IN London last week, and finding myself with an hour or two to spare, I went along to the Aztec Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

For those of you who would rather spend your trips to London walking around Piccadilly Circus staring at junkies and girls wearing short skirts, I would highly recommend a slight detour around the corner to the time-stained buildings of the RA.

Although I was casual about visiting the exhibition, I noticed that my heart was pounding when I walked in.

At last I would see something of what I had devoted two years of my life studying.

A long time ago at university I had chosen to write a dissertation on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and when asked by my tutor why I had chosen that particular subject, I replied that I had picked it because I knew nothing at all about it. That fixed him.

For those of you possessing similar scant information, the Aztecs were one if the most advanced civilisations in the world until the Spanish finally crushed them in 1521.

The Spaniards came in the name of God to convert the heathen native of the Yucatan Peninsula but what they were really after was gold.

Waving the Bible and swindling the natives always reminds me of ourselves here in Northern Ireland. Maybe that’s what attracted me to the subject in the first place.

The Spaniards had trouble figuring out the Aztecs. For instance, the latter’s sophisticated culture boasted triumphs in natural science, engineering, fine arts, poetry, philosophy and literature but they’d never managed to invent the wheel.

They stared in wonder at the primitive Spanish carts.

Also, they placed little value on gold, treating it in much the same way as we would plastic.

True, they fashioned intricate objects from the rare metal, but what they really valued were gaily coloured feathers from exotic birds. This suited the Spaniards down to the ground.

Never overly keen on feathers, they obligingly took all the beautifully fashioned gold objects and melted them down into handily portable gold bars.

The Aztecs were in the habit of going to war amongst themselves using feather shields as defence. Foolhardy though that may have seemed, it didn’t matter all that much because nobody got killed fighting anyway. The object of war was to take prisoners who would later be sacrificed to the gods.

Think of how easy it was for a couple of hundred Spaniards to subdue the Mexican hordes when they realised that the Aztecs weren’t used to people killing them.

I wandered round the exhibition with my mouth open. There they all were, ingots of gold melted down by the Spanish, a few surviving pieces of Aztec gold craftsmanship, sacrificial knives for carving prisoner’s hearts out, terrifying statues, miraculously preserved useless feather shields, obsidian skulls and death drums.

Then I saw a vessel used for holding intoxicating drink that appeared to have deliberate holes in it.

Using Aztec logic, I understood straight away. The holes were there to prevent the Aztecs from drinking enough to render them so drunk that they couldn’t wield a feather shield.

My Uncle Manny in Donegal used the same principle whenever he went to collect a ration of poteen from a man who had a still half way up the mountain.

Manny used to bring a shallow-draught metal can with no lid on it. As soon as the can was filled he would make his way back down the mountain, taking the occasional slurp of the crattur as he descended. The more slurps he took, the more intoxicated he became, and the more intoxicated he became, the more poteen would spill from the can. When he eventually arrived home he would be very drunk and the can would be empty. Remember now, he had only drunk half the contents of the can, the rest being clumsily spilt.

I once quizzed him about this apparent wastage and suggested that he would be better off with a lid on the can as he would manage to save 50% of the contents.

He replied by saying that, as he only needed half a can’s worth to get drunk, he didn’t need the other half anyway.

Those Aztecs had nothing to learn. Neither had my uncle.

Originally published in The Belfast Telegraph