Aztec and Giza Pyramids

Aztec and Giza Pyramids,

The Transatlantic Voyages of Mansa Musa

Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw

Aztec pyramids, a civilization aligning itself with the sun.The great ceremonial structures of Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, and the earlier monumental city of Teotihuacan, were not merely architecture. They were cosmology. They were declarations that earth could rise toward heaven through human will.

These pyramids were not tombs. They were stages for ritual, for sacrifice, for renewal. They were calendars in stone, mapping solar cycles and agricultural rhythms. The Aztec imagination did not separate politics from the cosmos. To build upward was to stabilize the universe.

Across the ocean, centuries earlier, Mansa Musa ruled the vast Mali Empire. If the Aztecs built mountains, Musa moved rivers — rivers of gold flowing across the Sahara into Cairo and beyond. His famous pilgrimage was not excess; it was sovereignty performed.

I am often drawn to the question that hovers between these two worlds: could Mali have crossed the Atlantic before Europe did? There are chronicles that speak of fleets sent westward before Musa’s reign. There are currents that flow from West Africa toward the Americas. There are dreams of contact.

But history requires humility. There is no decisive archaeological evidence linking Mali to Mesoamerica before Columbus. The Aztec world grew from deep indigenous roots, from centuries of Mesoamerican continuity. Its pyramids were not borrowed; they were born of their own cosmology.

Yet the question itself fascinates me.Because for centuries, history has been narrated as if greatness radiated from a single axis. But when I look at the 14th and 15th centuries, I see multiple centers of brilliance. Timbuktu, illuminated by manuscripts. Tenochtitlan, reflected in lake waters. Cairo, Venice, Mecca — all part of different constellations.

Mansa Musa represents Africa as axis. The Aztec pyramids might have Musa connections through his Transatlantic voyage, when Columbus first arrived, they had found West African gold in the Americas and there was African people living there according to many historical resorces.

The pyramids rise vertically — stone ascending toward the sun. Mali’s power moved horizontally — caravans crossing deserts, gold reshaping economies. One built height. The other built reach.

In both, I see sovereignty as architecture. And even if Musa never saw the shores of the Americas, the Atlantic was already a space of imagination long before it became a space of conquest. The legend of an African voyage westward reveals a hunger to restore balance — to remember that Africa was maritime, intellectual, expansive; that the Americas were urban, astronomical, philosophical.

We must be careful not to replace one myth with another. But we must also resist narratives of isolation.

Civilizations often rise in parallel. They do not need to borrow greatness to possess it, two suns rising independently on either side of the ocean — each illuminating its own world, each shaping time, each refusing invisibility. And history, if we listen carefully, tells us that the world was always wider than we were taught.

Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw

16 February 2026 Saint Germain Des Pres