Tlaloc is the Aztec god of rain and thunder. Concurrently also in charge of fire agriculture. Like many gods in other cultures, Tlaloc was believed to inhabit the mountaintops.
Despite the fact that Tlaloc was rather a positive deity and treated people quite favorably, being himself created by other gods, in anger he could still send all sorts of disasters, one way or another connected with the water element, whether it be rains, droughts, floods, hail, thunderstorms and hurricanes … The Aztecs brought him human sacrifices, drowning victims (including children) in the waters of Lake Texcoco.
At first glance, nothing unusual, but rather the opposite, an ordinary deity, similar descriptions of which are around the world. However, one story associated with this character still sets him apart from others. Namely, the history of the monumental statue of the god Tlaloc, which now adorns the entrance to the National Museum of Anthropology and History of Mexico City.
It is difficult to say when exactly the statue of Tlaloc was born. According to some sources - in the 5th century AD, however, this dating is indirect and, in fact, does not mean much.
For many centuries, and perhaps longer, the monument lay in the thickets of vegetation at the bottom of a dried-up river bed near the small settlement of San Miguel Coatlinchan near Texcoco. And he would have continued to stay there, if at the end of the 19th century he had not been discovered while digging a canal for irrigation.
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Almost a century later, in 1964, the Mexican authorities decided to move him to the capital to decorate the entrance to the newly opened National Museum of Anthropology and History with a statue of the rain god. However, this was not easy to do.
The Tlaloc Monument is a monolithic seven-meter high andesite statue - one of the hardest rocks. Since the weight of Tlaloc is neither more nor less than 167 tons, transporting it even from a neighboring state to the capital was not the most trivial task.
For transportation, a special ramp was built, thanks to which the monument was loaded onto a huge platform. They transported it using two tractors at once.
The transportation of the ancient deity was carried out in the dry season for Mexico, when there is little rainfall in the territory of the state of Mexico City, however, on the day the monument arrived in the capital, a strong thunderstorm with heavy rain broke out, which is quite superstitious Mexicans, especially from among those 25,000 people who met Tlaloc on the streets cities, associated with nothing more than the reaction of the deity to a change in his place of residence. However, whether this reaction was positive or negative remains unknown.
At the moment, the statue, surrounded by a fountain, still adorns the entrance to the main museum in Mexico, striking tourists from all over the world with its size.
This is a brief history of the Tlaloc monument. However, there are too many white spots in it, giving rise to a whole lot of questions. For example, where was the 168-ton andesite monument carved from? Until now, the quarry has never been found. How did the Aztecs (or any other Indian tribes, if, after all, the Aztecs have nothing to do with it) transported the statue, not knowing, according to the official version, even the wheels? Why did the monument lie "on its back" (and it was in this form that it was worshiped), although it is obvious that the statue should have stood upright? What tool was used for processing?
Here it is worth making a remark that at first glance, the traces of shock processing are immediately evident, however, besides them, there are also those whose nature of appearance can be equated to other technologies found in the same Aswan. One way or another, but the front side of Tlaloc is badly damaged. It is unclear whether these chips are the result of domestic and / or natural influences, or they appeared as a result of the planting of Christianity in the New World, when, at the behest of missionaries, artifacts and architectural monuments of both Americas were destroyed.
Nevertheless, given that the monument was found in the riverbed, as well as strange structural elements, such as the massive back of the statue and the "ritual" hole at the top, one can suggest a version that the Tlaloc monument was nothing more than a pillar of an ancient bridge across that the most dry river. However, in this case, the stone deity should have had a twin brother, perhaps not even one. But no major archaeological excavations have yet been carried out in the Texcoco area.
The Tlaloc monument is another element of the scattered puzzle, which cannot be combined into a harmonious picture of the past of humanity in its present form. With some external negligence, the andesite god does not fit into the capabilities of either the Aztecs or any other Indian cultures that lived in the New World (at least in the form in which historians imagine them). But there is a monument, which means sooner or later, but you will have to answer questions about its origin.