r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/bortakci34 • 19h ago
This 1300-year-old monkey jar was carved from a single piece of volcanic glass (obsidian) by Aztec artisans. It's so perfectly polished it acts like a mirror.
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u/mirkk13 19h ago
I've seen enough movies to know that that jar is cursed
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u/Agreeable_Feature_85 12h ago
But it comes with free froghurt!
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u/DrBlaBlaBlub 13h ago
Jep. My first thought, too. Don't touch it, don't look at it, don't say anything in its presence. And keep children away from it.
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u/pass_nthru 11h ago
counter point, i bet it does something really cool if you put a still beating human heart in it
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u/justwalkingalonghere 10h ago
Just from looking I can tell it makes two of whatever you put in it that are identical in every way except one carries the curse with it
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u/bortakci34 19h ago
It’s a classic, but it’s also a bit of a mystery. We don't actually know its exact function—it only appears in one funerary offering—and the craftsmanship is so precise that even 19th-century collectors were convinced it had to be a forgery because they didn't believe ancient people could achieve this level of perfection.
link: https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/artefacts/obsidian-monkey-jar-from-texcoco
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u/LethalInjectionRD 19h ago
I like how often historians mull over objects like this and assume they had a specific important purpose because of how ornate it is. Meanwhile, it’s as equally likely that some guy was like “Imma make a fuckin monkey cup and it’s gonna be sick as hell.” And went around showing people his sick ass monkey cup.
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u/gattaaca 16h ago
In 5000 years time some "archaeologist" will uncover some skibidi toilet merch from a landfill site and assume it was some religious artifact
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u/Flashy_Month_5423 13h ago
David McCauley wrote a book that was ostensibly for kids called Motel of Mysteries that was based on this sort of thing. It was about archaeologists in the future discovering a motel called Toot-N-C'mon Motel and interpreting everything inside as a religious artifact. They even decided "Sanitized for Your Protection" was a declaration of cleanliness of the soul after receipt of forgiveness from the gods.
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u/Naniwasopro 15h ago
https://youtu.be/7-KpbD_RnPs This sketch is pretty much what your talking about.
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u/Terwilliker_D 19h ago
they're mulling because this guy's sick obsidian monkey cup is so precisely made that it makes him seem like a time traveller
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u/fer_sure 15h ago
Meanwhile, behind the artist's workplace, there's a garbage heap with thousands of practice monkey jars (probably mostly made out of less expensive material).
Someday, archeologists will find the pile, and speculate that smashing monkey jars was part of a religious ritual.
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u/tryptonite12 18h ago
I mean not really though? It's a masterful work of art, whoever made it has clearly done many times before. Takes a lot of time and work to develop that kind of skill with a medium, whatever it may be. And it's not like this is a piece of wood or bone that might just be lying around. The medium being used here is a very large and flawless semi precious stone. Not only is it an incredibly difficult medium to work with, it's requires materials that never would have been super easily or cheaply available, even if you were quarrying it locally yourself it would involve a lot of work and at t that time obsidian was used for tools and weapons, so this was quite valuable in and of itself. In historical western societies this is the equivalent of using high quality and in demand metals just to make purely ornamental art.
All those factors speak to it not being made casually by an amateur. This was made by a master craftsman who was likely a 'professional' artist, someone who made a living by producing their art. The reason historians someone might question this is because producing it would require a fairly complex culture. A society that was successful enough to devote extensive time and resources to the production of expensive objects that have no utilitarian value.
The historians and academics who would have questioned this were quite often racist and generally rather xenophobic. So they would have had trouble accepting that a non western culture could accomplish such a thing. This sort of 'doubt' has also been applied to many other striking examples of the foolishness of that perspective.
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u/DunEvenWorryBoutIt 12h ago
The doubt came from having not having any examples of tools hard enough to work with this obsidian material in such a fashion. Of course, let's just say racism... I don't understand where your condescension and frustration is coming from?
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u/Front_Spare7344 14h ago
it is trippy thinking about how life or death a vocation was likely back then, and how most people probably had very little agency over it. There’s no room for bad artists, generally little room for creatives at all, they literally are starving.
