Question for October 2013

No surviving sixteenth century document says that the Aztecs removed the liver when they performed human sacrifices. Instead they all say that it was the heart or the head that was removed. However, some scholars think that the strange, tri-lobed object hanging over the chest of a skeletal figure in the Codex Magliabechiano (folio 76r) (picture, left) is a liver, and Leonardo López Luján and Vida Mercado identified as a liver the object dangling from beneath the rib cage of two almost life-size ceramic skeletal figures found in the House of the Eagles in the main ceremonial precinct (picture, right). Their identification has been challenged by Uta Berger, however. She argues that the object is indeed a human heart, a reading that López Luján has rejected.

Livers or hearts? Skeletal figure, Codex Magliabechiano, fol 76r (L); statue of Mictlantecuhtli, Templo Mayor Museum, Mexico City (R)