Aztec Eternals

After leaving the palace, Shulot strode forward, all the way to the east. Bertard calmly guarded him. The crowd greeted the warm morning sun and walked quickly towards the Shenqi Institute.

The young man was clearly in a good mood. With a warm smile on his face, he nodded slightly to the nobles and samurai who respectfully saluted along the way.

Not long east of the palace district is the majestic Great Temple. Shilot raised his head and looked up, his eyes narrowed. He keenly discovered that the Temple of Rain, one of the twin pyramids, was being rebuilt.

Beside the drapery of the God of Rain, the drapery of the God of War unfolded at the same time and was above. Most of the wind and rain symbols symbolizing the **** of rain were removed and replaced with hummingbird carvings symbolizing the **** of war. Although he couldn't see the statue of the **** in the inner hall, the young man was sure that there would also be changes there.

This is one of the New Year's preparations of the priesthood. Starting from this year's sacrificial ceremony, the main **** will gradually take over the agricultural priesthood of the rain god. The priests will also use the prepared myths to explain, and use a buffer of several years to let the people slowly accept the ascension of the Lord God.

After the Great Temple is the Palace of the Chief Minister, where the elders live in seclusion. Xiulott looked into the distance, the front of the palace was cold and chilling, and the elder guards were still as solemn as sculptures, but they couldn't see the old man who had crossed the century. After crossing the temple and the palace, he continued eastward, and soon arrived at the busy Shenqiu.

Looking at the name written by himself, the young man's heart rose slightly. In the towering palace, is the calm gaze of the elder also watching the future here?

After a while, Shiloh came back to his senses. He no longer thought about it, and went directly to the southern area of ​​the folk artisans. The first thing to look at is the woodblock printing that he is most concerned about.

The study of woodblock printing is located in a side hall to the east. In the exquisite and gorgeous side hall, all kinds of thick wooden boards, blue-black ink and white paper are piled up. When the young man stepped into the side hall, he could smell the fragrance of pine wood, the fragrance of ink, and a faint pungent odor.

Shirott's eyes swept over, slightly stagnant. He took a few steps closer, staring at the white paper as white as snow, pondering.

Seeing the arrival of His Highness, Aquila immediately put down the engraving plate in her hand, and knelt down and bowed. The young man raised his hand and motioned the senior middle-aged jade craftsman to get up. Then, he stretched out his hand and pinched the white paper in front of him. It was evenly thick and of high quality. And the faint pungent odor also came from the white paper.

"Aquila, did this paper come from the Craftsmanship Center?" Sherlot was a little puzzled.

"Your Highness, this is the latest refined paper completed by Shenqi's papermaking department. It is more suitable for engraving and printing. It is the invention of a young craftsman. They are in the house not far from the next door."

Aquila's face was calm and she told the truth.

Shuluo nodded, it seems that the papermaking department has indeed discovered a new process. Later, I have to ask carefully to compare it with the memory in my mind to see if I can find anything more. Then, he looked at the calm and steady middle-aged jade craftsman.

"Is the engraving of the engraving smooth? How is the printing effect?"

Aquila bowed and held out her hand.

"Your Highness, everything is going well. Please let me demonstrate it for you."

Saying that, Aquila took out a carved wooden plank with a thousand-character script written by His Highness on it. The anti-body characters on the engraving plate are engraved into raised embossed characters, and the remaining blank parts are removed from depressions. The young man stretched out his hand and felt it, the inscription was very fine, only slightly protruding from the surface, but the edge of the shallow nails protruded about 1-3 mm.

Afterwards, the middle-aged jade craftsman carefully painted the engraving plate with even blue ink with a brush. This ink is the most commonly used Mayan blue in the Union of Mexica. It is made by mixing the plant indigo extracted from the leaves of the wild green tree with the mineral binder extracted from palygorskite clay. Mayan blue is produced in high yields and is often used in sacrificial ceremonies to smear the entire body of the sacrifice.

After observing the degree of inking, Aquila carefully covered the board with white paper and stably pressed it with another flat wooden board. Soon, he lifted the paper from the printing plate and put it on the wooden table in the shade of the corner to dry in the shade.

Xiulote watched carefully, and there was already dried paper there. The Chinese characters on it were as big as thumbs, and the handwriting was clear and accurate. There are also papers with majestic depictions of the gods, and the Union's calendar sun stone. The pictures are extremely detailed and lifelike.

"Equila, how many sheets of paper can you print in a day? How many times can a printing plate be printed?" the boy asked eagerly.

Aquila thought for a while and answered cautiously.

"His Royal Highness, as long as there is enough paper, at the speed I just made, a printer can print more than 1,000 sheets a day. If you are busy day and night and are skilled, you can print up to 2,000 sheets. The number of times the engraving plate is used depends on the material of the wood. I haven't used it yet. It has broken a pair of engraving plates. Depending on the degree of wear and tear, there will always be a thousand times."

