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Likewise the Aztec Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan is a grand religious monument. Unlike Angkor Wat, the Aztec monument is in serious disrepair, but it was originally built for the purposes of large-scale human sacrifice, followed by anthropophagy. None of this is still in evidence today: tourists to present-day Mexico City do not get to see daily re-enactments of still-beating hearts ripped from the chests of sacrificial victims with obsidian knives. The reason for the monument has been posited that the Aztec culture had limited access to protein, with no domesticable livestock save dogs and turkeys: therefore cannibalism seemed the most reasonable option for dietary protein. However, the Templo Mayor demonstrates that sometimes non-western cultures can build monuments to things that any reasonable twenty-first century person (western or non-western) can find repellent. The Aztec temple seems mostly a monument to justify a truly horrific basis of society by calling it the will of bloodthirsty gods.

In some sense, a work like Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not entirely unlike the Aztec Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan -- both did have a fondness for reflective black obsidian after all, but more to the point both are in some way intended to justify grotesque acts of state-sponsored bloodshed. There is no need to indulge in the moral casuistry which asks if U.S. atrocities in Vietnam would have been better or worse if the American soldiers had behaved like Aztecs and eaten their victims afterward. The real point is that large-scale state-sanctioned murder of anyone represents a form of societal trauma, and the artwork steps into the breach to explain it. Angkor Wat has no such justification to perform: instead the two religions that were celebrated on its precincts (Hinduism and Buddhism) preach the essential unreality and misery of all human existence, such that Aztec cannibalism or napalming civilians becomes merely one more colorful patch on the veil of Maya, one more misery of the cycle of samsara that will one day be escaped.

The sixteenth-century ivory pendant mask, made by the Benin empire of Nigeria, is in the permanent collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met. 1978.412.323). It is unusual in terms of general African mask-making tradition for a number of reasons. It is made of ivory. It is not a mask to be worn over the face but as a pendant, hanging from around the neck. It is also intended, in the conjectures of historians, to be a specific portrait of a real person, the mother of the Benin emperor. As a depiction of a historical person, and a woman, it is therefore somewhat unusual. The Benin empire was located in present-day Nigeria. Pendant masks are worn today in "annual ceremonies of spiritual renewal and purification" but the actual purpose