Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8) / Aboriginal America

by Unknown

CHAPTER III.

MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA.

BY JUSTIN WINSOR.

THE traditions of the migrations of the Chichimecs, Colhuas, and Nahuas,” says Max Müller,[785] “are no better than the Greek traditions about Pelasgians, Æolians, and Ionians, and it would be a mere waste of time to construct out of such elements a systematic history, only to be destroyed again, sooner or later, by some Niebuhr, Grote, or Lewis.”

“It is yet too early,” says Bandelier,[786] “to establish a definite chronology, running farther back from the Conquest than two centuries,[787] and even within that period but very few dates have been satisfactorily fixed.”

Such are the conditions of the story which it is the purpose of this chapter to tell.

We have, to begin with, as in other history, the recognition of a race of giants, convenient to hang legends on, and accounted on all hands to have been occupants of the country in the dimmest past, so that there is nothing back of them. Who they were, whence they came, and what stands for their descendants after we get down to what in this pre-Spanish history we rather presumptuously call historic ground, is far from clear. If we had the easy faith of the native historian Ixtlilxochitl, we should believe that these gigantic Quinames, or Quinametin, were for the most part swallowed up in a great convulsion of nature, and it was those who escaped which the Olmecs and Tlascalans encountered in entering the country.[788] If all this means anything, which may well be doubted, it is as likely as not that these giants were the followers of a demi-god, Votan,[789] who came from over-sea to America,[790] found it peopled, established a government in Xibalba,—if such a place ever existed,—with the germs of Maya if not of other civilizations, whence, by migrations during succeeding times, the Votanites spread north and occupied the Mexican plateau, where they became degenerate, doubtless, if they deserved the extinction which we are told was in store for them. But they had an alleged chronicler for their early days, the writer of the Book of Votan, written either by the hero himself or by one of his descendants,—eight or nine generations in the range of authorship making little difference apparently. That this narrative was known to Francisco Nuñez de la Vega[791] would seem to imply that somebody at that time had turned it into readable script out of the unreadable hieroglyphics, while the disguises of the Spanish tongue, perhaps, as Bancroft[792] suggests, may have saved it from the iconoclastic zeal of the priests. When, later, Ramon de Ordoñez had the document,—perhaps the identical manuscript,—it consisted of a few folios of quarto paper, and was written in Roman script in the Tzendal tongue, and was inspected by Cabrera, who tells us something of its purport in his Teatro critico Americano, while Ramon himself was at the same time using it in his Historia del Cielo y de la Tierra. It was from a later copy of this last essay, the first copy being unknown, that the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg got his knowledge of what Ramon had derived from the Votan narrative, and which Brasseur has given us in several of his books.[793] That there was a primitive empire—Votanic, if you please—seems to some minds confirmed by other evidences than the story of Votan; and out of this empire—to adopt a European nomenclature—have come, as such believers say, after its downfall somewhere near the Christian era, and by divergence, the great stocks of people called Maya, Quiché, and Nahua, inhabiting later, and respectively, Yucatan, Guatemala, and Mexico. This is the view, if we accept the theory which Bancroft has prominently advocated, that the migrations of the Nahuas were from the south northward,[794] and that this was the period of the divergence, eighteen centuries ago or more, of the great civilizing stocks of Mexico and of Central America.[795] We fail to find so early a contact of these two races, if, on the other hand, we accept the old theory that the migrations which established the Toltec and Aztec powers were from the north southward,[796] through three several lines, as is sometimes held, one on each side of the Rocky Mountains, with a third following the coast. In this way such advocates trace the course of the Olmecs, who encountered the giants, and later of the Toltecs.

That the Votanic peoples or some other ancient tribes were then a distinct source of civilization, and that Palenqué may even be Xibalba, or the Nachan, which Votan founded, is a belief that some archæologists find the evidence of in certain radical differences in the Maya tongues and in the Maya ruins.[797]

In the Quiché traditions, as preserved in the Popul Vuh, and in the Annals of the Cakchiquels, we likewise go back into mistiness and into the inevitable myths which give the modern comparative mythologists so much comfort and enlightenment; but Bancroft[798] and the rest get from all this nebulousness, as was gotten from the Maya traditions, that there was a great power at Xibalba,[799]—if in Central America anywhere that place may have been,—which was overcome[800] when from Tulan[801] went out migrating chiefs, who founded the Quiché-Cakchiquel peoples of Guatemala, while others, the Yaqui,—very likely only traders,—went to Mexico, and still others went to Yucatan, thus accounting for the subsequent great centres of aboriginal power—if we accept this view.

As respects the traditions of the more northern races, there is the same choice of belief and alternative demonstration. The Olmecs, the earliest Nahua corners, are sometimes spoken of as sailing from Florida and landing on the coast at what is now Pánuco, whence they travelled to Guatemala,[802] and finally settled in Tamoanchan, and offered their sacrifices farther north at Teotihuacan.[803] This is very likely the Votan legend suited to the more northern region, and if so, it serves to show, unless we discard the whole theory, how the Votanic people had scattered. The other principal source of our suppositions—for we can hardly call it knowledge—of these times is the Codex Chimalpòpoca, of which there is elsewhere an account,[804] and from it we can derive much the same impressions, if we are disposed to sustain a preconceived notion.

The periods and succession of the races whose annals make up the history of what we now call Mexico, prior to the coming of the Spaniards, are confused and debatable. Whether under the name of Chichimecs we are to understand a distinct people, or a varied and conglomerate mass of people, which, in a generic way, we might call barbarians, is a question open to discussion.[805] There is no lack of names[806] to be applied to the tribes and bands which, according to all accounts, occupied the Mexican territory previous to the sixth century. Some of them were very likely Nahua forerunners[807] of the subsequent great influx of that race, like the Olmecs and Xicalancas, and may have been the people, “from the direction of Florida,” of whom mention has been made. Others, as some say, were eddies of those populous waves which, coming by the north from Asia, overflowed the Rocky Mountains, and became the builders of mounds and the later peoples of the Mississippi Valley,[808] passed down the trend of the Rocky Mountains, and built cliff-houses and pueblos, or streamed into the table-land of Mexico. This is all conjecture, perhaps delusion, but may be as good a supposition as any, if we agree to the northern theory, as Nadaillac[809] does, but not so tenable, if, with the contrary Bancroft,[810] we hold rather that they came from the south. We can turn from one to the other of these theorists and agree with both, as they cite their evidences. On the whole, a double compliance is better than dogmatism. It is one thing to lose one’s way in this labyrinth of belief, and another to lose one’s head.

It was the Olmecs who found the Quinames, or giants, near Puebla and Cholula, and in the end overcame them. The Olmecs built, according to one story, the great pyramid of Cholula,[811] and it was they who received the great Quetzalcoatl from across the sea, a white-bearded man, as the legends went, who was benign enough, in the stories told of him, to make the later Spaniards think, when they heard them, that he was no other than the Christian St. Thomas on his missions. When the Spaniards finally induced the inheritors of the Olmecs’ power to worship Quetzalcoatl as a beneficent god, his temple soon topped the mound at Cholula.[812] We have seen that the great Nahua occupation of the Mexican plateau, at a period somewhere from the fourth to the seventh century,[813] was preceded by some scattered tribal organizations of the same stock, which had at an early date mingled with the primitive peoples of this region. We have seen that there is a diversity of opinion as to the country from which they came, whether from the north or south. A consideration of this question involves the whole question of the migration of races in these pre-Columbian days, since it is the coming and going of peoples that form the basis of all its history.

In the study of these migrations, we find no more unanimity of interpretation than in other questions of these early times.[814] The Nahua peoples (Toltecs, Aztecs, Mexicans, or what you will), according to the prevalent views of the early Spanish writers, came by successive influxes from the north or northwest, and from a remote place called Tollan, Tula, Tlapallan, Huehue-Tlapallan, as respects the Toltec group,[815] and called Aztlan as respects the Aztec or Mexican. When, by settlement after settlement, each migratory people pushed farther south, they finally reached Central Mexico. This sequence of immigration seems to be agreed upon, but as to where their cradle was and as to what direction their line of progress took, there is a diversity of opinion as widely separated as the north is from the south. The northern position and the southern direction is all but universally accepted among the early Spanish writers[816] and their followers,[817] while it is claimed by others that the traditions as preserved point to the south as the starting-point. Cabrera took this view. Brasseur sought to reconcile conflicting tradition and Spanish statement by carrying the line of migration from the south with a northerly sweep, so that in the end Anahuac would be entered from the north, with which theory Bancroft[818] is inclined to agree. Aztlan, as well as Huehue-Tlapallan, by those who support the northern theory, has been placed anywhere from the California peninsula[819] within a radius that sweeps through Wisconsin and strikes the Atlantic at Florida.[820]

The advocates of the southern starting-point of these migrations have been comparatively few and of recent prominence; chief among them are Squier and Bancroft.[821]

With the appearance of a people, which, for want of a better designation, are usually termed Toltecs, on the Mexican table-land in the sixth century or thereabouts,[822] we begin the early history of Mexico, so far as we can make any deductions from the semi-mythical records and traditions which the Spaniards or the later aborigines have preserved for us. This story of the Nahua occupation of Anáhuac is one of strife and shifting vassalage, with rivalries and uprisings of neighboring and kindred tribes, going on for centuries. While the more advanced portion of the Nahuas in Anáhuac were making progress in the arts, that division of the same stock which was living beyond such influence, and without the bounds of Anáhuac, were looked upon rather as barbarians than as brothers, and acquired the name which had become a general one for such rougher natures, Chichimec. It is this Chichimec people under some name or other who are always starting up and overturning something. At one time they unite with the Colhuas and found Colhuacan, and nearly subjugate the lake region. Then the Toltec tarriers at Huehue-Tlapallan come boldly to the neighborhood of the Chichimecs and found Tollan; and thus they turn a wandering community into what, for want of a better name, is called a monarchy. They strengthened its government by an alliance with the Chichimecs,[823] and placed their seat of power at Colhuacan.

Then we read of a power springing up at Tezcuco, and of various other events, which happened or did not happen, according as you believe this or the other chronicle. The run of many of the stories of course produces the inevitable and beautiful daughter, and the bold princess, who control many an event. Then there is a league of Colhuacan, Otompan, and Tollan. Suddenly appears the great king Quetzalcoatl,—though it may be we confound him with the divinity of that name; and with him, to perplex matters, comes his sworn enemy Huemac. Quetzalcoatl’s devoted labors to make his people give up human sacrifice arrayed the priesthood against him, until at last he fell before the intrigues that made Huemac succeed in Tollan, and that drove his luckless rival to Cholula, where he reigned anew. Huemac followed him and drove him farther; but in doing so he gave his enemies in Tollan a chance to put another on the throne.

Then came a season of peace and development, when Tollan grew splendid. Colhuacan flourished in political power, and Teotihuacan[824] and Cholula were the religious shrines of the people. But at last the end was near.

The closing century of the Toltec power was a frightful one for broil, pestilence, and famine among the people, amours and revenge in the great chieftain’s household, revolt among the vassals; with sorcery rampant and the gods angry; with volcanoes belching, summers like a furnace, and winters like the pole; with the dreaded omen of a rabbit, horned like a deer, confronting the ruler, while rebel forces threatened the capital. There was also civil strife within the gates, phallic worship and debauchery,—all preceding an inundation of Chichimecan hordes. Thus the power that had flourished for several hundred years fell,—seemingly in the latter half of the eleventh century.[825] The remnant that was left of the desolated people went hither and thither, till the fragments were absorbed in the conquerors, or migrated to distant regions south.[826]

Whether the term Toltec signified a nation, or only denoted a dynasty, is a question for the archæologists to determine. The general opinion heretofore has been that they were a distinct race, of the Nahua stock, however, and that they came from the north. The story which has been thus far told of their history is the narrative of Ixtlilxochitl, and is repeated by Veytia, Clavigero, Prescott, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Orozco y Berra, Nadaillac, and the later compilers. Sahagún seems to have been the first to make a distinct use of the name Toltec, and Charency in his paper on Xibalba finds evidence that the Toltecs constituted two different migrations, the one of a race that was straight-headed, which came from the northwest, and the other of a flat-headed people, which came from Florida.

Brinton, on the contrary, finds no warrant either for this dual migration, or indeed for considering the Toltecs to be other than a section of the same race, that we know later as Aztecs or Mexicans. This sweeping denial of their ethnical independence had been forestalled by Gallatin;[827] but no one before Brinton had made it a distinct issue, though some writers before and since have verged on his views.[828] Others, like Charnay, have answered Brinton’s arguments, and defended the older views.[829] Bandelier’s views connect them with the Maya rather than with the Nahua stock,[830] if, as he thinks may be the case, they were the people who landed at Pánuco and settled at Tamoanchan, the Votanites, as they are sometimes called. He traces back to Herrera and Torquemada the identification for the first time of the Toltecs with these people.[831] Bandelier’s conclusions, however, are that “all we can gather about them with safety is, that they were a sedentary Indian stock, which at some remote period settled in Central Mexico,” and that “nothing certain is known of their language.”[832]

The desolation of Anáhuac as the Toltecs fell invited a foreign occupation, and a remote people called Chichimecs[833]—not to be confounded with the primitive barbarians which are often so called—poured down upon the country. Just how long after the Toltec downfall this happened, is in dispute;[834] but within a few years evidently, perhaps within not many months, came the rush of millions, if we may believe the big stories of the migration. They surged by the ruined capital of the Toltecs, came to the lake, founded Xoloc and Tenayocan, and encountered, as they spread over the country, what were left of the Toltecs, who secured peace by becoming vassals. Not quite so humble were the Colhuas of Colhuacan,—not to be confounded with the Acolhuas,—who were the most powerful section of the Toltecs yet left, and the Chichimecs set about crushing them, and succeeded in making them also vassals.[835] The Chichimec monarchs, if that term does not misrepresent them, soon formed alliances with the Tepanecs, the Otomis, and the Acolhuas, who had been prominent in the overthrow of the Toltecs, and all the invaders profited by the higher organizations and arts which these tribes had preserved and now imparted. The Chichimecs also sought to increase the stability of their power by marriages with the noble Toltecs still remaining. But all was not peace. There were rebellions from time to time to be put down; and a new people, whose future they did not then apprehend, had come in among them and settled at Chapultepec. These were the Aztecs, or Mexicans, a part of the great Nahua immigration, but as a tribe they had dallied behind the others on the way, but were now come, and the last to come.[836]

Tezcuco soon grew into prominence as a vassal power,[837] and upon the capital city many embellishments were bestowed, so that the great lord of the Chichimecs preferred it to his own Tenayocan, which gave opportunity for rebellious plots to be formed in his proper capital; and here at Tezcuco the next succeeding ruler preferred to reign, and here he became isolated by the uprising of rebellious nobles. The ensuing war was not simply of side against side, but counter-revolutions led to a confusion of tumults, and petty chieftains set themselves up against others here and there. The result was that Quinantzin, who had lost the general headship of the country, recovered it, and finally consolidated his power to a degree surpassing all his predecessors.

CLAVIGERO’S MEXICO.[838] (Ed. of 1780, vol. iii.)

CLAVIGERO’S MAP. (Ed. of 1580, vol. i.)

Clavigero speaks of his map “per servire all storia antica del Messico.” A map of the Aztec dominion just before the Conquest is given in Ranking (London, 1827). See note in Vol. II. p. 358.

Meanwhile the Aztecs at Chapultepec, growing arrogant, provoked their neighbors, and were repressed by those who were more powerful. But they abided their time. They were good fighters, and the Colhua ruler courted them to assist him in his maraudings, and thus they were becoming accustomed to warfare and to conquest, and were giving favors to be repaid. This intercourse, whether of association or rivalry, of the Colhuas and Mexicans (Aztecs), was continued through succeeding periods, with a confusion of dates and events which it is hard to make clear. There was mutual distrust and confidence alternately, and it all ended in the Aztecs settling on an island in the lake, where later they founded Tenochtitlan, or Mexico.[839] Here they developed those bloody rites of sacrifice which had already disgusted their allies and neighbors.