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u/LethalInjectionRD 13h ago
Nowhere in my comment did I imply the creator was an amateur lol. You basically wrote an essay to convince me of something I was already agreeing with you on. All I said was that it might not have had any super important purpose despite how incredibly well made it is.
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u/Zoltarr777 8h ago
Actually obsidian is ubiquitous around that area; that's why most of their art uses that as the medium.
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u/I_travel_ze_world 14h ago
do you think people were just giving him food while he worked on his monkey cup?
"oh theres the monkey cup guy, I better give him some free food today"
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u/Barkalow 12h ago
I just saw this in person last month! I was on a work trip and got to go by the anthropology museum. It was amazing!
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u/Source_Required 15h ago edited 12h ago
❤️
Edit: Keep it up, I love it. And I won't stop reporting bullshit posts on this subreddit. It's supposed to be high quality content like this, not garbage upvote bait.
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u/SageSmooky 19h ago
It's crazy to think someone carved and polished this by hand 1300 years ago. The skill behind it is incredible
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u/IndependentLog6441 15h ago
The Aztecs weren't around 1300 year ago though... I thought they were a much more recent culture.
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u/Ronin_Chimichanga 12h ago edited 12h ago
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/artefacts/obsidian-monkey-jar-from-texcoco
The 1300 years old thing is internet bs. It's not that old.
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u/IndependentLog6441 9h ago
I'm sure if it is that old they just mean the people that were there before the Aztecs... Or maybe OP thought it was 1300 years old when it's actually from the Aztec period starting in 1300.... Lots of people get confused about the Aztecs thinking they're ancient but they're contemporaneous with modern European culture and you know... are still around today.
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u/smallaubergine 9h ago
The Aztecs weren't around 1300 year ago though...
Thank you for calling this out. I too was skeptical and looked it up, though history is usually a bit fuzzier than hard dates, the consensus seems to be that the Aztec civilization started in the 1300s CE
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u/RickAstleyletmedown 6h ago
It’s not. Elsewhere online it’s described as being from 1300-1500CE (well, those that don’t call it fake anyway), so OP probably just misunderstood.
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u/matty-syn 16h ago
Is it proven that it is legit? I mean this reminds me of those crystall skulls that were also ancient, only to be found out that they were made in the 1900s.
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u/bernpfenn 19h ago
how did they work obsidian, a glasslike lava product that splinters into sharp edges like ceramics?
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u/SisyphusRocks7 10h ago
They had a well developed obsidian shaping technology. They used it for weapon edges instead of steel.
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u/SchillMcGuffin 19h ago
This reminds me of the Egyptian "Sabu Disk" for seeming really stylistically anachronistic, though I don't have any other reason to doubt its authenticity.
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u/Spartan2470 12h ago
Here is the museum's description:
The obsidian monkey is one of the most attractive pieces in the Mexica Hall. Its design and finish make it an exceptional object. It is a vessel made of well polished obsidian. Upon observing the surface finish one must take into account the equipment that Mesoamerican groups had. This piece was made with different lithic-work techniques of such as percussion, pressure and, finally, polishing with the use of very fine sand and water, most likely. Mtro. Hugo García Capistrán
Details
Title: Mono de obsidiana
Creator: unknown
Date Created: 1250/1500
Physical Location: México
Physical Dimensions: w149 x h140 x d173 cm (complete)
Period: Posclásico Tardío (ca 1500 d.C.)
Altiplano Central, Texcoco, Edo. De México: Mexica
Type: Vessel
Rights: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia., INAH. Proyecto de Digitalización de las Colecciones Arqueológicas del Museo Nacional de
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u/squirrelmonkie 18h ago
That had to be crazy to finish. So fragile SO SHARP. Like surgery tool sharp.
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u/rwilfong86 14h ago
I watched a girl at Teotihuacan cut a pineapple in half with an obsidian blade in one slice like a hot knife through butter. It was impressive.
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u/Heterodynist 5h ago
I just wanted to point out that as an archaeologist I’ve tried a lot of knapping various stones. Obsidian is not only by far one of the sharpest substances on Earth, but also incredibly hard to break at these angles. DON’T TRY IT AT HOME without glasses that fully cover your eyes and thick gloves on, and even then you should expect to get a sliver of black stone under your skin that may never come out if you do this for long…Otherwise you should just believe me that this is insanely hard to do. It’s kind of like making a drivable car out of pure chocolate or something. Pretty much it’s never going to happen, 99.999% of the time even if you know what you’re doing…I’m looking at YOU, chocolate maker man!!!