Hearing this, Shulot was greatly satisfied. Printing and books will be the most powerful ideological weapons to complete the religious reform and completely reshape the spiritual world of the Mexica!

The Order of Priests has compiled a concise teaching of several thousand words called the Book of Amakli, or simply the Book of Ali. In the Nahua language, "amakoli" means book, revelation, reading or scroll.

The Book of Ali is generally a scripture that praises the supremacy of the Lord God, and describes the myth of the Lord God's creation of the world. Its text is simple and simple, referring to the content of the thousand-character script, and it is used as the most elementary enlightenment book, just like the European Bible.

Since the engraving can be practical, the next step is to print tens of thousands of Ari Sutras and distribute them to every community military school. When the literacy education of the first priests is completed, they will go to every town and village of the Alliance with new weapons of thought. They will teach the will of the Lord God to every fifteen-year-old boy, popularize new religious ideas, completely change the next generation of the alliance, and establish the supreme kingdom of God on earth!

Thinking of this, Shirot's heart was ups and downs. In addition to printed scriptures, engravings can also depict majestic great temples and complete mythological stories. In the form of a picture book, the revelation and teachings of the Lord God are left to the illiterate ordinary people. It can also print prayer rituals, legal texts, calendar knowledge and agricultural icons to guide daily life and production.

All in all, printing and religious books will drastically reduce the difficulty of spreading religious ideas and rapidly advance the monotheistic reformation. From the current point of view, papermaking and printing technology must be kept strictly secret, and both papermaking and book printing can only be carried out in the capital.

This matter is related to the great cause of the Mexicans. For at least two generations, the core of the alliance must maintain the absolute monopoly advantage in cultural communication, and form a cross-dimensional cultural attack on the Central American states where the writing has not yet been formed!

Sherlot thought quickly and made a decision. All artisans must be closely monitored, registered, and even socially isolated. Book printing will become the bane of the priesthood. Those who dare to set foot in this field, whether they are commoners or nobles, will only have a dead end!

Thinking of this, he looked at Aquila calmly and indifferently. The middle-aged jade craftsman suddenly felt a chill in his heart, and hurriedly bowed his head and saluted, not daring to look directly.

Then, Shilot continued to think about the development of movable type printing in Europe. The religious reforms it brings will decide the fate of the Spanish Empire, the great enemy of the Aztec alliance.

About forty years ago, in 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing in the Holy Roman states. Today, this technology has been introduced to major European countries, and it is still spreading rapidly, giving birth to the opportunity for a new religious reform.

Thirty years later, almost at the same time that the Spanish invaded the Aztec Empire, the flames of the Reformation would first be ignited in the HRE countries, and then Britain would break with the Roman Church and establish an Anglican Church. The flame of Protestantism will gradually burn all over Europe.

Historically, the Spaniards who conquered the Americas would possess wealth beyond the European countries and reach their golden age. Due to religious differences, the pious Kingdom of Spain was therefore hostile to the Kingdom of England. Britain then supported the Netherlands' war of independence from Spain and plundered Spanish fleets in the Americas.

In the dual hostility of religion and kingship, the Kingdom of Spain finally sent an armada to try to conquer Britain, and then unexpectedly ended the war. The Armada was defeated at the Battle of Graveland and, coupled with a strong southerly wind, was forced to flee north. In the end, the loss of the Armada exceeded two-thirds, and more than a hundred large ships sank in the ocean, losing effective control over the Americas.

Then came the brutal and unusual thirty years of religious wars, which completely announced the decline of the Spanish Empire and the end of the Golden Age. The final finale was the War of Spanish Succession 50 years later. Spain lost almost all of its territory outside the Iberian Peninsula, and the empire ended.

Looking at the paper on which thoughts were printed, Shirlot fell into deep thought.

The development of history is a dynamic process, all kinds of clues are complicated and intertwined, and the times are moving forward. Important events in history are just records and manifestations of violent and dynamic conflicts in the general trend. The printing press gave birth to the general trend of the Reformation, the flame of Protestantism could not be extinguished by the Roman Church, and the centrifugal force of England was also driven by the general trend.

Regardless of religion and culture, purely diplomatically speaking, the Protestant Reformed Kingdom of England and the pious Spanish Empire had always been hostile and were natural allies of the alliance. In the distant future, this will be an important opportunity.

After thinking for a long time, Shilot shook his head and retracted his thoughts from the history that had not yet happened. He once again considered the technology and feasibility of movable type printing.

Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing consists of two parts: the lead movable type casting, and the wooden printing press.