THE LAKE OF MEXICO.

A map which did service in different forms in various books about Mexico and its aboriginal localities in the early part of the eighteenth century. It is here taken from the Voyages de Francois Coreal (Amsterdam, 1722).

Meanwhile the powers at Colhuacan and Azcapuzalco flourished and repressed uprisings, and out of all the strife Tezozomoc came into prominence with his Tepanecs, and amid it all the Aztecs, siding here and there, gained territory. With all this occurring in different parts of his dominions, the Chichimec potentate grew stronger and stronger, and while by his countenance the old Toltec influences more and more predominated. And so it was a flourishing government, with little to mar its prospects but the ambition of Tezozomoc, the Tepanec chieftain, and the rising power of the Aztecs, who had now become divided into Mexicans and Tlatelulcas. The famous ruler of the Chichimecs, Techotl, died in a.d. 1357, and the young Ixtlilxochitl took his power with all its emblems. The people of Tenochtitlan, or their rulers, were adepts in practising those arts of diplomacy by which an ambitious nation places itself beside its superiors to secure a sort of reflected consequence. Thus they pursued matrimonial alliances and other acts of prudence. Both Tenochtitlan and its neighbor Tlatelulco grew apace, while skilled artisans and commercial industries helped to raise them in importance.

The young Ixtlilxochitl at Tezcuco was not so fortunate, and it soon looked as if the Tepanec prince, Tezozomoc, was only waiting an opportunity to rebel. It was also pretty clear that he would have the aid of Mexico and Tlatelulco, and that he would succeed in securing the sympathy of many wavering vassals or allies. The plans of the Tepanec chieftain at last ripened, and he invaded the Tezcucan territory in 1415. In the war which followed, Ixtlilxochitl reversed the tide and invaded the Tepanec territory, besieging and capturing its capital, Azcapuzalco.[840] The conqueror lost by his clemency what he had gained by arms, and it was not long before he was in turn shut up in his own capital. He did not succeed in defending it, and was at last killed. So Tezozomoc reached his vantage of ambition, and was now in his old age the lord paramount of the country. He tried to harmonize the varied elements of his people; but the Mexicans had not fared in the general successes as they had hoped for, and were only openly content. The death of Tezozomoc prepared the way for one of his sons, Maxtla, to seize the command, and the vassal lords soon found that the spirit which had murdered a brother had aims that threatened wider desolation. The Mexicans were the particular object of Maxtla’s oppressive spirit, and by the choice of Itzcoatl for their ruler, who had been for many years the Mexican war-chief, that people defied the lord of all, and in this they were joined by the Tlatelulcas under Quauhtlatohuatzin, and by lesser allies. Under this combination of his enemies Maxtla’s capital fell, the usurper was sacrificed, and the honors of the victory were shared by Itzcoatl, Nezahualcoyotl (the Acolhuan prince whose imperial rights Maxtla had usurped), and Montezuma, the first of the name,—all who had in their several capacities led the army of three or four hundred thousand allies, if we may believe the figures, to their successes, which occurred apparently somewhere between 1425 and 1430. The political result was a tripartite confederacy in Anáhuac, consisting of Acolhua, Mexico, and Tlacopan. In the division of spoils, the latter was to have one fifth, and the others two fifths each, the Acolhuan prince presiding in their councils as senior.[841]

The next hundred years is a record of the increasing power of this confederacy, with a constant tendency to give Mexico a larger influence.[842] The two capitals, Tenochtitlan and Tezcuco, looking at each other across the lake, were uninterruptedly growing in splendor, or in what the historians call by that word,[843] with all the adjuncts of public works,—causeways, canals, aqueducts, temples, palaces and gardens, and other evidences of wealth, which perhaps these modern terms only approximately represent. Tezcuco was taken possession of by Nezahualcoyotl as his ancient inheritance, and his confederate Itzcoatl placed the crown on his head. Together they made war north and south. Xochimilco, on the lake next south of Mexico, yielded; and the people of Chalco, which was on the most southern of the string of lakes, revolted and were suppressed more than once, as opportunities offered. The confederates crossed the ridge that formed the southern bound of the Mexican valley and sacked Quauhnahuac. The Mexican ruler had in all this gained a certain ascendency in the valley coalition, when he died in 1440, and his nephew, Montezuma the soldier, and first of the name,[844] succeeded him. This prince soon had on his hands another war with Chalco, and with the aid of his confederates he finally humbled its presumptuous people. So, with or without pretence, the wars and conquests went on, if for no other reasons, to obtain prisoners for sacrifice.[845] They were diversified at times, particularly in 1449, by contests with the powers of nature, when the rising waters of the lake threatened to drown their cities, and when, one evil being cured, others in the shape of famine and plague succeeded.

Sometimes in the wars the confederates over-calculated their own prowess, as when Atonaltzin of Tilantongo sent them reeling back, only, however, to make better preparations and to succeed at last. In another war to the southeast they captured, as the accounts say, over six thousand victims for the stone of sacrifice.

The first Montezuma died in 1469, and the choice for succession fell on his grandson, the commander of the Mexican army, Axayacatl, who at once followed the usual custom of raiding the country to the south to get the thousands of prisoners whose sacrifice should grace his coronation. Nezahualcoyotl, the other principal allied chieftain, survived his associate but two years, dying in 1472, leaving among his hundred children but one legitimate son, Nezahualpilli, a minor, who succeeded. This gave the new Mexican ruler the opportunity to increase his power. He made Tlatelulco tributary, and a Mexican governor took the place there of an independent sovereign. He annexed the Matlaltzinca provinces on the west. So Axayacatl, dying in 1481, bequeathed an enlarged kingdom to his brother and successor, Tizoc, who has not left so warlike a record. According to some authorities, however, he is to be credited with the completion of the great Mexican temple of Huitzilopochtli. This did not save him from assassination, and his brother Ahuitzotl in 1486 succeeded, and to him fell the lot of dedicating that great temple. He conducted fresh wars vigorously enough to be able within a year, if we may believe the native records, to secure sixty or seventy thousand captives for the sacrificial stone, so essential a part of all such dedicatory exercises. It would be tedious to enumerate all the succeeding conquests, though varied by some defeats, like that which they experienced in the Tehuantepec region. Some differences grew up, too, between the Mexican chieftain and Nezahualpilli, notwithstanding or because of the virtues of the latter, among which doubtless, according to the prevailing standard, we must count his taking at once three Mexican princesses for wives, and his keeping a harem of over two thousand women, if we may believe his descendant, the historian Ixtlilxochitl. His justice as an arbitrary monarch is mentioned as exemplary, and his putting to death a guilty son is recounted as proof of it.

Ahuitzotl had not as many virtues, or perhaps he had not a descendant to record them so effectively; but when he died in 1503, what there was heroic in his nature was commemorated in his likeness sculptured with others of his line on the cliff of Chapultepec.[846] To him succeeded that Montezuma, son of Axayacatl, with whom later this ancient history vanishes. When he came to power, the Aztec name was never significant of more lordly power, though the confederates had already had some reminders that conquest near home was easier than conquest far away. The policy of the last Aztec ruler was far from popular, and while he propitiated the higher ranks, he estranged the people. The hopes of the disaffected within and without Anáhuac were now centred in the Tlascalans, whose territory lay easterly towards the Gulf of Mexico, and who had thus far not felt the burden of Aztec oppression. Notwithstanding that their natural allies, the Cholulans, turned against the Tlascalans, the Aztec armies never succeeded in humbling them, as they did the Mistecs and the occupants of the region towards the Pacific. Eclipses, earthquakes, and famine soon succeeded one another, and the forebodings grew numerous. Hardly anything happened but the omens of disaster[847] were seen in it, and superstition began to do its work of enervation, while a breach between Montezuma and the Tezcucan chief was a bad augury. In this condition of things the Mexican king tried to buoy his hopes by further conquests; but widespread as these invasions were, Michoacan to the west, and Tlascala to the east, always kept their independence. The Zapotecs in Oajaca had at one time succumbed, but this was before the days of the last Montezuma.

His rival across the lake at Tezcuco was more oppressed with the tales of the soothsayers than Montezuma was, and seems to have become inert before what he thought an impending doom some time before he died, or, as his people believed, before he had been translated to the ancient Amaquemecan, the cradle of his race. This was in 1515. His son Cacama was chosen to succeed; but a younger brother, Ixtlilxochitl, believed that the choice was instigated by Montezuma for ulterior gain, and so began a revolt in the outlying provinces, in which he received the aid of Tlascala. The appearance of the Spaniards on the coasts of Yucatan and Tabasco, of which exaggerated reports reached the Mexican capital, paralyzed Montezuma, so that the northern revolt succeeded, and Cacama and Ixtlilxochitl came to an understanding, which left the Mexicans without much exterior support. Montezuma was in this crippled condition when his lookouts on the coast sent him word that the dreaded Spaniards had appeared, and he could recognize their wonderful power in the pictured records which the messenger bore to him.[848] This portent was the visit in 1518 of Juan de Grijalva to the spot where Vera Cruz now stands; and after the Spaniard sailed away, there were months of anxiety before word again reached the capital, in 1519, of another arrival of the white-winged vessels, and this was the coming of Cortés, who was not long in discovering that the path of his conquest was made clear by the current belief that he was the returned Quetzalcoatl,[849] and by his quick perception of the opportunity which presented itself of combining and leading the enemies of Montezuma.[850]

Among what are usually reckoned the civilized nations of middle America, there are two considerable centres of a dim history that have little relation with the story which has been thus far followed. One of these is that of the people of what we now call Guatemala, and the other that of Yucatan. The political society which existed in Guatemala had nothing of the known duration assigned to the more northern people, at least not in essential data; but we know of it simply as a very meagre and perplexing chronology running for the most part back two or three centuries only. Whether the beginnings of what we suppose we know of these people have anything to do with any Toltec migration southward is what archæologists dispute about, and the philologists seem to have the best of the argument in the proof that the tongue of these southern peoples is more like Maya than Nahua. It is claimed that the architectural remains of Guatemala indicate a departure from the Maya stock and some alliance with a foreign stock; and that this alien influence was Nahuan seems probable enough when we consider certain similarities in myth and tradition of the Nahuas and the Quichés. But we have not much even of tradition and myth of the early days, except what we my read in the Popul Vuh, where we may make out of it what we can, or even what we please,[851] with some mysterious connection with Votan and Xibalba. Among the mythical traditions of this mythical period, there are the inevitable migration stories, beginning with the Quichés and ending with the coming of the Cakchiquels, but no one knows to a surety when. The new-comers found Maya-speaking people, and called them mem or memes (stutterers), because they spoke the Maya so differently from themselves.

It was in the twelfth or thirteenth century that we get the first traces of any historical kind of the Quichés and of their rivals the Cakchiquels. Of their early rulers we have the customary diversities and inconsistencies in what purports to be their story, and it is difficult to say whether this or the other or some other tribe revolted, conquered, or were beaten, as we read the annals of this constant warfare. We meet something tangible, however, when we learn that Montezuma sent a messenger, who informed the Quichés of the presence of the Spaniards in his capital, which set them astir to be prepared in their turn.

MAP IN BRASSEUR’S POPUL VUH.

It is in the beginning of the sixteenth century that we encounter the rivalries of three prominent peoples in this Guatemala country, and these were the Quichés, the Cakchiquels, and the Zutigils; and of these the Quichés, with their main seat at Utatlan, were the most powerful, though not so much so but the Cakchiquels could get the best of them at times in the wager of war; as they did also finally when the Spaniard Alvarado appeared, with whom the Cakchiquels entered into an alliance that brought the Quichés into sore straits.

A more important nationality attracts us in the Mayas of Yucatan. There can be nothing but vague surmise as to what were the primitive inhabitants of this region; but it seems to be tolerably clear that a certain homogeneousness pervaded the people, speaking one tongue, which the Spaniards found in possession. Whether these had come from the northern regions, and were migrated Toltecs, as some believe, is open to discussion.[852] It has often been contended that they were originally of the Nahua and Toltec blood; but later writers, like Bancroft,[853] have denied it. Brinton discards the Toltec element entirely.

What by a license one may call history begins back with the semi-mythical Zamná, to whom all good things are ascribed—the introduction of the Maya institutions and of the Maya hieroglyphics.[854] Whether Zamná had any connection, shadowy or real, with the great Votanic demi-god, and with the establishment of the Xibalban empire, if it may be so called, is a thing to be asserted or denied, as one inclines to separate or unite the traditions of Yucatan with those of the Tzendal, Quiché, and Toltec. Ramon de Ordonez, in a spirit of vagary, tells us that Mayapan, the great city of the early Mayas, was but one of the group of centres, with Palenqué, Tulan, and Copan for the rest, as is believed, which made up the Votanic empire. Perhaps it was. If we accept Brinton’s view, it certainly was not. Then Torquemada and Landa tell us that Cukulcan, a great captain and a god, was but another Quetzalcoatl, or Gucumatz. Perhaps he was. Possibly also he was the bringer of Nahua influence to Mayapan, away back in a period corresponding to the early centuries of the Christian era. It is easy to say, in all this confusion, this is proved and that is not. The historian, accustomed to deal with palpable evidence, feels much inclined to leave all views in abeyance.

The Cocomes of Yucatan history were Cukulcan’s descendants or followers, and had a prosperous history, as we are told; and there came to live among them the Totul Xius, by some considered a Maya people, who like the Quichés had been subjected to Nahua influences, and who implanted in the monuments and institutions of Yucatan those traces of Nahua character which the archæologists discover.[855] The Totul Xius are placed in Uxmal in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, where they flourished along with the Cocomes, and it is to them that it is claimed many of the ruins which now interest us in Yucatan can be traced, though some of them perhaps go back to Zamná and to the Xibalban period, or at least it would be hard to prove otherwise.

When at last the Cocome chieftains began to oppress their subjects, the Totul Xius gave them shelter, and finally assisted them in a revolt, which succeeded and made Uxmal the supreme city, and Mayapan became a ruin, or at least was much neglected. The dynasty of the Totul Xius then flourished, but was in its turn overthrown, and a period of factions and revolutions followed, during which Mayapan was wholly obliterated, and the Totul Xius settled in Mani, where the Spaniards found them when they invaded Yucatan to make an easy conquest of a divided people.[856]

[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]

FROM the conquerors of New Spain we fail to get any systematic portrayal of the character and history of the subjugated people; but nevertheless we are not without some help in such studies from the letters of Cortes,[857] the accounts of the so-called anonymous conqueror,[858] and from what Stephens[859] calls “the hurried and imperfect observations of an unlettered soldier,” Bernal Diaz.[860]

MS. OF BERNAL DIAZ.

Fac-simile of the beginning of Capitulo LXXIV. of his Historia Verdadera, following a plate in the fourth volume of J. M. de Heredia’s French translation (Paris, 1877).

We cannot neglect for this ancient period the more general writers on New Spain, some of whom lived near enough to the Conquest to reflect current opinions upon the aboriginal life as it existed in the years next succeeding the fall of Mexico. Such are Peter Martyr, Grynæus, Münster, and Ramusio. More in the nature of chronicles is the Historia General of Oviedo (1535, etc.).[861] The Historia General of Gomara became generally known soon after the middle of the sixteenth century.[862] The Rapport, written about 1560, by Alonzo de Zurita, throws light on the Aztec laws and institutions.[863] Benzoni about this time traversed the country, observing the Indian customs.[864] We find other descriptions of the aboriginal customs by the missionary Didacus Valades, in his Rhetorica Christiana, of which the fourth part relates to Mexico.[865] Brasseur says that Valades was well informed and appreciative of the people which he so kindly depicted.[866] By the beginning of the seventeenth century we find in Herrera’s Historia the most comprehensive of the historical surveys, in which he summarizes the earlier writers, if not always exactly.[867] Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Repts., ii. 387) says of the ancient history of Mexico that “it appears as if the twelfth century was the limit of definite tradition. What lies beyond it is vague and uncertain, remnants of tradition being intermingled with legends and mythological fancies.” He cites some of the leading writers as mainly starting in their stories respectively as follows: Brasseur, B. C. 955; Clavigero, a.d. 596; Veytia, a.d. 697; Ixtlilxochitl, a.d. 503. Bandelier views all these dates as too mythical for historical investigations, and finds no earlier fixed date than the founding of Tenochtitlan (Mexico) in a.d. 1325. “What lies beyond the twelfth century can occasionally be rendered of value for ethnological purposes, but it admits of no definite historical use.” Bancroft (v. 360) speaks of the sources of disagreement in the final century of the native annals, from the constant tendency of such writers as Ixtlilxochitl, Tezozomoc, Chimalpain, and Camargo, to laud their own people and defame their rivals.

