This chapter elaborates the point made at the end of chapter 4: Mesoamerican rulers were not attempting to write truthful and objective history, but to communicate official propaganda. Their writings have historic content, but it is a manipulated history in which the facts are altered to meet successive rulers’ changing political and ideological needs. Past events were fabricate to suit current policies, conquests were exaggerated, lies were old about genealogical relationships, and secondary centers claimed independence form primary centers even when such control had never been relinquished.

The clearest expression of this historical revisionism can be found in cases where stone monuments were defaced, recarved, or reset, and where hide or paper books were painted over, resurfaced with lime, or rewritten.

We give examples below from the Aztec, Mixtec, and Maya.

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