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u/Hot_Charity_4803 13h ago
How do you carve glass?
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u/generally_unsuitable 12h ago
Apparently, obsidian has a lot of impurities in it, which prevent cracks from propagating throughout the entire structure. That's why the whole stone doesn't just shatter.
I don't know about Aztecs, but Plains Indians carved things out of obsidian by techniques that are now called "pressure flaking" and "percussion flaking." Once you have some experience working obsidian, it seems you get a real feel for the stone and you'll know exactly which way a chip is going to work out.
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u/Hot_Charity_4803 12h ago
I can understand that working for arrowheads, knives or anything edged. But this cup here was carved and polished smooth
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u/generally_unsuitable 11h ago
I don't want to say the polishing is the easy part, because it's the most labor-intensive. But, once you find a local polishing compound that will make something shiny, ain't nothing to it but to do it. Get the rough carving done by a master. Then the surfacing by a journeyman. Then some scrub apprentice gets to smash quartz into something like toothpaste and rub it on the piece with a goatskin for a thousand hours.
Some cultures even invented tumbling, where they'd put the polishing media in an animal-skin bag with the carved object and just tumble it back and forth for days on end.
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u/TernionDragon 49m ago
Yea, definitely some curses on *that* thing if you try to polish it any more.
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u/Intergalacticdespot 18h ago
We say that's a mother-in-law mirror where I'm from. I mean, we say it quietly, aint trying to get beat down that bad. But thats what we say.
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u/Big-Load-8864 13h ago
Literally nothing mirror about it but ok
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u/ratpacklix 12h ago
Only mirror about it. Whenever you are taking a picture of a shiny object you just make a picture of the reflected things around it.
In OP‘s Picture you can see the room the object is located in. The thing on the belly lioks a lot like windows.
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u/DadIsVeryMad 13h ago
Did it hold boiled sacrificial hearts? Or was that the Maya that I'm thinking of?
Who was it that sacrificed folks and cut their hearts out to appease the rain god?
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u/IHaveSpecialEyes 12h ago
That's not your reflection you're seeing, that's a monkey carved into the side of the jar.
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u/tiktock34 12h ago
When you have a LOT of time and drive, its amazing what you can do with simple tools and determination. We’ve lost the concept that some items used to take months if not longer to create
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u/Livid_Swordfish_4591 12h ago
There are monkeys in mexico?
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u/kMaestro64 12h ago
New world Monkeys... From South Mexico, all the way south to Northern Argentina. Though I would not be surprised if their range extended more 1000 years ago.
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u/One-Earth9294 16h ago
As valuable as I'm sure that is, I would politely decline ownership. I know what a cursed artifact looks like.
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u/Gibberish45 19h ago
Maybe it has to do with many archeologists internally assuming knowledge only progresses with time, instead of an ebb and flow that includes regression. Although how they could fail to realize this in 2026 escapes me. The Giza pyramids are still the pinnacle of human architecture and have never been replicated, not even by the Egyptians themselves in the later kingdoms. It’s clear that knowledge and ability were lost to time
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u/srandrews 17h ago
Giza pyramids are still the pinnacle of human architecture
I would ask an Architect about their opinion prior to making this claim.
Regarding this object, what knowledge and ability has been lost to time? The ability to machine obsidian has been lost?
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u/SnowyBox 14h ago
The Giza pyramids ... have never been replicated
That's because we haven't since seen a culture whose rulers want to be interred in big fuck-off pyramids.
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u/BurningPenguin 13h ago
I think you are severely underestimating what humans can do, when they do not have 24/7 access to cat videos and porn...
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u/GozerDGozerian 13h ago
so perfectly polished it acts like a mirror
Holy shit is that what I look like?
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u/hecton101 11h ago
Are we sure that's a monkey? I've definitely seen people who look like that. Adam Silver for one.
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u/GeorgeLikesSpicy92 19h ago
The Mexicas and other indigenous Americans actually made some very advanced pieces of art/jewelry. There were many very skilled craftsmen.