In the latter part of the sixteenth century the viceroy of Mexico, Don Martin Enriquez, set on foot some measures to gather the relics and traditions of the native Mexicans. Under this incentive it fell to Juan de Tobar, a Jesuit, and to Diego Duran, a Dominican, to be early associated with the resuscitation of the ancient history of the country.

To Father Tobar (or Tovar) we owe what is known as the Codex Ramirez, which in the edition of the Crónica Mexicana[868] by Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, issued in Mexico (1878), with annotations by Orozco y Berra, is called a Relacion del origen de los Indios que habitan esta nueva España segun sus historias (José M. Vigil, editor). It is an important source of our knowledge of the ancient history of Mexico, as authoritatively interpreted by the Aztec priests, from their picture-writings, at the bidding of Ramirez de Fuenleal, Bishop of Cuenca. This ecclesiastic carried the document with him to Spain, where in Madrid it is still preserved. It was used by Herrera. Chavero and Brinton recognize its representative value.[869]

To Father Duran we are indebted for an equally ardent advocacy of the rights of the natives in his Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España y islas de Tierra-Firme (1579-81), which was edited in part (1867), as stated elsewhere[870] by José F. Ramirez, and after an interval completed (1880) by Prof. Gumesindo Mendoza, of the Museo Nacional,—the perfected work making two volumes of text and an atlas of plates. Both from Tobar and from Duran some of the contemporary writers gathered largely their material.[871]

SAHAGUN.

After a lithograph in Cumplido’s Mexican edition of Prescott’s Mexico.

We come to a different kind of record when we deal with the Roman script of the early phonetic rendering of the native tongues. It has been pointed out that we have perhaps the earliest of such renderings in a single sentence in a publication made at Antwerp in 1534, where a Franciscan, Pedro de Gante,[872] under date of June 21, 1529, tells the story of his arriving in America in 1523, and his spending the interval in Mexico and Tezcuco, acquiring a knowledge of the natives and enough of their language to close his epistle with a sentence of it as a sample.[873] But no chance effort of this kind was enough. It took systematic endeavors on the part of the priests to settle grammatical principles and determine phonetic values, and the measure of their success was seen in the speedy way in which the interpretation of the old idiograms was forgotten. Mr. Brevoort has pointed out how much the progress of what may be called native literature, which is to-day so helpful to us in filling the picture of their ancient life, is due to the labors in this process of linguistic transfer of Motolinfa,[874] Alonzo de Molina,[875] Andrés de Olmos,[876] and, above all, of the ablest student of the ancient tongues in his day, as Mendieta calls Father Sahagún,[877] who, dying in 1590 at ninety, had spent a good part of a long life so that we of this generation might profit by his records.[878]

Coming later into the field than Duran, Acosta, and Sahagún, and profiting from the labors of his predecessors, we find in the Monarchia Indiana of Torquemada[879] the most comprehensive treatment of the ancient history given to us by any of the early Spanish writers. The book, however, is a provoking one, from the want of plan, its chronological confusion, and the general lack of a critical spirit[880] pervading it.

It is usually held that the earliest amassment of native records for historical purposes, after the Conquest, was that made by Ixtlilxochitl of the archives of his Tezcucan line, which he used in his writings in a way that has not satisfied some later investigators. Charnay says that in his own studies he follows Veytia by preference; but Prescott finds beneath the high colors of the pictures of Ixtlilxochitl not a little to be commended. Bandelier,[881] on the other hand, expresses a distrust when he says of Ixtlilxochitl that “he is always a very suspicious authority, not because he is more confused than any other Indian writer, but because he wrote for an interested object, and with a view of sustaining tribal claims in the eyes of the Spanish government.”[882]

Among the manuscripts which seem to have belonged to Ixtlilxochitl was the one known in our day under the designation given to it by Brasseur de Bourbourg, Codex Chimalpopoca,[883] in honor of Faustino Chimalpopoca, a learned professor of Aztec, who assisted Brasseur in translating it. The anonymous author had set to himself the task of converting into the written native tongue a rendering of the ancient hieroglyphics, constituting, as Brasseur says, a complete and regular history of Mexico and Colhuacan. He describes it in his Lettres à M. le duc de Valmy (lettre seconde)—the first part (in Mexican) being a history of the Chichimecas; the second (in Spanish), by another hand, elucidating the antiquities—as the most rare and most precious of all the manuscripts which escaped destruction, elucidating what was obscure in Gomara and Torquemada.

Brasseur based upon this MS. his account of the Toltec period in his Nations Civilisées du Mexique (i. p. lxxviii), treating as an historical document what in later years, amid his vagaries, he assumed to be but the record of geological changes.[884] A similar use was made by him of another MS., sometimes called a Memorial de Colhuacan, and which he named the Codex Gondra after the director of the Museo Nacional in Mexico.[885]

Brasseur says, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, that the Chimalpopoca MS. is dated in 1558, but in his Hist. Nat. Civ., i. p. lxxix, he says that it was written in 1563 and 1579, by a writer of Quauhtitlan, and not by Ixtlilxochitl, as was thought by Pichardo, who with Gama possessed copies later owned by Aubin. The copy used by Brasseur was, as he says, made from the MS. in the Boturini collection,[886] where it was called Historia de los Reynos de Colhuacan y México,[887] and it is supposed to be the original, now preserved in the Museo Nacional de México. It is not all legible, and that institution has published only the better preserved and earlier parts of it, though Aubin’s copies are said to contain the full text. This edition, which is called Anales de Cuauhtitlan, is accompanied by two Spanish versions, the early one made for Brasseur, and a new one executed by Mendoza and Solis, and it is begun in the Anales del Museo Nacional for 1879 (vol. i.).[888]

The next after Ixtlilxochitl to become conspicuous as a collector, was Sigüenza y Gongora (b. 1645), and it was while he was the chief keeper of such records[889] that the Italian traveller Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Carreri examined them, and made some record of them.[890] A more important student inspected the collection, which was later gathered in the College of San Pedro and San Pablo, and this was Clavigero,[891] who manifested a particular interest in the picture-writing of the Mexicans,[892] and has given us a useful account of the antecedent historians.[893]

CLAVIGERO.

After a lithograph in Cumplido’s Mexican edition of Prescott’s Mexico, vol. iii.

The best known efforts at collecting material for the ante-Spanish history of Mexico were made by Boturini,[894] who had come over to New Spain in 1736, on some agency for a descendant of Montezuma, the Countess de Santibañez. Here he became interested in the antiquities of the country, and spent eight years roving about the country picking up manuscripts and pictures, and seeking in vain for some one to explain their hieroglyphics. Some action on his part incurring the displeasure of the public authorities, he was arrested, his collection[895] taken from him, and he was sent to Spain. On the voyage an English cruiser captured the vessel in which he was, and he thus lost whatever he chanced to have with him.[896] What he left behind remained in the possession of the government, and became the spoil of damp, revolutionists, and curiosity-seekers. Once again in Spain, Boturini sought redress of the Council of the Indies, and was sustained by it in his petition; but neither he nor his heirs succeeded in recovering his collection. He also prepared a book setting forth how he proposed, by the aid of these old manuscripts and pictures, to resuscitate the forgotten history of the Mexicans. The book[897] is a jumble of notions; but appended to it was what gives it its chief value, a “Catálogo del Museo histórico Indiano,” which tells us what the collection was. While it was thus denied to its collector, Mariano Veytia,[898] who had sympathized with Boturini in Madrid, had possession, for a while at least, of a part of it, and made use of it in his Historia Antigua de Méjico, but it is denied, as usually stated, that the authorities upon his death (1778) prevented the publication of his book. The student was deprived of Veytia’s results till his MS. was ably edited, with notes and an appendix, by C. F. Ortega (Mexico, 1836).[899] Another, who was connected at a later day with the Boturini collection, and who was a more accurate writer than Veytia, was Antonio de Leon y Gama, born in Mexico in 1735. His Descripcion histórica y Cronológica de las Dos Piedras (Mexico, 1832)[900] was occasioned by the finding, in 1790, of the great Mexican Calendar Stone and other sculptures in the Square of Mexico. This work brought to bear Gama’s great learning to the interpretation of these relics, and to an exposition of the astronomy and mythology of the ancient Mexicans, in a way that secured the commendation of Humboldt.[901]

LORENZO BOTURINI.

After a lithograph in Cumplido’s Mexican edition of Prescott’s Mexico. There is an etched portrait in the Archives de la Soc. Américaine de France, nouvelle série, i., which is accompanied by an essay on this “Père de l’Américanisme,” and “les sources aux quelles il a puisé son précis d’histoire Américaine,” by Léon Cahun.

During these years of uncertainty respecting the Boturini collection, a certain hold upon it seems to have been shared successively by Pichardo and Sanchez, by which in the end some part came to the Museo Nacional, in Mexico.[902] It was also the subject of lawsuits, which finally resulted in the dispersion of what was left by public auction, at a time when Humboldt was passing through Mexico, and some of its treasures were secured by him and placed in the Berlin Museum. Others passed hither and thither (a few to Kingsborough), but not in a way to obscure their paths, so that when, in 1830, Aubin was sent to Mexico by the French government, he was able to secure a considerable portion of them, as the result of searches during the next ten years. It was with the purpose, some years later, of assisting in the elucidation and publication of Aubin’s collection that the Société Américaine de France was established. The collection of historical records, as Aubin held it, was described, in 1881, by himself,[903] when he divided his Mexican picture-writings into two classes,—those which had belonged to Boturini, and those which had not.[904] Aubin at the same time described his collection of the Spanish MSS. of Ixtlilxochitl,[905] while he congratulated himself that he had secured the old picture-writings upon which that native writer depended in the early part of his Historia Chichimeca. These Spanish MSS. bear the signature and annotations of Veytia.

FRONTISPIECE OF BOTURINI’S IDEA.

We have another description of the Aubin collection by Brasseur de Bourbourg.[906]

If we allow the first place among native writers, using the Spanish tongue, to Ixtlilxochitl, we find several others of considerable service: Diego Muñoz Camargo, a Tlaxcallan Mestizo, wrote (1585) a Historia de Tlaxcallan.[907] Tezozomoc’s Crónica Mexicana is probably best known through Ternaux’s version,[908] and there is an Italian abridgment in F. C. Marmocchi’s Raccolta di Viaggi (vol. x.). The catalogue of Boturini discloses a MS. by a Cacique of Quiahuiztlan, Juan Ventura Zapata y Mendoza, which brings the Crónica de la muy noble y real Ciudad de Tlaxcallan from the earliest times down to 1689; but it is not now known. Torquemada and others cite two native Tezcucan writers,—Juan Bautista Pomar, whose Relacion de las Antigüedades de los Indios[909] treats of the manners of his ancestors, and Antonio Pimentel, whose Relaciones are well known. The MS. Crónica Mexicana of Anton Muñon Chimalpain (b. 1579), tracing the annals from the eleventh century, is or was among the Aubin MSS.[910] There was collected before 1536, under the orders of Bishop Zumárraga, a number of aboriginal tales and traditions, which under the title of Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas was printed by Icazbalceta, who owns the MS., in the Anales del Museo Nacional (ii. no. 2).[911]

ICAZBALCETA.

[After a photograph kindly furnished by himself at the editor’s request.—Ed.]

As regards Yucatan, Brasseur[912] speaks of the scantiness of the historical material, and Brinton[913] does not know a single case where a Maya author has written in the Spanish tongue, as the Aztecs did, under Spanish influence. We owe more to Dr. Daniel Garrison Brinton than to any one else for the elucidation of the native records, and he had had the advantage of the collection of Yucatan MSS. formed by Dr. C. H. Berendt,[914] which, after that gentleman’s death, passed into Brinton’s hands.

PROFESSOR DANIEL G. BRINTON.

After the destruction of the ancient records by Landa, considerable efforts were made throughout Yucatan, in a sort of reactionary spirit, to recall the lingering recollections of what these manuscripts contained. The grouping of such recovered material became known as Chilan Balam.[915] It is from local collections of this kind that Brinton selected the narratives which he has published as The Maya Chronicles, being the first volume of his Library of Aboriginal American Literature. The original texts[916] are accompanied by an English translation. One of the books, the Chilan Balam of Mani, had been earlier printed by Stephens, in his Yucatan.[917] The only early Spanish chronicle is Bishop Landa’s Relation des choses de Yucatan,[918] which follows not an original, but a copy of the bishop’s text, written, as Brasseur thinks, thirty years after Landa’s death, or about 1610, and which Brasseur first brought to the world’s attention when he published his edition, with both Spanish and French texts, at Paris, in 1864. The MS. seems to have been incomplete, and was perhaps inaccurately copied at the time. At this date (1864) Brasseur had become an enthusiast for his theory of the personification of the forces of nature in the old recitals, and there was some distrust how far his zeal had affected his text; and moreover he had not published the entire text, but had omitted about one sixth. Brasseur’s method of editing became apparent when, in 1884, at Madrid, Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado published literally the whole Spanish text, as an appendix to the Spanish translation of Rosny’s essay on the hieratic writing. The Spanish editor pointed out some but not all the differences between his text and Brasseur’s,—a scrutiny which Brinton has perfected in his Critical Remarks on the Editions of Landa’s Writings (Philad., 1887).[919] Landa gives extracts from a work by Bernardo Lizana, relating to Yucatan, of which it is difficult to get other information.[920] The earliest published historical narrative was Cogolludo’s Historia de Yucathan (Madrid, 1688).[921] Stephens, in his study of the subject, speaks of it as “voluminous, confused, and ill-digested,” and says “it might almost be called a history of the Franciscan friars, to which order Cogolludo belonged.”[922]

The native sources of the aboriginal history of Guatemala, and of what is sometimes called the Quiché-Cakchiquel Empire, are not abundant,[923] but the most important are the Popul Vuh, a traditional book of the Quichés, and the Memorial de Tecpan-Atitlan.

The Popul Vuh was discovered in the library of the university at Guatemala, probably not far from 1700,[924] by Francisco Ximenez, a missionary in a mountain village of the country. Ximenez did not find the original Quiché book, but a copy of it, made after it was lost, and later than the Conquest, which we may infer was reproduced from memory to replace the lost text, and in this way it may have received some admixture of Christian thought.[925] It was this sort of a text that Ximenez turned into Spanish; and this version, with the copy of the Quiché, which Ximenez also made, is what has come down to us. Karl Scherzer, a German traveller[926] in the country, found Ximenez’ work, which had seemingly passed into the university library on the suppression of the monasteries, and which, as he supposes, had not been printed because of some disagreeable things in it about the Spanish treatment of the natives. Scherzer edited the MS., which was published as Las Historias del Origen de los Indios de Esta Provincia de Guatemala[927] (Vienna, 1857).

Brasseur, who had seen the Ximenez MSS. in 1855, considered the Spanish version untrustworthy, and so with the aid of some natives he gave it a French rendering, and republished it a few years later as Popol Vuh. Le Livre sacré et les Mythes de l’antiquité américaine, avec les livres héroïques et historiques des Quichés. Ouvrage original des indigènes de Guatémala, texte Quiché et trad. française en regard, accompagnée de notes philologiques et d’un commentaire sur la mythologie et les migrations des peuples anciens de l’Amérique, etc., composé sur des documents originaux et inédits (Paris, 1861).

