I wish this silly "gotcha" fact about Oxford being older than the Aztecs would go away.

All it's saying is that most people don't know enough about Mesoamerican civilizations to differentiate clearly between the Aztec and the Maya; the Maya have been around since long before Oxford and that's why people anchor 'the Aztecs' in the distant past. This should be pretty obvious.

It's like saying "Did you know that the Aztec Empire is older than the University of Reading" -- yeah, that's not what most people are thinking of when they think of an old English university.

I don't want to contradict the thesis of the article though, it's true that our perception is skewed. My favorite version of this is that Chinese armies were fighting each other with gunpowder-based weapons in the 1100s.

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gizajob a day ago | parent | next [-]

Ok here’s another: they were teaching at the University of Oxford before the Māori discovered and settled New Zealand.

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phyalow a day ago | parent [-]

I wish more Kiwis knew this.

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Obscurity4340 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Whats the inference here?

	▲	guywithahat 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In New Zealand the Maori act as though they're some indigenous population who deserves reparations, however they were really more like a colonial people who lost to a more powerful colonial nation. It's a little like the UK claiming the Falkland Islands. The British were the first to discover the islands and the first to inhabit them, however I wouldn't call them indigenous to the Falkland islands in the same way they might be indigenous to England. Certainly they wouldn't deserve reparations if Argentina someday captured the islands

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jongjong a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It sounds shocking because it's one sentence which delivers two surprises; Oxford is older than expected and the Aztec empire is more recent than expected.

	▲	teruakohatu a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree. It’s not a comment on the existence of a people group but rather a political structure. Saying something is older than the USA does not imply nobody lived in North America more than 250 years ago.
	▲	IshKebab 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No his point is that this is surprising because people have the wrong idea of what the Aztec empire is. It's like saying "the population of the City of London is only 8500 people!" - it's only surprising because it's misleading.

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hithre 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

… And Mediterranean countries were using grenade since the 8th century.