Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/7

agriculture, since humans ceased being nomadic hunter—gatherers to remain, for generations, in the same place. Thus, they were able to observe, experiment and discover the miracle of plant cultivation, philosophy, science, crafts, art and religion. In fact, Egypt and Mesopotamia^[1] began settlement processes and agricultural techniques, approximately eight thousand years BCE; followed at about 6,000 years BCE by China, India, Mexico^[2] and the Andean^[3] region. (Leon Portilla. 1980).^[4]

These six civilizations are the most ancient, but above all, they had an autonomous development; that is, none received external cultural contributions. They were able to access, invent and develop all their knowledge base without external input. Thus, Mexico started its Cultural development approximately six thousand years B.C.E. with the discovery of agriculture, but above all, we must emphasize, the hybridization of corn, and reached surprisingly
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1. In antiquity, there were a number of towns along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this region is known as Mesopotamia which means "land between rivers". It occupied the current territory of Iraq. Its oldest culture was the Sumerian.
2. Recent discoveries of maize, squash and chili seeds in the Tlacolula Valley in Oaxaca, some dating back 10,000 years, place Anahuac civilization among the oldest in the world, along with Mesopotamia and Egypt.
3. The territory on the Andes mountain range currently occupied by Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile.
4. Miguel León-Portilla (Born in Mexico City, February 22, 1926) is a Mexican Anthropologist and Historian, and a prime authority on Nahuatl thought and literature. Since 1988 he is an emeritus researcher at the National University of Mexico. His 1956 doctoral thesis, “Nahuatl Philosophy Studied from its Sources” written under the tutelage of Fr. Ángel María Garibay K., a Nahuatl speaker. León-Portilla has spearheaded a movement to understand and re-evaluate Nahuatl literature, not only from the pre-Columbian era, but also contemporary works, since Nahuatl is still spoken by 1.5 million people. He has contributed to the establishment of bilingual education in rural Mexico. Leon Portilla has also contributed to the discovery of the works of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a primary source about Aztec civilization, whom he called the first Aztec anthropologist. Zahagún gathered the knowledge of the Aztec wise men, (Tlamantinime), and wrote it down in vernacular Spanish. At the request of the Spanish authorities, he wrote a Castillian Spanish version of said knowledge in his work “General History of theThings of New Spain”, but his principal work, The Florentine Codex was never published. Before León Portilla, the Codex had only been translated once, (into German), and it was an incomplete version. In November, 1998, the Association Juchimanes de Plata A.C. granted him the Prize “Juchimán de Plata”, housed at the Autonomous Juárez University of Tabasco.