Brasseur’s introduction bears the special title: Dissertation sur les mythes de l’antiquité Américaine sur la probabilité des Communications existant anciennement d’un Continent à l’autre, et sur les migrations des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique,—in which he took occasion to elucidate his theory of cataclysms and Atlantis. He speaks of his annotations as the results of his observations among the Quichés and of his prolonged studies. He calls the Popul Vuh rather a national than a sacred book,[928] and thinks it the original in some part of the “Livre divin des Toltèques,” the Teo-Amoxtli.[929] Brinton avers that neither Ximenez nor Brasseur has adequately translated the Quiché text,[930] and sees no reason to think that the matter has been in any way influenced by the Spanish contact, emanating indeed long before that event; and he has based some studies upon it.[931] In this opinion Bandelier is at variance, at least as regards the first portion, for he believes it to have been written after the Conquest and under Christian influences.[932] Brasseur in some of his other writings has further discussed the matter.[933]

The Memorial of Tecpan-Atitlan, to use Brasseur’s title, is an incomplete MS.,[934] found in 1844 by Juan Gavarrete in rearranging the MSS. of the convent of San Francisco, of Guatemala, and it was by Gavarrete that a Spanish version of Brasseur’s rendering was printed in 1873 in the Boletin de la Sociedad económica de Guatemala (nos. 29-43). This translation by Brasseur, made in 1856, was never printed by him, but, passing into Pinart’s hands with Brasseur’s collections,[935] it was entrusted by that collector to Dr. Brinton, who selected the parts of interest (46 out of 96 pp.), and included it as vol. vi. in his Library of Aboriginal American Literature, under the title of The annals of the Cakchiquels. The original text, with a translation, notes, and introduction (Philadelphia, 1885).

Brinton disagrees with Brasseur in placing the date of its beginning towards the opening of the eleventh century, and puts it rather at about a.d. 1380. Brasseur says he received the original from Gavarrete, and it would seem to have been a copy made between 1620 and 1650, though it bears internal evidence of having been written by one who was of adult age at the time of the Conquest.

Brinton’s introduction discusses the ethnological position of the Cakchiquels, who he thinks had been separated from the Mayas for a long period.

The next in importance of the Guatemalan books is the work of Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzman, Historia de Guatemala, ó Recordación florida escrita el siglo xvii., que publica por primera vez con notas é ilustraciones F. Zaragoza (Madrid, 1882-83), being vols. 1 and 2 of the Biblioteca de los americanistas. The original MS., dated 1690, is in the archives of the city of Guatemala. Owing to a tendency of the author to laud the natives, modern historians have looked with some suspicion on his authority, and have pointed out inconsistencies and suspected errors.[936] Of a later writer, Ramon de Ordoñez (died about 1840), we have only the rough draught of a Historia de la creation del Cielo y de la tierra, conforme al sistema de la gentilidad Americana, which is of importance for traditions.[937] This manuscript, preserved in the Museo Nacional in Mexico, is all that now exists, representing the perfected work. Brasseur (Bib. Mex.-Guat., 113) had a copy of this draught (made in 1848-49). The original fair copy was sent to Madrid for the press, and it is suspected that the Council for the Indies suppressed it in 1805. Ramon cites a manuscript Hist. de la Prov. de San Vicente de Chiappas y Goathemala, which is perhaps the same as the Crónica de la Prov. de Chiapas y Guatemala, of which the seventh book is in the Museo Nacional (Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. 97; Brasseur, Bib. Mex.-Guat., 157).

The work of Antonio de Remesal is sometimes cited as Historia general de las Indias occidentales, y particular de la gobernacion de Chiapas y Guatemala, and sometimes as Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente de Chyapa y Guatemala (Madrid, 1619, 1620).[938]

Bandelier (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., i. 95) has indicated the leading sources of the history of Chiapas, so closely associated with Guatemala. To round the study of the aboriginal period of this Pacific region, we may find something in Alvarado’s letters on the Conquest;[939] in Las Casas for the interior parts, and in Alonso de Zurita’s Relacion, 1560,[940] as respects the Quiché tribes, which is the source of much in Herrera.[941] For Oajaca (Oaxaca, Guaxaca) the special source is Francisco de Burgoa’s Geográfica descripcion de la parte septentrional del Polo Artico de la América, etc. (México, 1674), in two quarto volumes,—or at least it is generally so regarded. Bandelier, who traces the works on Oajaca (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., n. s., i. 115), says there is a book of a modern writer, Juan B. Carriedo, which follows Burgoa largely. Brasseur (Bib. Mex.-Guat., p. 33) speaks of Burgoa as the only source which remains of the native history of Oajaca. He says it is a very rare book, even in Mexico. He largely depends upon its full details in some parts of his Nations Civilisées (iii. livre 9). Alonso de la Rea’s Crónica de Mechoacan (Mexico, 1648) and Basalenque’s Crónica de San Augustin de Mechoacan (Mexico, 1673) are books which Brinton complains he could find in no library in the United States.

We trace the aboriginal condition of Nicaragua in Peter Martyr, Oviedo, Torquemada, and Ixtlilxochitl.[942]

The earliest general account of all these ancient peoples which we have in English is in the History of America, by William Robertson, who describes the condition of Mexico at the time of the Conquest, and epitomizes the early Spanish accounts of the natives. Prescott and Helps followed in his steps, with new facilities. Albert Gallatin brought the powers of a vigorous intellect to bear, though but cursorily, upon the subject, in his “Notes on the semi-civilized nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America,” in the Amer. Ethnological Society’s Transactions (N. Y., 1845, vol. i.), and he was about the first to recognize the dangerous pitfalls of the pseudo-historical narratives of these peoples. The Native Races[943] of H. H. Bancroft was the first very general sifting and massing in English of the great confusion of material upon their condition, myths, languages, antiquities, and history.[944] The archæological remains are treated by Stephens for Yucatan and Central America, by Dr. Le Plongeon[945] for Yucatan, by Ephraim G. Squier for Nicaragua and Central America in general,[946] by Adolphe F. A. Bandelier in his communications to the Peabody Museum and to the Archæological Institute of America,[947] and by Professor Daniel G. Brinton in his editing of ancient records[948] and in his mythological and linguistic studies, referred to elsewhere. To these may be added, as completing the English references, various records of personal observations.[949]

BRASSEUR DE BOURBOURG.

Follows an etching published in the Annuaire de la Société Américaine de France, 1875. He died at Nice, Jan. 8, 1874, aged 59 years.

During the American Civil War, when there were hopes of some permanence for French influence in Mexico, the French government made some organized efforts to further the study of the antiquities of the country, and the results were published in the Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Méxique (Paris, 1864-69, in 3 vols.).[950] The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who took a conspicuous part in this labor, has probably done more than any other Frenchman to bring into order the studies upon these ancient races, and in some directions he is our ultimate source. Unfortunately his character as an archæological expounder did not improve as he went on, and he grew to be the expositor of some wild notions that have proved acceptable to few. He tells us that he first had his attention turned to American archæology by the report, which had a short run in European circles, of the discovery of a Macedonian helmet and weapons in Brazil in 1832, and by a review of Rio’s report on Palenqué, which he read in the Journal des Savants. Upon coming to America, fresh from his studies in Rome, he was made professor of history in the seminary at Quebec in 1845-46, writing at that time a Histoire du Canada, of little value. Later, in Boston, he perfected his English and read Prescott. Then we find him at Rome poring over the Codex Vaticanus, and studying the Codex Borgianus in the library of the Propaganda. In 1848 he returned to the United States, and, embarking at New Orleans for Mexico, he found himself on shipboard in the company of the new French minister, whom he accompanied, on landing, to the city of Mexico, being made almoner to the legation. This official station gave him some advantage in beginning his researches, in which Rafael Isidro Gondra, the director of the Museo, with the curators of the vice-regal archives, and José Maria Andrade, the librarian of the university, assisted him. Later he gave himself to the study of the Nahua tongue, under the guidance of Faustino Chimalpopoca Galicia, a descendant of a brother of Montezuma, then a professor in the college of San Gregorio. In 1851 he was ready to print at Mexico, in French and Spanish, his Lettres pour servir d’introduction à l’histoire primitive des anciennes nations civilisées du Méxique, addressed (October, 1850) to the Duc de Valmy, in which he sketched the progress of his studies up to that time. He speaks of it as “le premier fruit de mes travaux d’archéologie et d’histoire méxicaines.”[951] It was this brochure which introduced him to the attention of Squier and Aubin, and from the latter, during his residence in Paris (1851-54), he received great assistance. Pressed in his circumstances, he was obliged at this time to eke out his living by popular writing, which helped also to enable him to publish his successive works.[952] To complete his Central American studies, he went again to America in 1854, and in Washington he saw for the first time the texts of Las Casas and Duran, in the collection of Peter Force, who had got copies from Madrid. He has given us[953] an account of his successful search for old manuscripts in Central America. Finally, as the result of all these studies, he published his most important work,—Histoire des nations civilisées du Méxique et de l’Amérique centrale durant les siècles antérieurs à C. Colomb, écrite sur des docs. origin. et entièrement inédits, puisés aux anciennes archives des indigènes (Paris, 1857-58).[954] This was the first orderly and extensive effort to combine out of all available material, native and Spanish, a divisionary and consecutive history of ante-Columbian times in these regions, to which he added from the native sources a new account of the conquest by the Spaniards. His purpose to separate the historic from the mythical may incite criticism, but his views are the result of more labor and more knowledge than any one before him had brought to the subject.[955] In his later publications there is less reason to be satisfied with his results, and Brinton[956] even thinks that “he had a weakness to throw designedly considerable obscurity about his authorities and the sources of his knowledge.” His fellow-students almost invariably yield praise to his successful research and to his great learning, surpassing perhaps that of any of them, but they are one and all chary of adopting his later theories.[957] These were expressed at length in his Quatre lettres sur le Mexique. Exposition du système hiéroglyphique mexicain. La fin de l’âge de pierre. Époque glaciaire temporaire. Commencement de l’âge de bronze. Origines de la civilisation et des religions de l’antiquité. D’après le Teo-Amoxtli [etc.] (Paris, 1868), wherein he accounted as mere symbolism what he had earlier elucidated as historical records, and connected the recital of the Codex Chimalpopoca with the story of Atlantis, making that lost land the original seat of all old-world and new-world civilization, and finding in that sacred history of Colhuacan and Mexico the secret evidence of a mighty cataclysm that sunk the continent from Honduras (subsequently with Yucatan elevated) to perhaps the Canaries.[958] Two years later, in his elucidation of the MS. Troano (1869-70), this same theory governed all his study. Brasseur was quite aware of the loss of estimation which followed upon his erratic change of opinion, as the introduction to his Bibl. Mex.-Guatémalienne shows. No other French writer, however, has so associated his name with the history of these early peoples.[959]

In Mexico itself the earliest general narrative was not cast in the usual historical form, but in the guise of a dialogue, held night after night, between a Spaniard and an Indian, the ancient history of the country was recounted. The author, Joseph Joaquin Granados y Galvez, published it in 1778, as Tardes Américanas: gobierno gentil y católico: breve y particular noticia de toda la historia Indiana: sucesos, casos notables, y cosas ignoradas, desde la entrada de la Gran nacion Tulteca á esta tierra de Anahuac, hasta los presentes tiempos.[960]

The most comprehensive grouping of historical material is in the Diccionario Universal de historia y de Geografía (Mexico, 1853-56),[961] of which Manuel Orozco y Berra was one of the chief collaborators. This last author has in two other works added very much to our knowledge of the racial and ancient history of the indigenous peoples. These are his Geografía de las lenguas y Carta Etnográfica de México (Mexico, 1864),[962] and his Historia antigua y de la Conquista de México (Mexico, 1880, in four volumes).[963] Perhaps the most important of all the Mexican publications is Manuel Larrainzar’s Estudios sobre la historia de América, sus ruinas y antigüedades, comparadas con lo más notable del otro Continente (Mexico, 1875-1878, in five volumes).

In German the most important of recent books is Hermann Strebel’s Alt-Mexico (Hamburg, 1885); but Waitz’s Amerikaner (1864, vol. ii.) has a section on the Mexicans. Adolph Bastian’s “Zur Geschichte des Alten Mexico” is contained in the second volume of his Culturländer des Alten America (Berlin, 1878), in which he considers the subject of Quetzalcoatl, the religious ceremonial, administrative and social life, as well as the different stocks of the native tribes.

[NOTES.]

[I.]The Authorities on the so-called Civilization of Ancient Mexico and Adjacent Lands, and the Interpretation of such Authorities.

THE ancient so-called civilization which the Spaniards found in Mexico and Central America is the subject of much controversy: in the first place as regards its origin, whether indigenous, or allied to and derived from the civilizations of the Old World; and in the second place as regards its character, whether it was something more than a kind of grotesque barbarism, or of a nature that makes even the Spanish culture, which supplanted it, inferior in some respects by comparison.[964] The first of these problems, as regards its origin, is considered in another place. As respects the second, or its character, it is proposed here to follow the history of opinions.

In a book published at Seville in 1519, Martin Fernandez d’Enciso’s Suma de geographia que trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo: en especial de las Indias,[965] the European reader is supposed to have received the earliest hints of the degree of civilization—if it be so termed—of which the succeeding Spanish writers made so much. A brief sentence was thus the shadowy beginning of the stories of grandeur and magnificence[966] which we find later in Cortes, Bernal Diaz, Las Casas, Torquemada, Sahagún, Ramusio, Gomara, Oviedo, Zurita, Tezozomoc, and Ixtlilxochitl, and which is repeated often with accumulating effect in Acosta, Herrera, Lorenzana, Solis, Clavigero, and their successors.[967] Bandelier[968] points out how Robertson, in his views of Mexican civilization as in “the infancy of civil life,”[969] really opened the view for the first time of the exaggerated and uncritical estimates of the older writers, which Morgan has carried in our day to the highest pitch, and, as it would seem, without sufficient recognition of some of the contrary evidence.

