The turkey, which was introduced into Europe from Mexico, was called huexolotl from the gobbling noise it makes. (It must be remembered that x and j in Spanish are not the same letters as in English, but a hard guttural aspirate, like the German ch). The name, slightly altered into guajalote, is still used in Mexico; but when these birds were brought to Europe, the Spaniards called them peacocks (pavos). To get rid of the confusion, it became necessary to call the real peacock “pavón” (big peacock), or “pavo real” (royal peacock). The German name for a turkey, “Wälscher Hahn,” “Italian fowl,” is reasonable, for the Germans got them from Italy; but our name “turkey” is wonderfully absurd.
There may be other Mexican words to be found in our language, but not many. The Mexicans were cultivating maize and tobacco when the Spaniards invaded the country, and had done so for ages; but these vegetables had been found already in the West India islands, and had got their name from the language of Hayti, mahiz and tabaco; the latter word, it seems, meaning not the tobacco itself, but the cigars made of it.
I do not recollect anything else worthy of note that Europe has borrowed from Ancient Mexico, except Botanic Gardens, and dishes made to keep hot at dinner-time, which the Aztecs managed by having a pan of burning charcoal underneath them.
To return to the Museum. There are stamps in terra-cotta with geometrical patterns, for making lines and ornaments on the vases before they were baked, and for stamping patterns upon the cotton cloth which was one of their principal manufactures, as it is now. Connected with the same art are the malacates, or winders, which I have already described. Little grotesque heads made of baked clay, like those I have mentioned as being found in such immense numbers on the sites of old Mexican cities, are here by hundreds. I think there were, besides, some of the moulds, also in terra-cotta, in which they were formed; at any rate, they are to be seen, so that making the little heads must have been a regular trade. What they were for is not so easy to say. Some have bodies, and are made with flat backs to stand against a wall, and these were probably idols. The ancient Mexicans, we read, had household-gods in great numbers, and called them Tepitotons, “little ones.” The greatest proportion, however, are mere heads which never had had bodies, and will not stand anyhow. They could not have been personal ornaments, for there is nothing to fasten them on by. They are rather a puzzle. I have seen a suggestion somewhere, that when a man was buried, each surviving member of his family put one of these heads into his grave. This sounds plausible enough, especially as both male and female heads are found.
One shelf in the museum is particularly instructive. We called it the “Chamber of Horrors,” after the manner of Marlborough House, and it contains numbers of the sham antiquities, the manufacture of which is a regular thing in Mexico, as it is in Italy. They are principally vases and idols of earthenware, for the art of working obsidian is lost, and there can be no trickery about that;[[19]] and as to the hammers, chisels, and idols in green jade, serpentine, and such like hard materials, they are decidedly cheaper to find than to make. The Indians in Mexico make their unglazed pottery just as they did before the Conquest, so that, if they imitate real antiques exactly, there is no possibility of detecting the fraud; but when they begin to work from their own designs, or even to copy from memory, they are almost sure to put in something that betrays them.
[19] This assertion must be qualified by a remark of the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who tells us that in some places the Indians still use lancets of obsidian to bleed themselves with. I believe there is nothing of the kind to be found in the part of Mexico which we visited.
As soon as the Spaniards came, they began to introduce drawing as it was understood in Europe; and from that moment the peculiarities of Mexican art began to disappear. The foreheads of the Mexican races are all very low, and their painters and sculptors even exaggerated this peculiarity, to make the faces they depicted more beautiful,—so producing an effect which to us Europeans seems hideously ugly, but which is not more unnatural than the ideal type of beauty we see in the Greek statues. After the era of the Spaniards we see no more of such foreheads; and the eyes, which were drawn in profiles as one sees them in the full face, are put in their natural position. The short squat figures become slim and tall; and in numberless little details of dress, modelling, and ornament, the acquaintance of the artist with European types is shown; and it is very seldom that the modern counterfeiter can keep clear of these and get back to the old standard.
Among the things on the condemned shelf were men’s faces too correctly drawn to be genuine, grotesque animals that no artist would ever have designed who had not seen a horse, head-dresses and drapery that were European and not Mexican. Among the figures in Mayer’s Mexico, a vase is represented as a real antique, which, I think, is one of the worst cases I ever noticed. There is a man’s head upon it, with long projecting pointed nose and chin, a long thin pendant moustache, an eye drawn in profile, and a cap. It is true the pure Mexican race occasionally have moustaches, but they are very slight, not like this, which falls in a curve on both sides of the mouth; and no Mexican of pure Indian race ever had such a nose and chin, which must have been modelled from the face of some toothless old Spaniard.
Mention must be made of the wooden drums—teponaztli—of which some few specimens are still to be seen in Mexico. Such drums figured in the religious ceremonies of the Aztecs, and one often hears of them in Mexican history. I have mentioned already the great drum which Bernal Diaz saw when he went up the Mexican teocalli with Cortes, and which he describes as a hellish instrument, made with skins of great serpents; and which, when it was struck, gave a loud and melancholy sound, that could be heard at two leagues’ distance. Indeed, they did afterwards hear it from their camp a mile or two off, when their unfortunate companions were being sacrificed on the teocalli.
The Aztec drums, which are still to be seen, are altogether of wood, nearly cylindrical, but swelling out in the middle, and hollowed out of solid logs. Some have the sounding-board made unequally thick in different parts, so as to give several notes when struck. All are elaborately carved over with various designs, such as faces, head-dresses, weapons, suns with rays, and fanciful patterns, among which the twisted cord is one of the commonest.