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For more than 3,000 years, Mexico was the site of several
Mesoaimerican civilizations, such as the Aztec, the Olmec,
Teotihuacan, the Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec and the Maya.
These indigenous civilizations are credited with many
inventions: pyramid-temples, cities, mathematics (becoming
the first people in the world to use zero), astronomy,
medicine, writing, highly-accurate calendars, fine arts,
intensive agriculture, engineering, an abacus, a complex
theology, and the wheel.
Latecomers to Mexico's central plateau, the Mexica, or
Aztecs, as they were sometimes called in memory of Aztlán,
the starting point of their tribes wanderings, never thought
of themselves as anything but heirs of the brilliant
civilizations that had preceded them. For them all the
highly-civilized arts, sculpture, architecture, engraving,
feather-mosiac work, the invention of the calendar, were due
to the former inhabitants of Tula, the Toltecs, who reached
the height of their civilization in the tenth and eleventh
centuries.
The arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century, and
their defeat of the Mexica in 1521, marked the beginning of
the 300 year-long colonial period of Mexico as New Spain. It
is now estimated that Spanish-Europeans committed and
facilitated the genocide of 23 million indigenous people in
Mexico (and what is now called Central America.) Within 100
years of contact with Europeans, 95% of indigenous Mexicans
were dead.
On September 16, 1810, independence from Spain was
declared, by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Catholic priest in
the small town of Dolores, causing a long war that
eventually led to independence in 1821 and the creation of
the First Mexican Empire.
See Also:
Mexico After Independence
Resources
After independence, Spanish possessions in Central America
were all incorporated into Mexico from 1822 to 1823, when
they declared independence, with the exception of Chiapas.
Sources:
www.wikipedia.org
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