It has usually been held that the creation among the Mexicans about thirty years after the founding of Mexico of a chief-of-men (Tlacatecuhtli) instituted a feudal monarchy. Bandelier,[970] speaking of the application of feudal terms by the old writers to Mexican institutions, says: “What in their first process of thinking was merely a comparative, became very soon a positive terminology for the purpose of describing institutions to which this foreign terminology never was adapted.” He instances that the so-called “king” of these early writers was a translation of the native term, which in fact only meant “one of those who spoke;” that is, a prominent member of the council.[971] Bandelier traces the beginning of the feudal ideas as a graft upon the native systems, in the oldest document issued by Europeans on Mexican soil, when Cortes (May 20, 1519) conferred land on his allies, the chiefs of Axapusco and Tepeyahualco, and for the first time made their offices hereditary. It is Bandelier’s opinion that “the grantees had no conception of the true import of what they accepted; neither did Cortes conceive the nature of their ideas.” This was followed after the Spanish occupation of Mexico by the institution of “repartimientos,” through which the natives became serfs of the soil to the conquerors.[972]

The story about this unknown splendor of a strange civilization fascinated the world nearly half a century ago in the kindly recital of Prescott;[973] but it was observed that he quoted too often the somewhat illusory and exaggerated statements of Ixtlilxochitl, and was not a little attracted by the gorgeous pictures of Waldeck and Dupaix. With such a charming depicter, the barbaric gorgeousness of this ancient empire, as it became the fashion to call it, gathered a new interest, which has never waned, and Morgan[974] is probably correct in affirming that it “has called into existence a larger number of works than were ever before written upon any people of the same number and of the same importance.”[975] Even those who, like Tylor, had gone to Mexico sceptics, had been forced to the conclusion that Prescott’s pictures were substantially correct, and setting aside what he felt to be the monstrous exaggerations of Solis, Gomara, and the rest, he could not find the history much less trustworthy than European history of the same period.[976] It has been told in another place[977] how the derogatory view, as opposed to the views of Prescott, were expressed by R. A. Wilson in his New Conquest of Mexico, in assuming that all the conquerors said was baseless fabrication, the European Montezuma becoming a petty Indian chief, and the great city of Mexico a collection of hovels in an everglade,—the ruins of the country being accounted for by supposing them the relics of an ancient Phœnician civilization, which had been stamped out by the inroads of barbarians, whose equally barbarious descendants the Spaniards were in turn to overcome. It cannot be said that such iconoclastic opinions obtained any marked acceptance; but it was apparent that the notion of the exaggeration of the Spanish accounts was becoming sensibly fixed in the world’s opinion. We see this reaction in a far less excessive way in Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man (i. 325, etc.), and he was struck, among other things, with the utter obliteration of the architectural traces of the conquered race in the city of Mexico itself.[978] When, in 1875, Hubert H. Bancroft published the second volume of his Native Races, he confessed “that much concerning the Aztec civilization had been greatly exaggerated by the old Spanish writers, and for obvious reasons;” but he contended that the stories of their magnificence must in the main be accepted, because of the unanimity of witnesses, notwithstanding their copying from one another, and because of the evidence of the ruins.[979] He strikes his key-note in his chapter on the “Government of the Nahua Nations,” in speaking of it as “monarchical and nearly absolute;”[980] but it was perhaps in his chapter on the “Palaces and Households of the Nahua Kings,” where he fortifies his statement by numerous references, that he carried his descriptions to the extent that allied his opinions to those who most unhesitatingly accepted the old stories.[981]

The most serious arraignment of these long-accepted views was by Lewis H. Morgan, who speaks of them as having “caught the imagination and overcome the critical judgment of Prescott, ravaged the sprightly brain of Brasseur de Bourbourg, and carried up in a whirlwind our author at the Golden Gate.”[982]

Morgan’s studies had been primarily among the Iroquois, and by analogy he had applied his reasoning to the aboriginal conditions of Mexico and Central America, thus degrading their so-called civilization to the level of the Indian tribal organization, as it was understood in the North.[983] Morgan’s confidence in its deductions was perfect, and he was not very gracious in alluding to the views of his opponents. He looked upon “the fabric of Aztec romance as the most deadly encumbrance upon American ethnology.”[984] The Spanish chroniclers, as he contended, “inaugurated American aboriginal history upon a misconception of Indian life, which has remained substantially unquestioned till recently.”[985] He charges upon ignorance of the structure and principles of Indian society, the perversion of all the writers,[986] from Cortes to Bancroft, who, as he says, unable to comprehend its peculiarities, invoked the imagination to supply whatever was necessary to fill out the picture.[987] The actual condition to which the Indians of Spanish America had reached was, according to his schedule, the upper status of barbarism, between which and the beginning of civilization he reckoned an entire ethnical period. “In the art of government they had not been able to rise above gentile institutions and establish political society. This fact,” Morgan continues, “demonstrates the impossibility of privileged classes and of potentates, under their institutions, with power to enforce the labor of the people for the erection of palaces for their use, and explains the absence of such structures.”[988]

This is the essence of the variance of the two schools of interpretation of the Aztec and Maya life. The reader of Bancroft will find, on the other hand, due recognition of an imperial system, with its monarch and nobles and classes of slaves, and innumerable palaces, of which we see to-day the ruins. The studies of Bandelier are appealed to by Morgan as substantiating his view.[989] Mrs. Zelia Nuttall (Proc. Am. Assoc. Adv. Sci., Aug., 1886) claims to be able to show that the true interpretation of the Borgian and other codices points in part at least to details of a communal life.

The special issues which for a test Morgan takes with Bancroft are in regard to the character of the house in which Montezuma lived, and of the dinner which is represented by Bernal Diaz and the rest as the daily banquet of an imperial potentate. Morgan’s criticism is in his Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines (Washington, 1881).[990] The basis of this book had been intended for a fifth Part of his Ancient Society, but was not used in that publication. He printed the material, however, in papers on “Montezuma’s Dinner” (No. Am. Rev., Ap. 1876), “Houses of the Moundbuilders” (Ibid., July, 1876), and “Study of the Houses and House Life of the Indian Tribes” (Archæol. Inst. of Amer. Publ.). These papers amalgamated now make the work called Houses and House Life.[991]

Morgan argues that a communal mode of living accords with the usages of aboriginal hospitality, as well as with their tenure of lands,[992] and with the large buildings, which others call palaces, and he calls joint tenement houses. He instances, as evidence of the size of such houses, that at Cholula four hundred Spaniards and one thousand allied Indians found lodging in such a house; and he points to Stephens’s description of similar communal establishments which he found in our day near Uxmal.[993] He holds that the inference of communal living from such data as these is sufficient to warrant a belief in it, although none of the early Spanish writers mention such communism as existing; while they actually describe a communal feast in what is known as Montezuma’s dinner;[994] and while the plans of the large buildings now seen in ruins are exactly in accord with the demands of separate families united in joint occupancy. In such groups, he holds, there is usually one building devoted to the purpose of a Tecpan, or official house of the tribe.[995] Under the pressure to labor, which the Spaniards inflicted on their occupants, these communal dwellers were driven, to escape such servitude, into the forest, and thus their houses fell into decay. Morgan’s views attracted the adhesion of not a few archæologists, like Bandelier and Dawson; but in Bancroft, as contravening the spirit of his Native Races, they begat feelings that substituted disdain for convincing arguments.[996] The less passionate controversialists point out, with more effect, how hazardous it is, in coming to conclusions on the quality of the Nahua, Maya, or Quiché conditions of life, to ignore such evidences as those of the hieroglyphics, the calendars, the architecture and carvings, the literature and the industries, as evincing quite another kind, rather than degree, of progress, from that of the northern Indians.[997]

[II.]Bibliographical Notes upon the Ruins and Archæological Remains of Mexico and Central America.

Elsewhere in this work some account is given of the comprehensive treatment of American antiquities. It is the purpose of this note to characterize such other descriptions as have been specially confined to the antiquities of Mexico, Central America, and adjacent parts; together with noting occasionally those more comprehensive works which have sections on these regions. The earliest and most distinguished of all such treatises are the writings of Alexander von Humboldt,[998] to whom may be ascribed the paternity of what the French define as the Science of Americanism, which, however, took more definite shape and invited discipleship when the Société Américaine de France was formed, and Aubin in his Mémoire sur la peinture didactique et l’écriture figurative des Anciens Méxicains furnished a standard of scholarship. How new this science was may be deduced from the fact that Robertson, the most distinguished authority on early American history, who wrote in English, in the last part of the preceding century, had ventured to say that in all New Spain there was not “a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the Conquest.” After Humboldt, the most famous of what may be called the pioneers of this art were Kingsborough, Dupaix, and Waldeck, whose publications are sufficiently described elsewhere. The most startling developments came from the expeditions of Stephens and Catherwood, the former mingling both in his Central America and Yucatan the charms of a personal narrative with his archæological studies, while the draughtsman, beside furnishing the sketches for Stephens’s book, embodied his drawings on a larger scale in the publication which passes under his own name.[999] The explorations of Charnay are those which have excited the most interest of late years, though equally significant results have been produced by such special explorers as Squier in Nicaragua, Le Plongeon in Yucatan, and Bandelier in Mexico.

The labors of the French archæologist, which began in 1858, resulted in the work Cités et ruines Américaines: Mitla, Palenqué, Izamal, Chichen-Itza, Uxmal, recueillies et photographiées par Désiré Charnay, avec un Texte par M. Viollet le Duc. (Paris, 1863.) Charnay contributed to this joint publication, beside the photographs, a paper called “Le Méxique, 1858-61,—souvenirs et impressions de Voyage.” The Architect Viollet le Duc gives us in the same book an essay by an active, well-equipped, and ingenious mind, but his speculations about the origin of this Southern civilization and its remains are rather curious than convincing.[1000]

THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA.

After a drawing in Cumplido’s Spanish translation of Prescott’s Mexico, vol. iii. (Mexico, 1846.)

The public began to learn better what Charnay’s full and hearty confidence in his own sweeping assertions was, when he again entered the field in a series of papers on the ruins of Central America which he contributed (1879-81) to the North American Review (vols. cxxxi.-cxxxiii.), and which for the most part reached the public newly dressed in some of the papers contributed by L. P. Gratacap to the American Antiquarian,[1001] and in a paper by F. A. Ober on “The Ancient Cities of America,” in the Amer. Geog. Soc. Bulletin, Mar., 1888. Charnay took moulds of various sculptures found among the ruins, which were placed in the Trocadero Museum in Paris.[1002] What Charnay communicated in English to the No. Amer. Review appeared in better shape in French in the Tour du Monde (1886-87), and in a still riper condition in his latest work, Les anciens villes du Nouveau Monde: voyages d’explorations au Méxique et dans l’Amérique Centrale. 1857-1882. Ouvrage contenant 214 gravures et 19 cartes ou plans. (Paris, 1885.)[1003]

GREAT MOUND OF CHOLULA.

After a sketch in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 233, who also gives a plan of the mound. The modern Church of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios is on the summit, where there are no traces of aboriginal works. A paved road leads to the top. A suburban road skirts its base, and fields of maguey surround it. The circuit of the base is 3859 feet, and the mound covers nearly twenty acres. Estimates of its height are variously given from 165 to 208 feet, according as one or another base line is chosen. It is built of adobe brick laid in clay, and it has suffered from erosion, slides, and other effects of time. There are some traces of steps up the side. Bandelier (pl. xv.) also gives a fac-simile of an old map of Cholula. The earliest picture which we have of the mound, evidently thought by the first Spaniards to be a natural one, is in the arms of Cholula (1540). There are other modern cuts in Carbajal-Espinosa’s Mexico (i. 195); Archæologia Americana (i. 12); Brocklehurst’s Mexico to-day, 182. The degree of restoration which draughtsmen allow to themselves, accounts in large measure for the great diversity of appearance which the mound makes in the different drawings of it. There is a professed restoration by Mothes in Armin’s Heutige Mexico, 63, 68, 72. The engraving in Humboldt is really a restoration (Vues, etc., pl. vii., or pl. viii. of the folio ed.). Bandelier gives a slight sketch of a restoration (p. 246, pl. viii.).

We proceed now to note geographically some of the principal ruins. In the vicinity of Vera Cruz the pyramid of Papantla is the conspicuous monument,[1004] but there is little else thereabouts needing particular mention. Among the ruins of the central plateau of Mexico, the famous pyramid of Cholula is best known. The time of its construction is a matter about which archæologists are not agreed, though it is perhaps to be connected with the earliest period of the Nahua power. Duran, on the other hand, has told a story of its erection by the giants, overcome by the Nahuas.[1005] Its purpose is equally debatable, whether intended for a memorial, a refuge, a defence, or a spot of worship—very likely the truth may be divided among them all.[1006] It is a similar problem for divided opinion whether it was built by a great display of human energy, in accordance with the tradition that the bricks which composed its surface were passed from hand to hand by a line of men, extending to the spot where they were made leagues away, or constructed by a slower process of accretion, spread over successive generations, which might not have required any marvellous array of workmen.[1007] The fierce conflict which—as some hold—Cortés had with the natives around the mound and on its slopes settled its fate; and the demolition begun thereupon, and continued by the furious desolaters of the Church, has been aided by the erosions of time and the hand of progress, till the great monument has become a ragged and corroded hill, which might to the casual observer stand for the natural base, given by the Creator, to the modern chapel that now crowns its summit; but if Bandelier’s view (p. 249) is correct, that none of the conquerors mention it, then the conflict which is recorded took place, not here, but on the vanished mound of Quetzalcoatl, which in Bandelier’s opinion was a different structure from this more famous mound, while other writers pronounce it the shrine itself of Quetzalcoatl.[1008]

MEXICAN CALENDAR STONE.

After a cut in Harper’s Magazine. An enlarged engraving of the central head is given on the title-page of the present volume. A photographic reproduction, as the “Stone of the Sun,” is given in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 54, where he summarizes the history of it, with references, including a paper by Alfredo Chavero, in the Anales del Museo nacional de México, and another, with a cut, by P. J. J. Valentini, in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1878, and in The Nation, Aug. 8 and Sept. 19, 1878. Chavero’s explanation is translated in Brocklehurst’s Mexico to-day, p. 186. The stone is dated in a year corresponding to a.d. 1479, and it was early described in Duran’s Historia de las Indias, and in Tezozomoc’s Crónica mexicana. Tylor (Anahuac, 238) says that of the drawings made before the days of photography, that in Carlos Nebel’s Viaje pintoresco y Arqueológico sobre la República Mejicana, 1829-1834 (Paris, 1839), is the best, while the engravings given by Humboldt (pl. xxiii.) and others are more or less erroneous. Cf. other cuts in Carbajal’s México, i. 528; Bustamante’s Mañanas de la Alameda (Mexico, 1835-36); Short’s No. Amer. of Antiq., 408, 451, with references; Bancroft’s Native Races, ii. 520; iv. 506; Stevens’s Flint Chips, 309.

Various calendar disks are figured in Clavigero (Casena, 1780); a colored calendar on agave paper is reproduced in the Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Méxique, iii. 120. (Quaritch held the original document in Aug., 1888, at £25, which had belonged to M. Boban.)

For elucidations of the Mexican astronomical and calendar system see Acosta, vi. cap. 2; Granados y Galvez’s Tardes Americanas (1778); Humboldt’s essay in connection with pl. xxiii. of his Atlas; Prescott’s Mexico, i. 117; Bollaert in Memoirs read before the Anthropol. Soc. of London, i. 210; E. G. Squier’s Some new discoveries respecting the dates on the great calendar stone of the ancient Mexicans, with observations on the Mexican cycle of fifty-two years, in the American Journal of Science and Arts, 2d ser., March, 1849, pp. 153-157; Abbé J. Pipart’s Astronomie, Chronologie et rites des Méxicaines in the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France (n. ser. i.); Brasseur’s Nat. Civ., iii. livre ii.; Bancroft’s Nat. Races, ii. ch. 16; Short, ch. 9, with ref., p. 445; Cyrus Thomas in Powell’s Rept. Ethn. Bureau, iii. 7. Cf. Brinton’s Abor. Amer. Authors, p. 38; Brasseur’s “Chronologie historique des Méxicaines” in the Actes de la Soc. d’Ethnographie (1872), vol. vi.; Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 355, for the Toltecs as the source of astronomical ideas, with which compare Bancroft, v. 192; the Bulletin de la Soc. royale Belge de Géog., Sept., Oct., 1886; and Bandelier in the Peabody Mus. Repts., ii. 572, for a comparison of calendars.

Wilson in his Prehistoric Man (i. 246) says: “By the unaided results of native science, the dwellers on the Mexican plateau had effected an adjustment of civil to solar time so nearly correct that when the Spaniards landed on their coast, their own reckoning, according to the unreformed Julian calendar, was really eleven days in error, compared with that of the barbarian nation whose civilization they so speedily effaced.”

See what Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. 333) says of the native veneration for this calendar stone, when it was exhumed. Mrs. Nuttall (Proc. Am. Asso. Adv. Sci., Aug., 1886) claims to be able to show that this monolith is really a stone which stood in the Mexican market-place, and was used in regulating the stated market-days.

