Oddly enough, the Aztecs, however, *did* very accurately predict their own end, to within a week or two.
A very regimented society, strictly ruled by their calendar, which predicted the end of the world on the first day of their month of “Corn”, aka “1 Corn”. Either way, it would have been a disaster, with either the return of Quetzalcoatl and the end of their world, *or*, if the calendar were wrong, lots of priests were going to meet their end and they would have to rewrite their calendar, a nationally traumatic experience.
But right on schedule, runners came in from the coast, bearing news of giant things that came out of the Sun, carrying with them tall beings with six legs and shiny skin.
In this case, Spanish ships arriving from the East at dawn, from which descended armored Conquistadors on horseback.
This to people who had never seen ships, armor or horses, was pretty intimidating. Very easy to confuse with Quetzalcoatl. So the general consensus was that everybody was going to die.
Once the Conquistadors arrived in the capital, it didn’t take long for the Aztecs to figure out that they were not gods. But they were still entirely alien, and could not be explained at all by their calendar.
This meant that their reality was shattered. Nobody knew what to do anymore. By the time the diseases hit, many of them had already given up. And though they eventually drove out the Conquistadors for a time, the game was over and their world destroyed.
It should be noted that many empires in Mezoamerica were fatalistic, for the simple reason that they were surrounded by the ruins of other empires that had fallen apart.
And though we have no evidence that they ever invented wheels for vehicles, they did grasp the concept of the wheel, as some of their children’s toys had wheels.
Here is the calendar that fouled everything up.
http://rainbowcrystal.com/altar/P-90azteccalendar.jpg
That is the SAME design on a large bowl my wife keeps in the cupboard!
We freqently use it for nachos and salsa and such.
