Nahua Philosophy: Tlamatinime and the Concept of Neltiliztli

The Nahua peoples of the Valley of Mexico, whose imperial expression was the Mexica (Aztec) state centered at Tenochtitlan, sustained a class of specialized thinkers known as the tlamatinime, literally "those who know things." Far from being priests in a narrow ritual sense, the tlamatinime combined the roles of teacher, poet, moral counselor, and keeper of the amoxtli (bark-paper books), and taught in institutions such as the calmecac, schools attached to temples where the sons of nobles were trained in astronomy, history, ritual song, and rhetoric. The Mexican philosopher and historian Miguel León-Portilla argued, first in his 1956 doctoral thesis La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes and later in the English-language Aztec Thought and Culture (1963), that the surviving Nahuatl sources — chiefly the Cantares Mexicanos, the Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España, and the Colloquios y Doctrina Cristiana, a 1524 dialogue between twelve Franciscan friars and Nahua elders recorded decades later by Bernardino de Sahagún's informants — preserve genuine philosophical reflection rather than mere myth or liturgy, including explicit debate among the tlamatinime themselves over the reliability of human knowledge and the fate of the dead.