3. The word "Toltec" was a nickname given by the invading Aztecs to the race inhabiting Mexico on their arrival.
4. The Toltecs were Mayans, the ancestors, with their kinsmen further south, of those Mayan peoples to-day, as at the Spanish Conquest, inhabiting Central America from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico to the frontier of Nicaragua.
5. The Mayans are of the Apalachian stock, and had long been settled in Central America before the invasion of the Aztecs.
6. The architectural skill of the Mayans was not developed by them naturally, but was introduced from a foreign country some centuries before the Aztecs invaded their northernmost possessions.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The value of the Tula tradition is best gauged by a comparison of the dates given by authorities. Thus Sahagun (Historia de la Nueva España) places its destruction in 319 B.C.; Ixtlilxochitl (Historia Chichemeca, iii. cap. 4) brings it down to 969 A.D.; the Codex Ramirez gives it as 1168 A.D.; and so on. There is an equally amazing variation about the date of its founding.
[9] Ixtlilxochitl, in his Relaciones Historicas, says Topiltzin was the last king of Tula; that Toltec sovereignty extended a thousand leagues from north to south, and eight hundred from east to west; and that in the wars that attended its downfall 5,600,000 persons were slain!
[10] According to Dr. Brinton, the name Nahuatl, which of late years scholars have agreed to use in the place of Aztec, does not belong to the latter people. It is an Aztec word meaning—first, to speak clearly; second, to order or command; third, to speak as one with authority. Hence it gained the sense of "astute," "superior," and Nahuatlaca were the Superior People. Dr. Brinton thinks it was another name given by the Aztecs to the dispossessed Mayans, and that as the years passed and the legends of the two races became hopelessly confused, the Aztecs adopted the name themselves.
[11] Of Mexican traditions Dr. Brinton (A Review of the Data for the Study of the Prehistoric Chronology of America: 1887) says: "It is extremely doubtful if their earliest reminiscences refer to any event outside the narrow valley parcelled out between the petty states of Tenochtitlan, Tezcuco and Tlacopan.... The chronicles of Mexico proper contain no fixed date prior to that of the founding of Tenochtitlan in the year 1325 of our era."