The wooden printing press here is just a screw-type wine press that turns with threads and levers to stably apply pressure to the wood below for printing. This technique was invented after BC, and it was not uncommon in the Chinese dynasties. In fact, the printing press has never been the decisive factor in the application of movable type printing, movable type casting is!

Gutenberg's lead movable type casting technology comes from the casting of goldsmiths, and the technological innovation lies in the steps of yin and yang casting. He first used hard metal to make a yang character model, and then used the yang character model to knock and carve on soft metal, and then reproduced a font containing yin characters. Finally, low-melting lead and tin are cast using an inscription mold to produce a large number of repeating inscription grains for layout and printing.

This technology also has no technical bottleneck for Huaxia's goldsmiths. The copper-plate banknotes of the Song Dynasty already used metal movable type to print different anti-counterfeiting font sizes. However, metal movable type has not been popularized in the Celestial Dynasty, and its root cause lies in the essential difference between the Chinese script system and the Latin alphabet system.

There are more than 10,000 Chinese characters in the Chinese character system, and there are thousands of commonly used characters. The Latin alphabet has only 26 letters, and Old Latin even has only 21. The movable type libraries of the two are not on the same scale at all, and the difference is two orders of magnitude. This vastly different production cost determines whether the technology is practical or not.

From the perspective of the training of printing workers, movable type workers of Chinese characters must know thousands to 10,000 Chinese characters, understand the sound and rhyme, know the position of each character in the thousands of characters, and prepare plural frequently used characters. As for movable type workers in the Latin alphabet, as long as they can spell 26 letters, an ordinary apprentice can learn it in a few days.

Shilot pondered silently, and finally nodded his head.

After the precipitation of history, the writing system of the Celestial Dynasty completely chose engraving and printing, and metal movable type is only digital anti-counterfeiting at most. And the Mexicans who embrace Chinese characters will inevitably use woodblock printing. Block printing is characterized by low cost, low craftsmanship, long-term preservation, and low requirements for worker culture, which is also in line with the status quo of the alliance.

Woodblock printing would remain the mainstay of the Alliance until technological advances brought about by the Industrial Revolution made movable metal type incredibly cheap.

In a moment, Shulot set the alliance's century-old technical route. He continued to look at the engraved ink.

Metal movable type does not touch water, and ink needs to be used, that is, adding animal and vegetable oil and turpentine oil to the ink. Since he decided to use a wooden engraving, the boy only cared about the ink used for the wood.

There are two types of ink in the alliance, one is natural black ink made from natural coal, which is coal, and the other is blue ink made from vegetable dyes and mineral clay.

Shilot pondered slightly. In the areas controlled by the Union, natural coal is very scarce and is only occasionally used as a black paint. The main source of these paints was the Zapotec people of the South, proving that there must be open pit coal mines of unknown size.

According to the young man's memory, the northern land of dog descent, near the future Texas, has a large amount of oil and also stores the large coal mines formed together. These key mineral deposits are the key places that must be occupied, and are also the driving force for future industrial development~www.readwn.com~ In addition to natural coal, the common method of ink production in China is to burn wood to obtain smoke. Shulot recalled the production process of Huimo and analyzed every picture in his impression. The top-secret production process of Daming in this era will be freely circulated on the Internet in the future.

It's a pity that he thought about it for a long time, and he only remembered that it was burning pine wood, taking the pine smoke on the surface, and then adding gum to bond it. It seems that there is a process of gold painting? The teenager shook his head, and according to the existing ideas, he would arrange for a craftsman to try it out after a while.

The middle-aged jade craftsman Aguilar lowered his head and waited for a while before quietly raising his head, seeing His Highness shaking his head. He fell to the ground again in panic, his head pressed tightly to the ground, and there was a slight noise from the collision.

Shirot shifted his gaze and landed on Aquila on the ground. He smiled contentedly and promised aloud.

"Aquila, you did a good job! From today, I will consecrate you as a master craftsman of engraving, which is equivalent to the military nobles of the alliance! You will have gold, silver, gems and the land of Qinampa. You can promote two The children are royal warriors, as my followers!"

Hearing this, Aguilar raised her head in disbelief, with shock and surprise on her face. Afterwards, he lowered his head again forcefully, and kowtowed deeply on the ground, making a fierce sound.

Shirot's eyes were deep for a moment, and then he slowly opened his mouth.

"Starting tomorrow, I will send two samurai to **** you personally. The technical craftsmanship here will be listed in the top secret of the alliance. I will send you a special apprentice. From today, you will be the exclusive craftsman of the priesthood. !"

After speaking, the young man calmly watched the middle-aged jade craftsman for a moment, observing the joy and pious expression of the other party. After a long time, he nodded in satisfaction, turned around and went to the papermaking place.