We have reference to a Cholula mound in some of the earliest writers. Bernal Diaz counted the steps on its side.[1009] Motolinía saw it within ten years of the Conquest, when it was overgrown and much ruined. Sahagún says it was built for defensive purposes. Rojas, in his Relacion de Cholula, 1581, calls it a fortress, and says the Spaniards levelled its convex top to plant there a cross, where later, in 1594, they built a chapel. Torquemada, following Motolinía and the later Mendieta, says it was never finished, and was decayed in his time, though he traced the different levels. Its interest as a relic thus dates almost from the beginnings of the modern history of the region. Boturini mentions its four terraces. Clavigero, in 1744, rode up its sides on horseback, impelled by curiosity, and found it hard work even then to look upon it as other than a natural hill.[1010] The earliest of the critical accounts of it, however, is Humboldt’s, made from examinations in 1803, when much more than now of its original construction was observable, and his account is the one from which most travellers have drawn,—the result of close scrutiny in his text and of considerable license in his plate, in which he aimed at something like a restoration.[1011] The latest critical examination is in Bandelier’s “Studies about Cholula and its vicinity,” making part iii. of his Archæological Tour in Mexico in 1881.[1012]

What are called the finest ruins in Mexico are those of Xochicalco, seventy-five miles southwest of the capital, consisting of a mound of five terraces supported by masonry, with a walled area on the summit. Of late years a cornfield surrounds what is left of the pyramidal structure, which was its crowning edifice, and which up to the middle of the last century had five receding stories, though only one now appears. It owes its destruction to the needs which the proprietors of the neighboring sugar-works have had for its stones. The earliest account of the ruins appeared in the “Descripcion (1791) de los antiqüedades de Xochicalco” of José Antonio Alzate y Ramirez, in the Gacetas de Literatura (Mexico, 1790-94, in 3 vols.; reprinted Puebla, 1831, in 4 vols.), accompanied by plates, which were again used in Pietro Marquez’s Due Antichi Monumenti de Architettura Messicana (Roma, 1804),[1013] with an Italian version of Alzate, from which the French translation in Dupaix was made. Alzate furnished the basis of the account in Humboldt’s Vues (i. 129; pl. ix. of folio ed.), and Waldeck (Voyage pitt., 69) regrets that Humboldt adopted so inexact a description as that of Alzate. From Nebel (Viage pintoresco) we get our best graphic representations, for Tylor (Anahuac) says that Casteñeda’s drawings, accompanying Dupaix, are very incorrect. Bancroft says that one, at least, of these drawings in Kingsborough bears not the slightest resemblance to the one given in Dupaix. In 1835 there were explorations made under orders of the Mexican government, which were published in the Revista Mexicana (i. 539,—reprinted in the Diccionario Universal, x. 938). Other accounts, more or less helpful, are given by Latrobe, Mayer,[1014] and in Isador Löwenstern’s Le Méxique (Paris, 1843).[1015]

COURT IN THE MEXICO MUSEUM.

Note.—The opposite view of the court of the Museum is from Charnay, p. 57. He says: “The Museum cannot be called rich, in so far that there is nothing remarkable in what the visitor is allowed to see.” The vases, which had so much deceived Charnay, earlier, as to cause him to make casts of them for the Paris Museum, he at a later day pronounced forgeries; and he says that they, with many others which are seen in public and private museums, were manufactured at Tlatiloco, a Mexican suburb, between 1820 and 1828. See Holmes on the trade in Mexican spurious relics in Science, 1886.

The reclining statue in the foreground is balanced by one similar to it at an opposite part of the court-yard. One is the Chac-mool, as Le Plongeon called it, unearthed by him at Chichen-Itza, and appropriated by the Mexican government; the other was discovered at Tlaxcala.

The round stone in the centre is the sacrificial stone dug up in the great square in Mexico, of which an enlarged view is given on another page.

The museum is described in Bancroft, iv. 554; in Mayer’s Mexico as it was, etc., and his Mexico, Aztec, etc.; Fossey’s Mexique.

On Le Plongeon’s discovery of the Chac-mool see Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Apr., 1877; Oct., 1878, and new series, i. 280; Nadaillac, Eng. tr., 346; Short, 400; Le Plongeon’s Sacred Mysteries, 88, and his paper in the Amer. Geog. Soc. Journal, ix. 142 (1877). Hamy calls it the Toltec god Tlaloc, the rain-god; and Charnay agrees with him, giving (pp. 366-7) cuts of his and of the one found at Tlaxcala.

The ancient Anahuac corresponds mainly to the valley of Mexico city.[1016] Bancroft (iv. 497) shows in a summary way the extent of our knowledge of the scant archæological remains within this central area.[1017]

In the city of Mexico not a single relic of the architecture of the earlier peoples remains,[1018] though a few movable sculptured objects are preserved.[1019]

OLD MEXICAN BRIDGE NEAR TEZCUCO.

After a sketch in Tylor’s Anahuac, who thinks it the original Puente de las Bergantinas, where Cortes had his brigantines launched. The span is about 20 feet, and this Tylor thinks “an immense span for such a construction.” Cf. H. H. Bancroft, Native Races, iv. 479, 528. Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Reports, ii. 696) doubts its antiquity.

Tezcuco, on the other side of the lake from Mexico, affords some traces of the ante-Conquest architecture, but has revealed no such interesting movable relics as have been found in the capital city.[1020] Twenty-five miles north of Mexico are the ruins of Teotihuacan, which have been abundantly described by early writers and modern explorers. Bancroft (iv. 530) makes up his summary mainly from a Mexican official account, Ramon Almaraz’s Memoria de los trabajos ejecutados por la comision cientifica de Pachuca (Mexico, 1865), adding what was needed to fill out details from Clavigero, Humboldt, and the later writers.[1021]

Bancroft (iv. ch. 10), in describing what is known of the remains in the northern parts of Mexico, gives a summary of what has been written regarding the most famous of these ruins, Quemada in Zacatecas.[1022]

THE INDIO TRISTE.

After a photograph in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 68. He thinks it was intended to be a bearer of a torch, and has no symbolical meaning.

Bancroft (iv. ch. 7) has given a separate chapter to the antiquities of Oajaca (Oaxaca) and Guerrero, as the most southern of what he terms the Nahua people, including and lying westerly of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he speaks of it as a region but little known to travellers, except as they pass through a part of it lying on the commercial route from Acapulco to the capital city of Mexico. Bancroft’s summary, with his references, must suffice for the inquirer for all except the principal group of ruins in this region, that of Mitla (or Lyó-Baa), of which a full recapitulation of authorities may be made, most of which are also to be referred to for the lesser ruins, though, as Bancroft points out, the information respecting Monte Alban and Zachila is far from satisfactory. Of Monte Alban, Dupaix and Charnay are the most important witnesses, and the latter says that he considers Monte Alban “one of the most precious remains, and very surely the most ancient of the American civilizations.”[1023] On Dupaix alone we must depend for what we know of Zachila.

It is, however, of Mitla (sometime Miquitlan, Mictlan) that more considerable mention must be made, and its ruins, about thirty miles southerly from Mexico, have been oftenest visited, as they deserve to be; and we have to regret that Stephens never took them within the range of his observations. Their demolition had begun during a century or two previous to the Spanish Conquest, and was not complete even then. Nature is gloomy, and even repulsive in its desolation about the ruins;[1024] but a small village still exists among them. The place is mentioned by Duran[1025] as inhabited about 1450; Motolinía describes it as still lived in,[1026] and in 1565-74 it had a gobernador of its own. Burgoa speaks of it in 1644.[1027]

GENERAL PLAN OF MITLA.

After Bandelier’s sketch (Archæological Tour, p. 276). KEY:
A, the ruins on the highest ground, with a church and curacy built into the walls.
B, C, E, are ruins outside the village.
D is within the modern village.
F is beyond the river.

The earliest of the modern explorers were Luis Martin, a Mexican architect, and Colonel de la Laguna, who examined the ruins in 1802; and it was from Martin and his drawings that Humboldt drew the information with which, in 1810, he first engaged the attention of the general public upon Mitla, in his Vues des Cordillères. Dupaix’s visit was in 1806. The architect Eduard L. Mühlenpfordt, in his Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik Mejico (Hannover, 1844, in 2 vols.), says that he made plans and drawings in 1830,[1028] which, passing into the hands of Juan B. Carriedo, were used by him to illustrate a paper, “Los palacios antiguos de Mitla,” in the Ilustracion Mexicana (vol. ii.), in which he set forth the condition of the ruins in 1852. Meanwhile, in 1837, some drawings had been made, which were twenty years later reproduced in the ninth volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, as Brantz Mayer’s Observations on Mexican history and archæology, with a special notice of Zapotec, remains as delineated in Mr. J. G. Sawkins’s drawings of Mitla, etc. (Washington, 1857). Bancroft points out (iv. 406) that the inaccuracies and impossibilities of Sawkins’ drawings are such as to lead to the conclusion that he pretended to explorations which he never made, and probably drafted his views from some indefinite information; and that Mayer was deceived, having no more precise statements than Humboldt’s by which to test the drawings. Matthieu Fossey visited the ruins in 1838; but his account in his Le Méxique (Paris, 1857) is found by Bancroft to be mainly a borrowed one. G. F. von Tempsky’s Mitla, a narrative of incidents and personal adventure on a journey in Mexico, Guatemala and Salvador, 1853-1855, edited by J. S. Bell (London, 1858), deceives us by the title into supposing that considerable attention is given in the book to Mitla, but we find him spending but a part of a day there in February, 1854 (p. 250). The book is not prized; Bandelier calls it of small scientific value, and Bancroft says his plates must have been made up from other sources than his own observations.[1029] Charnay, here, as well as elsewhere, made for us some important photographs in 1859.[1030] This kind of illustration received new accessions of value when Emilio Herbrüger issued a series of thirty-four fine plates as Album de Vistas fotográficas de las Antiguas Ruinas de los palacios de Mitla (Oaxaca, 1874). In 1864, J. W. von Müller, in his Reisen in den Vereinigten Staaten, Canada und Mexico (Leipzig, in 3 vols.), included an account of a visit.[1031] The most careful examination made since Bancroft summarized existing knowledge is that of Bandelier in his Archæological Tour in Mexico in 1881 (Boston, 1885), published as no. ii. of the American series of the Papers of the Archæological Institute of America, which is illustrated with heliotypes and sketch plans of the ruins and architectural details in all their geometrical symmetry. Bancroft (iv. 392, etc.) could only give a plan of the ruins based on the sketches of Mühlenpfordt as published by Carriedo, but the student will find a more careful one[1032] in Bandelier, who also gives detailed ones of the several buildings (pl. xvii., xviii.)

SACRIFICIAL STONE.

After a photograph in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 67. See on another page, cut of the court-yard of the Museum, where this stone is preserved. Cf. Humboldt, pl. xxi.; Bandelier in Amer. Antiq., 1878; Bancroft, iv. 509; Stevens’s Flint Chips, 311. There is a discussion of the stone in Orozco y Berra’s El Cuauhxicalli de Tizoc, in the Anales del Museo Nacional, i. no. 1; ii. no. 1. On the sacrificial stone of San Juan Teotihuacan, see paper by Amos W. Butler in the Amer. Antiq., vii. 148. A cut in Clavigero (ii.) shows how the stone was used in sacrifices; the engraving has been often copied. In Mrs. Nuttall’s view this stone simply records the periodical tribute days (Am. Ass. Adv. Sci. Proc., Aug. 1886).

There is no part of Spanish America richer in architectural remains than the northern section of Yucatan, and Bancroft (iv. ch. 5) has occasion to enumerate and to describe with more or less fullness between fifty and sixty independent groups of ruins.[1033] Stephens explored forty-four of these abandoned towns, and such was the native ignorance that of only a few of them could anything be learned in Merida. And yet that this country was the land of a peculiar architecture was known to the earliest explorers. Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, Juan de Grijalva in 1518, Cortés himself in 1519, and Francisco de Montejo in 1527 observed the ruins in Cozumel, an island off the northwest coast of the peninsula, and at other points of the shore.[1034] It is only, however, within the present century that we have had any critical notices. Rio heard reports of them merely. Lorenzo de Zavala saw only Uxmal, as his account given in Dupaix shows. The earliest detailed descriptions were those of Waldeck in his Voyage pittoresque et achéologique dans la province d’Yucatan (Paris, 1838, folio, with steel plates and lithographs), but he also saw little more than the ruins of Uxmal, in the expedition in which he had received pecuniary support from Lord Kingsborough.[1035] It is to John L. Stephens and his accompanying draughtsman, Frederic Catherwood, that we owe by far the most essential part of our knowledge of the Yucatan remains. He had begun a survey of Uxmal in 1840, but had made little progress when the illness of his artist broke up his plans. Accordingly he gave the world but partial results in his Incidents of Travel in Central America. Not satisfied with his imperfect examination, he returned to Yucatan in 1841, and in 1843 published at New York the book which has become the main source of information for all compilers ever since, his Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (N. Y., 1842; London, 1843; again, N. Y., 1856, 1858). It was in the early days of the Daguerrean process, and Catherwood took with him a camera, from which his excellent drawings derive some of their fidelity. They appeared in his own Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America (N. Y., 1844), on a larger scale than in Stephens’s smaller pages.

WALDECK.

After an etching published in the Annuaire de la Soc. Amer. de France. Cf. Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., October, 1875.

Stephens’s earlier book had had an almost immediate success. The reviewers were unanimous in commendation, as they might well be.[1036] It has been asserted that it was in order to avail of this new interest that a resident of New Orleans, Mr. B. M. Norman, hastened to Yucatan, while Stephens was there a second time, and during the winter of 1841-42 made the trip among the ruins, which is recorded in his Rambles in Yucatan, or Notes of Travel through the peninsula, including a Visit to the Remarkable Ruins of Chi-chen, Kabah Zayi, and Uxmal (New York, 1843).[1037]

The Daguerrean camera was also used by the Baron von Friederichsthal in his studies at Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and his exploration seems to have taken place between the two visits of Stephens, as Bancroft determines from a letter (April 21, 1841) written after the baron had started on his return voyage to Europe.[1038] In Paris, in October, 1841, under the introduction of Humboldt, Friederichsthal addressed the Academy, and his paper was printed in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (xcii. 297) as “Les Monuments de l’Yucatan.”[1039] The camera was not, however, brought to the aid of the student with the most satisfactory results till Charnay, in 1858, visited Izamal, Chichen-Itza, and Uxmal. He gave a foretaste of his results in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog. (1861, vol. ii. 364), and in 1863 gave not very extended descriptions, relying mostly on his Atlas of photographs in his Cités et Ruines Américaines, a part of which volume consists of the architectural speculations of Viollet le Duc. Beside the farther studies of Charnay in his Anciens Villes du Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1885), there have been recent explorations in Yucatan by Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, mainly at Chichen-Itza, in which for a while he had the aid and countenance of Mr. Stephen Salisbury, Jr.,[1040] of Worcester, Mass. Le Plongeon’s results are decidedly novel and helpful, but they were expressed with more license of explication than satisfied the committee of that society, when his papers were referred to them for publication, and than has proved acceptable to other examiners.[1041] Nearly all other descriptions of the Yucatan ruins have been derived substantially from these chief authorities.[1042]

DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY.

Reproduced from an engraving in the London edition, 1887, of the English translation of his Ancient Cities of the New World.

The principal ruins of Yucatan are those of Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and references to the literature of each will suffice. Those at Uxmal are in some respects distinct in character from the remains of Honduras and of Chiapas. There are no idols as at Copan. There are no extensive stucco-work and no tablets as at Palenqué. The general type is Cyclopean masonry, faced with dressed stones. The Casa de Monjas, or nunnery (so called), is often considered the most remarkable ruin in Central America; and no architectural feature of any of them has been the subject of more inquiry than the protuberant ornaments in the cornices, which are usually called elephants’ trunks.[1043] It has been contended that the place was inhabited in the days of Cortes.[1044]

FROM CHARNAY.

Also in the Bull. Soc. de Géog. de Paris, 1882 (p. 542). The best large (36 × 28 in.) topographical and historical map of Yucatan, showing the site of ruins, is that of Huebbe and Azuar, 1878. The Plano de Yucatan, of Santiago Nigra de San Martin, also showing the ruins, 1848, is reduced in Stephen Salisbury’s Mayas (Worcester, 1877), or in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1876, and April, 1877. V. A. Malte-Brun’s map, likewise marking the ruins, is in Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Palenqué (1866). There are maps in C. G. Fancourt’s Hist. Yucatan (London, 1854); Dupaix’s Antiquités Méxicaines; Waldeck’s Voyage dans la Yucatan (his MS. map was used by Malte-Brun). Cf. the map of Yucatan and Chiapas, in Brasseur and Waldeck’s Monuments Anciens du Méxique (1866). Perhaps the most convenient map to use in the study of Maya antiquities is that in Bancroft’s Nat. Races, iv. Cf. Crescentio Carrillo’s “Geografía Maya” in the Anales del Museo nacional de México, ii. 435.

