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Indigenous literature is expressed in various forms of poetry and prose: great epic poems recalling cosmological myths and legends about the gods and cultural heroes, sacred hymns, and a variety of religious poetry often lyrical and sometimes dramatic, chronicles and historical accounts based on the ancient annals, and, finally, stories of creative imagination and instructive texts covering numerous topics. The greatest wealth of preserved literary texts (due to the efforts of friars and native survivors) has come down to us from the Náhuas of Central Mexico. Náhuatl literature (the literature of the people of the empire which sprawled across much of modern Mexico, collectively referred to as the “Mexica”) covered all aspects of life, for its aim was to help the memory to retain the whole accumulated knowledge of earlier generations, their religious ideas, myths, ritual, divination, medicine, history, law, as well as rhetoric and lyric and epic poetry. Prose was used for instructive treatises, mythical and historical narratives and verse for religious or profane poems. Many accounts or descriptions of events were in the form of poetry or rhythmic verses, since this format was easier to commit to memory. Some of these poems were veritable sagas, and others reflections upon the brevity of life or the uncertainty of fate, satisfying this culture’s appetite for philosophico-moral rhetoric. In contrast to the delicate sensitivity of the poems and legends of Maya literature, the often forceful expressions of Náhuatl literature reflect the mentality of the Aztecs, a people obsessed by a mysticomilitaristic concept of life. Ritual was a major tool in the creation of an imperial people—a highly elastic and dynamic expressive mode, more akin to street theatre and collective popular representation of familiar “performance texts.” Such extended dramatized performances (they often lasted days), recruiting different groups of participants from different social levels in complex sequence, were themselves sculpted successions of choreographed sentiments loosely organized around a theme, and made the more powerful for being repeatable, public, and participatory through the ritual aesthetic. Books or written accounts, using a compromise between ideogram, phoneticism and simple representation or pictography, served merely as prompters to the memory, since historical accounts, hymns and poems had to be learned by heart for transmission. For this reason, certain prompts were used such as phonetic parallels, assonances and alliterations.