of a calendar system.

A few months ago they played a special on the Discovery channel about  discoveries of America before Columbus.  After talking about various theories about who were actually the first people to travel to the New World, they came to the conclusion that pretty much everyone discovered America at one point in time.  They finally changed their question from "Who discovered America?" to "Who didn't discover America?".  Well today I am not going to talk about the discovery of America but the making of metal books.  To those of us who are LDS (such as members of our Reinventing Knowledge class here at BYU) metal plate writings might be of special interest because the Book of Mormon was translated from an ancient record engraved on golden plates.  Although engravings on metal plates were at one point thought of as a rare occurrence, recent discoveries have shown more and more examples of this form of information storage.  As you will see in this post, we might pose ourselves a similar question:

"Who didn't write on metal plates?"

A Whistle to Carry You Home

WARNING: THIS POST MAY GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES!

     So as I have been researching about ancient cultures I have become fascinated with the Aztec Empire of Mexico.  Last week I talked a little bit about the medical practices of the Aztecs and other pre-colombian cultures.  Sadly, not even modern medicine has advanced enough to let us live forever and death is inevitable for us all.  I stumbled across a video on the internet that freaked me out and intrigued me enough that I decided to investigate some more about Aztec beliefs about the passing from this world to the next.  Before showing it though I need to explain a little first.

     

Quetzalcoatl and Mictlantecuhtli (god of the underworld)