The map in Stephens’s Yucatan, vol. i., shows his route among the ruins, but does not pretend to be accurate for regions off his course.

The Journal of the Royal Geog. Soc., vol. xi., has a map showing the ruins in Central America.

The best map to show at a glance the location of the ruins in the larger field of Spanish America is in Bancroft’s Nat. Races, iv.

The earliest printed account of Uxmal is in Cogolludo’s Yucathan (Madrid, 1688), pp. 176, 193, 197; but it was well into this century before others were written. Lorenzo de Zavala gave but an outline account in his Notice, printed in Dupaix in 1834. Waldeck (Voyage Pitt. 67, 93) spent eight days there in May, 1835, and Stephens gives him the credit of being the earliest describer to attract attention. Stephens’s first visit in 1840 was hasty (Cent. Amer., ii. 413), but on his second visit (1842) he took with him Waldeck’s Voyage, and his description and the drawings of Catherwood were made with the advantage of having these earlier drawings to compare. Stephens (Yucatan, i. 297) says that their plans and drawings differ materially from Waldeck’s; but Bancroft, who compares the two, says that Stephens exaggerated the differences, which are not material, except in a few plates (Stephens’s Yucatan, i. 163; ii. 264—ch. 24, 25). About the same time Norman and Friederichsthal made their visits. Bancroft (iv. 150) refers to the lesser narratives of Carillo (1845), and another, recorded in the Registro Yucateco (i. 273, 361), with Carl Bartholomæus Heller (April, 1847) in his Reisen in Mexico (Leipzig, 1853). Charnay’s Ruines (p. 362), and his Anciens Villes (ch. 19, 20), record visits in 1858 and later. Brasseur reported upon Uxmal in 1865 in the Archives de la Com. Scientifique du Méxique (ii. 234, 254), and he had already made mention of them in his Hist. Nations Civ., ii. ch. 1.[1045]

RUINED TEMPLE AT UXMAL.

After a cut in Ruge’s Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 357.

The ruins of Chichen-Itza make part of the eastern group of the Yucatan remains. As was not the case with some of the other principal ruins, the city in its prime has a record in Maya tradition; it was known in the days of the Conquest, and has not been lost sight of since,[1046] though its ruins were not visited by explorers till well within the present century, the first of whom, according to Stephens, was John Burke, in 1838. Stephens had heard of them and mentioned them to Friederichsthal, who was there in 1840 (Nouv. Annales des Voyages, xcii. 300-306). Norman was there in February, 1842 (Rambles, 104), and did not seem aware that any one had been there before him; and Stephens himself, during the next month (Yucatan, ii. 282), made the best record which we have. Charnay made his observations in 1858 (Ruines, 339,—cf. Anciens Villes, ch. 18), and gives us nine good photographs. The latest discoverer is Le Plongeon, whose investigations were signalized by the finding (1876) of the statue of Chackmool, and by other notable researches (Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1877; October, 1878).[1047]

FROM CHICHEN-ITZA.

After a cut in Squier’s Serpent Symbol. There are two of these rings in the walls of one of the buildings twenty or thirty feet from the ground. They are four feet in diameter. Cf. Stephens’s Yucatan, ii. 304; Bancroft, iv. 230.

FROM CHICHEN-ITZA.

A bas-relief, one of the best preserved at Chichen-Itza, after a sketch in Charnay and Viollet-le-Duc’s Cités et Ruines Américaines (Paris, 1863), p. 53, of which Viollet-le-Duc says: “Le profil du guerrier se rapproche sensiblement les types du Nord de l’Europe.”

It seems hardly to admit of doubt that the cities—if that be their proper designation—of Yucatan were the work of the Maya people, whose descendants were found by the Spaniards in possession of the peninsula, and that in some cases, like those of Uxmal and Toloom, their sacred edifices did not cease to be used till some time after the Spaniards had possessed the country. Such were the conclusions of Stephens,[1048] the sanest mind that has spent its action upon these remains; and he tells us that a deed of the region where Uxmal is situated, which passed in 1673, mentions the daily religious rites which the natives were then celebrating there, and speaks of the swinging doors and cisterns then in use. The abandonment of one of the buildings, at least, is brought down to within about two centuries, and comparisons of Catherwood’s drawings with the descriptions of more recent explorers, by showing a very marked deterioration within a comparatively few years, enable us easily to understand how the piercing roots of a rapidly growing vegetation can make a greater havoc in a century than will occur in temperate climates. The preservation of paint on the walls, and of wooden lintels in some places, also induce a belief that no great time, such as would imply an extinct race of builders, is necessary to account for the present condition of the ruins, and we must always remember how the Spaniards used them as quarries for building their neighboring towns. How long these habitations and shrines stood in their perfection is a question about which archæologists have had many and diverse estimates, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years. There is nothing in the ruins themselves to settle the question, beyond a study of their construction. So far as the traditionary history of the Mayas can determine, some of them may have been built between the third and the tenth century.[1049]

We come now to Chiapas. The age of the ruins of Palenqué[1050] can only be conjectured, and very indefinitely, though perhaps there is not much risk in saying that they represent some of the oldest architectural structures known in the New World, and were very likely abandoned three or four centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. Still, any confident statement is unwise. Perhaps there may be some fitness in Brasseur’s belief that the stucco additions and roofs were the work of a later people than those who laid the foundations.[1051] Bancroft (iv. 289) has given the fullest account of the literature describing these ruins. They seem to have been first found in 1750, or a few years before. The report reaching Ramon de Ordoñez, then a boy, was not forgotten by him, and prompted him to send his brother in 1773 to explore them. Among the manuscripts in the Brasseur Collection (Bib. Mex.-Guat., p. 113; Pinart, no. 695) are a Memoria relativa à las ruinas... de Palenqué, and Notas de Chiapas y Palenqué, which are supposed to be the record of this exploration written by Ramon, as copied from the original in the Museo Nacional, and which, in part at least, constituted the report which Ramon made in 1784 to the president of the Audiencia Real. Ramon’s view was that he had hit upon the land of Ophir, and the country visited by the Phœnicians. This same president now directed José Antonio Calderon to visit the ruins, and we have his “Informe” translated in Brasseur’s Palenqué (introd. p. 5). From February to June of 1785, Antonio Benasconi, the royal architect of Guatemala, inspected the ruins under similar orders. His report, as well as the preceding one, with the accompanying drawings, were dispatched to Spain, where J. B. Muñoz made a summary of them for the king. I do not find any of them have been printed. The result of the royal interest in the matter was, that Antonio del Rio was next commissioned to make a more thorough survey, which he accomplished (May-June, 1787) with the aid of a band of natives to fell the trees and fire the rubbish. He broke through the walls in a reckless way, that added greatly to the devastation of years. Rio’s report, dated at Palenqué June 24, 1787, was published first in 1855, in the Diccionario Univ. de Geog., viii. 528.[1052] Meanwhile, beside the copy of the manuscript sent to Spain, other manuscripts were kept in Guatemala and Mexico; and one of these falling into the hands of a Dr. M’Quy, was taken to England and translated under the title Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City discovered near Palenque in Guatemala, Spanish America, translated from the Original MS. Report of Capt. Don A. Del Rio; followed by Teatro Critico Americano, or a Critical Investigation and Research into the History of the Americans, by Doctor Felix Cabrera (London, 1822).[1053]

A RESTORATION BY VIOLLET-LE-DUC.

From Histoire de l’Habitation Humaine, par Viollet-le-Duc (Paris, 1875). There is a restoration of the Palenqué palace—so called—in Armin’s Das heutige Mexico (copied in Short, 342, and Bancroft, iv. 323).

The results of the explorations of Dupaix, made early in the present century by order of Carlos IV. of Spain, long remained unpublished. His report and the drawings of Castañeda lay uncared for in the Mexican archives during the period of the Revolution. Latour Allard, of Paris, obtained copies of some of the drawings, and from these Kingsborough got copies, which he engraved for his Mexican Antiquities, in which Dupaix’s report was also printed in Spanish and English (vols. iv., v., vi.). It is not quite certain whether the originals or copies were delivered (1828) by the Mexican authorities to Baradère, who a few years later secured their publication with additional matter as Antiquités méxicaines. Relation des trois expéditions du capitaine Dupaix, ordonnées en 1805, 1806 et 1807, pour la recherche des antiquités du pays, notamment celles de Mitla et de Palenque; accompagnée des dessins de Castañeda, et d’une carte du pays exploré; suivie d’un parallèle de ces monuments avec ceux de l’Égypte, de l’Indostan, et du reste de l’ancien monde par Alexandre Lenoir; d’une dissertation sur l’origine de l’ancienne population des deux Amériques par [D. B.] Warden; avec un discours préliminaire par. M. Charles Farcy, et des notes explicatives, et autres documents par MM. Baradère, de St. Priest [etc.]. (Paris 1834, texte et atlas.)[1054] The plates of this edition are superior to those in Kingsborough and in Rio; and are indeed improved in the engraving over Castañeda’s drawings. The book as a whole is one of the most important on Palenqué which we have. The investigations were made on his third expedition (1807-8). A tablet taken from the ruins by him is in the Museo Nacional, and a cast of it is figured in the Numis. and Antiq. Soc. of Philad. Proc., Dec. 4, 1884.

During the twenty-five years next following Dupaix, we find two correspondents of the French and English Geographical Societies supplying their publications with occasional accounts of their observations among the ruins. One of them, Dr. F. Corroy,[1055] was then living at Tabasco; the other, Col. Juan Gallindo,[1056] was resident in the country as an administrative officer.

SCULPTURES, TEMPLE OF THE CROSS, PALENQUÉ.

These slabs, six feet high, were taken from Palenqué, and when Stephens saw them they were in private hands at San Domingo, near by, but later they were placed in the church front in the same town, and here Charnay took impressions of them, from which they were engraved in The Ancient Cities, etc., p. 217, and copied thence in the above cuts. This same type of head is considered by Rosny the Aztec head of Palenqué (Doc. écrits de la Antiq. Amer., 73), and as belonging to the superior classes. In order to secure the convex curve of the nose and forehead an ornament was sometimes added, as shown in a head of the second tablet at Palenqué, and in the photograph of a bas-relief, preserved in the Museo Archeologico at Madrid, given by Rosny (vol. 3), and hypothetically called by him a statue of Cuculkan. This ornament is not infrequently seen in other images of this region.

Bandelier (Peabody Mus. Repts., ii. 126), speaking of the tablet of the Cross of Palenqué, says: “These tablets and figures show in dress such a striking analogy of what we know of the military accoutrements of the Mexicans, that it is a strong approach to identity.”

Fréderic de Waldeck, the artist who some years before had familiarized himself with the character of the ruins in the preparation of the engravings for Rio’s work, was employed in 1832-34. He was now considerably over sixty years of age, and under the pay of a committee, which had raised a subscription, in which the Mexican government shared. He made the most thorough examination of Palenqué which has yet been made. Waldeck was a skilful artist, and his drawings are exquisite; but he was not free from a tendency to improve or restore, where the conditions gave a hint, and so as we have them in the final publication they have not been accepted as wholly trustworthy. He made more than 200 drawings, and either the originals or copies—Stephens says “copies,” the originals being confiscated—were taken to Europe. Waldeck announced his book in Paris, and the public had already had a taste of his not very sober views in some communications which he had sent in Aug. and Nov., 1832, to the Société de Géographie de Paris. Long years of delay followed, and Waldeck had lived to be over ninety, when the French government bought his collection[1057] (in 1860), and made preparations for its publication. Out of the 188 drawings thus secured, 56 were selected and were admirably engraved, and only that portion of Waldeck’s text was preserved which was purely descriptive, and not all of that. Selection was made of Brasseur de Bourbourg, who at that time had never visited the ruins,[1058] to furnish some introductory matter. This he prepared in an Avant-propos, recapitulating the progress of such studies; and this was followed by an Introduction aux Ruines de Palenqué, narrating the course of explorations up to that time; a section also published separately as Recherches sur les Ruines de Palenqué et sur les origines de la civilisation du Méxique (Paris, 1886), and finally Waldeck’s own Description des Ruines, followed by the plates, most of which relate to Palenqué. Thus composed, a large volume was published under the general title of Monuments anciens du Méxique. Palenqué et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Méxique. Collection de vues [etc.], cartes et plans dessinés d’après nature et relevés par M. de Waldeck. Texte rédigé par M. Brasseur de Bourbourg. (Paris, 1864-1866.)[1059] While Waldeck’s results were still unpublished the ruins of Palenqué were brought most effectively to the attention of the English reader in the Travels in Central America (vol. ii. ch. 17) of Stephens, which was illustrated by the drawings of Catherwood,[1060] since famous. These better cover the field, and are more exact than those of Dupaix.

PLAN OF COPAN (RUINS AND VILLAGE).

From The Stone Sculptures of Copán and Quiriguá (N. Y., 1883) of Meye and Schmidt.

Bancroft refers to an anonymous account in the Registro Yucateco (i. 318). One of the most intelligent of the later travellers is Arthur Morelet, who privately printed his Voyage dans l’Amérique Central, Cuba et le Yucatan, which includes an account of a fortnight’s stay at Palenqué. His results would be difficult of access except that Mrs. M. F. Squier, with an introduction by E. G. Squier, published a translation of that part of it relating to the main land as Travels in Central America, including accounts of regions unexplored since the Conquest (N. Y., 1871).[1061]

Désiré Charnay was the first to bring photography to the aid of the student when he visited Palenqué in 1858, and his plates forming the folio atlas accompanying his Cités et Ruines Américaines (1863), pp. 72, 411, are, as Bancroft (iv. 293) points out, of interest to enable us to test the drawings of preceding delineators, and to show how time had acted on the ruins since the visit of Stephens. His later results are recorded in his Les anciennes villes du Nouveau Monde (Paris, 1885).[1062]

YUCATAN TYPES.

Given by Rosny, Doc. Écrits de la Antiq. Amér., p. 73, as types of the short-headed race which preceded the Aztec occupation. They are from sculptures at Copan. Cf. Stephens’s Cent. America, i. 139; Bancroft, iv. 101.

PLAN OF THE RUINS OF QUIRIGUA.

From Meye and Schmidt’s Stone Sculptures of Copán and Quiriguá (N. Y., 1883).

There have been only two statues found at Palenqué, in connection with the T emple of the Cross,[1063] but the considerable number of carved figures discovered at Copan,[1064] as well as the general impression that these latter ruins are the oldest on the American continent,[1065] have made in some respects these most celebrated of the Honduras remains more interesting than those of Chiapas. It is now generally agreed that the ruins of Copan[1066] do not represent the town called Copan, assaulted and captured by Hernando de Choves in 1530, though the identity of names has induced some writers to claim that these ruins were inhabited when the Spaniards came.[1067] The earliest account of them which we have is that in Palacio’s letter to Felipe II., written (1576) hardly more than a generation after the Conquest, and showing that the ruins then were much in the same condition as later described.[1068] The next account is that of Fuentes y Guzman’s Historia de Guatemala (1689), now accessible in the Madrid edition of 1882; but for a long time only known in the citation in Juarros’ Guatemala (p. 56), and through those who had copied from Juarros.[1069] His account is brief, speaks of Castilian costumes, and is otherwise so enigmatical that Brasseur calls it mendacious. Colonel Galindo, in visiting the ruins in 1836, confounded them with the Copan of the Conquest.[1070] The ruins also came Under the scrutiny of Stephens in 1839, and they were described by him, and drawn by Catherwood, for the first time with any fullness and care, in their respective works.[1071]

Always associated with Copan, and perhaps even older, if the lower relief of the carvings can bear that interpretation, are the ruins near the village of Quiriguá, in Guatemala, and known by that name. Catherwood first brought them into notice;[1072] but the visit of Karl Scherzer in 1854 produced the most extensive account of them which we have, in his Ein Besuch bei den Ruinen von Quiriguá (Wien, 1855).[1073]

The principal explorers of Nicaragua have been Ephraim George Squier, in his Nicaragua,[1074] and Frederick Boyle, in his Ride across a Continent (Lond. 1868),[1075] and their results, as well as the scattered data of others,[1076] are best epitomized in Bancroft (iv. ch. 2), who gives other references to second-hand descriptions (p. 29). Since Bancroft’s survey there have been a few important contributions.[1077]

[III.]Bibliographical Notes on the Picture-Writing of the Nahuas and Mayas.

IN considering the methods of record and communication used by these peoples, we must keep in mind the two distinct systems of the Aztecs and the Mayas;[1078] and further, particularly as regards the former, we must not forget that some of these writings were made after the Conquest, and were influenced in some degree by Spanish associations. Of this last class were land titles and catechisms, for the native system obtained for some time as a useful method with the conquerors for recording the transmission of lands and helping the instruction by the priests.[1079]

FAC-SIMILE OF A PART OF LANDA’S MS.

After a fac-simile in the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France, nouv. ser., ii. 34. (Cf. pl. xix. of Rosny’s Essai sur le déchiffrement, etc.) It is a copy, not the original, of Landa’s text, but a nearly contemporary one (made thirty years after Landa’s death), and the only one known.

It is usual in tracing the development of a hieroglyphic system to advance from a purely figurative one—in which pictures of objects are used—through a symbolic phase; in which such pictures are interpreted conventionally instead of realistically. It was to this last stage that the Aztecs had advanced; but they mingled the two methods, and apparently varied in the order of reading, whether by lines or columns, forwards, upwards, or backwards. The difficulty of understanding them is further increased by the same object holding different meanings in different connections, and still more by the personal element, or writer’s style, as we should call it, which was impressed on his choice of objects and emblems.[1080] This rendered interpretation by no means easy to the aborigines themselves, and we have statements that when native documents were referred to them it required sometimes long consultations to reach a common understanding.[1081] The additional step by which objects stand for sounds, the Aztecs seem not to have taken, except in the names of persons and places, in which they understood the modern child’s art of the rebus, where such symbol more or less clearly stands for a syllable, and the representation was usually of conventionalized forms, somewhat like the art of the European herald. Thus the Aztec system was what Daniel Wilson[1082] calls “the pictorial suggestion of associated ideas.”[1083] The phonetic scale, if not comprehended in the Aztec system, made an essential part of the Maya hieroglyphics, and this was the great distinctive feature of the latter, as we learn from the early descriptions,[1084] and from the alphabet which Landa has preserved for us. It is not only in the codices or books of the Mayas that their writing is preserved to us, but in the inscriptions of their carved architectural remains.[1085]

Note—This representation of Yucatan hieroglyphics is a reduction of pl. i. in Léon de Rosny’s Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique de l’Amérique Centrale, Paris, 1876. Cf. Bancroft, iv. 92; Short, 405.

When the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg found, in 1863, in the library of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, the MS. of Landa’s Relacion, and discovered in it what purported to be a key to the Maya alphabet, there were hopes that the interpretation of the Maya books and inscriptions was not far off. Twenty-five years, however, has not seen the progress that was wished for; and if we may believe Valentini, the alphabet of Landa is a pure fabrication of the bishop himself;[1086] and even some of those who account it genuine, like Le Plongeon, hold that it is inadequate in dealing with the older Maya inscriptions.[1087] Cyrus Thomas speaks of this alphabet as simply an attempt of the bishop to pick out of compound characters their simple elements on the supposition that something like phonetic representations would be the result.[1088] Landa’s own description[1089] of the alphabet accompanying his graphic key[1090] is very unsatisfactory, not to say incomprehensible. Brasseur has tried to render it in French, and Bancroft in English; but it remains a difficult problem to interpret it intelligibly.

Brasseur very soon set himself the task of interpreting the Troano manuscript by the aid of this key, and he soon had the opportunity of giving his interpretation to the public when the Emperor Napoleon III. ordered that codex to be printed in the sumptuous manner of the imperial press.[1091] The efforts of Brasseur met with hardly a sign of approval. Léon de Rosny criticised him,[1092] and Dr. Brinton found in his results nothing to commend.[1093]

No one has approached the question of interpreting these Maya writings with more careful scrutiny than Léon de Rosny, who first attracted attention with his comparative study, Les écritures figuratives et hiéroglyphiques des différens peuples anciens et moderns (Paris, 1860; again, 1870, augmentée). From 1869 to 1871 he published at Paris four parts of Archives paléographiques de l’Orient et de l’Amérique, publiées avec des notices historiques et philologiques, in which he included several studies of the native writings, and gave a bibliography (pp. 101-115) of American paleography up to that time. His L’interprétation des anciens textes Mayas made part of the first volume of the Archives de la Soc. Américaine de France (new series). His chief work, making the second volume of the same, is his Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’écriture hiératique de l’Amérique Central (Paris, 1876), and it is the most thorough examination of the problem yet made.[1094] The last part (4th) was published in 1878, and a Spanish translation appeared in 1881.

PALENQUÉ HIEROGLYPHICS.

After a cut in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, ii. p. 63. It is also given in Bancroft (iv. 355), and others. It is from the Tablet of the Cross.

Wm. Bollaert, who had paid some attention to the paleography of America,[1095] was one of the earliest in England to examine Brasseur’s work on Landa, which he did in a memoir read before the Anthropological Society,[1096] and later in an “Examination of the Central American hieroglyphs by the recently discovered Maya alphabet.”[1097] Brinton[1098] calls his conclusions fanciful, and Le Plongeon claims that the inscription in Stephens, which Bollaert worked upon, is inaccurately given, and that Bollaert’s results were nonsense.[1099] Hyacinthe de Charency’s efforts have hardly been more successful, though he attempted the use of Landa’s alphabet with something like scientific care. He examined a small part of the inscription of the Palenqué tablet of the Cross in his Essai de déchiffrement d’un fragment d’inscription palenquéene.[1100]

Dr. Brinton translated Charency’s results, and, adding Landa’s alphabet, published his Ancient phonetic alphabet of Yucatan (N. Y., 1870), a small tract.[1101] His continued studies were manifest in the introduction on “The graphic system and the ancient records of the Mayas” to Cyrus Thomas’s Manuscript Troano.[1102] In this paper Dr. Brinton traces the history of the attempts which have thus far been made in solving this perplexing problem.[1103] The latest application of the scientific spirit is that of the astronomer E. S. Holden, who sought to eliminate the probabilities of recurrent signs by the usual mathematical methods of resolving systems of modern cipher.[1104]

There are few examples of the aboriginal ideographic writings left to us. Their fewness is usually charged to the destruction which was publicly made of them under the domination of the Church in the years following the Conquest.[1105] The alleged agents in this demolition were Bishop Landa, in 1562, at Mani, in Yucatan,[1106] and Bishop Zumárraga at Tlatelalco, or, as some say, at Tezcuco, in Mexico.[1107] Peter Martyr[1108] has told us something of the records as he saw them, and we know also from him, and from their subsequent discovery in European collections, that some examples of them were early taken to the Old World. We have further knowledge of them from Las Casas and from Landa himself.[1109] There have been efforts made of late years by Icazbalceta and Canon Carrillo to mitigate the severity of judgment, particularly as respects Zumárraga.[1110] The first, and indeed the only attempt that has been made to bring together for mutual illustration all that was known of these manuscripts which escaped the fire,[1111] was in the great work of the Viscount Kingsborough (b. 1795, d. 1837). It was while, as Edward King, he was a student at Oxford that this nobleman’s passion for Mexican antiquities was first roused by seeing an original Aztec pictograph, described by Purchas (Pilgrimes, vol. iii.), and preserved in the Bodleian. In the studies to which this led he was assisted by some special scholars, including Obadiah Rich, who searched for him in Spain in 1830 and 1832, and who after Kingsborough’s death obtained a large part of the manuscript collections which that nobleman had amassed (Catalogue of the Sale, Dublin, 1842). Many of the Kingsborough manuscripts passed into the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (Catalogue, no. 404), but the correspondence pertaining to Kingsborough’s life-work seems to have disappeared. Phillipps had been one of the main encouragers of Kingsborough in his undertaking.[1112] Kingsborough, who had spent £30,000 on his undertaking, had a business dispute with the merchants who furnished the printing-paper, and he was by them thrown into jail as a debtor, and died in confinement.[1113]

LÉON DE ROSNY.

After a photogravure in Les Documents écrits de l’antiquité Américaine (Paris, 1882). Cf. cut in Mém. de la Soc. d’Ethnographie (1887), xiii. p. 71.

Kingsborough’s great work, the most sumptuous yet bestowed upon Mexican archæology, was published between 1830 and 1848, there being an interval of seventeen years between the seventh and eighth volumes. The original intention seems to have embraced ten volumes, for the final section of the ninth volume is signatured as for a tenth.[1114] The work is called: Antiquities of Mexico; comprising facsimiles of Ancient Mexican Paintings and Hieroglyphics, preserved in the Royal Libraries of Paris, Berlin, and Dresden; in the Imperial Library of Vienna; in the Vatican Library; in the Borgian Museum at Rome; in the Library of the Institute of Bologna; and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; together with the Monuments of New Spain, by M. Dupaix; illustrated by many valuable inedited MSS. With the theory maintained by Kingsborough throughout the work, that the Jews were the first colonizers of the country, we have nothing to do here; but as the earliest and as yet the largest repository of hieroglyphic material, the book needs to be examined. The compiler states where he found his MSS., but he gives nothing of their history, though something more is now known of their descent. Peter Martyr speaks of the number of Mexican MSS. which had in his day been taken to Spain, and Prescott remarks it as strange that not a single one given by Kingsborough was found in that country. There are, however, some to be seen there now.[1115] Comparisons which have been made of Kingsborough’s plates show that they are not inexact; but they almost necessarily lack the validity that the modern photographic processes give to facsimiles.

FAC-SIMILE OF PLATE XXV OF THE DRESDEN CODEX.

From Cyrus Thomas’s Manuscript Troano.

Kingsborough’s first volume opens with a fac-simile of what is usually called the Codex Mendoza, preserved in the Bodleian. It is, however, a contemporary copy on European paper of an original now lost, which was sent by the Viceroy Mendoza to Charles V. Another copy made part of the Boturini collection, and from this Lorenzana[1116] engraved that portion of it which consists of tribute-rolls. The story told of the fate of the original is, that on its passage to Europe it was captured by a French cruiser and taken to Paris, where it was bought by the chaplain of the English embassy, the antiquary Purchas, who has engraved it.[1117] It was then lost sight of, and if Prescott’s inference is correct it was not the original, but the Bodleian copy, which came into Purchas’ hands.[1118]

Beside the tribute-rolls,[1119] which make one part of it, the MS. covers the civil history of the Mexicans, with a third part on the discipline and economy of the people, which renders it of so much importance in an archæological sense.[1120] The second reproduction in Kingsborough’s first volume is what he calls the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and formerly owned by M. Le Tellier.[1121] The rest of this initial volume is made up of facsimiles of Mexican hieroglyphics and paintings, from the Boturini and Selden collections, which last is in the Bodleian.

The second Kingsborough volume opens with a reproduction of the Codex Vaticanus (the explanation[1122] is in volume vi.), which is in the library of the Vatican, and it is known to have been copied in Mexico by Pedro de los Rios in 1566. It is partly historical and partly mythological.[1123] The rest of this volume is made up of facsimiles of other manuscripts,—one given to the Bodleian by Archbishop Laud, others at Bologna,[1124] Vienna,[1125] and Berlin.

The third volume reproduces one belonging to the Borgian Museum at Rome, written on skin, and thought to be a ritual and astrological almanac. This is accompanied by a commentary by Frabega.[1126] Kingsborough gives but a single Maya MS., and this is in his third volume, and stands with him as an Aztec production. This is the Dresden Codex, not very exactly rendered, which is preserved in the royal library in that city, for which it was bought by Götz,[1127] at Vienna, in 1739. Prescott (i. 107) seemed to recognize its difference from the Aztec MSS., without knowing precisely how to class it.[1128] Brasseur de Bourbourg calls it a religious and astrological ritual. It is in two sections, and it is not certain that they belong together. In 1880 it was reproduced at Dresden by polychromatic photography (Chromo-Lichtdruck), as the process is called, under the editing of Dr. E. Förstemann, who in an introduction describes it as composed of thirty-nine oblong sheets folded together like a fan. They are made of the bark of a tree, and covered with varnish. Thirty-five have drawings and hieroglyphics on both sides; the other four on one side only. It is now preserved between glass to prevent handling, and both sides can be examined. Some progress has been made, it is professed, in deciphering its meaning, and it is supposed to contain “records of a mythic, historic, and ritualistic character.”[1129]

Another script in Kingsborough, perhaps a Tezcucan MS., though having some Maya affinities, is the Fejérvary Codex, then preserved in Hungary, and lately owned by Mayer, of Liverpool.[1130]

Three other Maya manuscripts have been brought to light since Kingsborough’s day, to say nothing of three others said to be in private hands, and not described.[1131] Of these, the Codex Troano has been the subject of much study. It is the property of a Madrid gentleman, Don Juan Tro y Ortolano, and the title given to the manuscript has been somewhat fantastically formed from his name by the Abbé Etienne Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg, who was instrumental in its recognition about 1865 or 1866, and who edited a sumptuous two-volume folio edition with chromo-lithographic plates.[1132]

CODEX CORTESIANUS.

From a fac-simile in the Archives de la Société Américaine de France, nouv. ser., ii. 30.

CODEX PEREZIANUS.

One of the leaves of a MS. No. 2, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, following the fac-simile (pl. 124) in Léon de Rosny’s Archives paléographiques (Paris, 1869).

While Léon de Rosny was preparing his Essai sur le déchiffrement de l’Ecriture hiératique (1876), a Maya manuscript was offered to the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris and declined, because the price demanded was too high. Photographic copies of two of its leaves had been submitted, and one of these is given by Rosny in the Essai (pl. xi.). The Spanish government finally bought the MS., which, because it was supposed to have once belonged to Cortes, is now known as the Codex Cortesianus. Rosny afterwards saw it and studied it in the Museo Archeológico at Madrid, as he makes known in his Doc. Ecrits de la Antiq. Amér., p. 79, where he points out the complementary character of one of its leaves with another of the MS. Troano, showing them to belong together, and gives photographs of the two (pl. v. vi.), as well as of other leaves (pl. 8 and 9). The part of this codex of a calendar character (Tableau des Bacab) is reproduced from Rosny’s plate by Cyrus Thomas[1133] in an essay in the Third Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, together with an attempted restoration of the plate, which is obscure in parts. Finally a small edition (85 copies) of the entire MS. was published at Paris in 1883.[1134]

The last of the Maya MSS. recently brought to light is sometimes cited as the Codex Perezianus, because the paper in which it was wrapped, when recognized in 1859 by Rosny,[1135] bore the name “Perez”; and sometimes designated as Codex Mexicanus, or Manuscrit Yucatèque No. 2, of the National Library at Paris. It was a few years later published as Manuscrit dit Méxicain No. 2 de la Bibliothèque Impériale, photographié par ordre de S. E. M. Duruy, ministre de l’instruction publique (Paris, 1864, in folio, 50 copies). The original is a fragment of eleven leaves, and Brasseur[1136] speaks of it as the most beautiful of all the MSS. in execution, but the one which has suffered the most from time and usage.[1137]

Note.—This Yucatan bas-relief follows a photograph by Rosny (1880), reproduced in the Mém. de la Soc. d’Ethnographie, no. 3 (Paris, 1882).

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