Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

by Edward B. Tylor

Mr. Christy’s collection is richer than any other in small sculptured figures from Central America. It contains a squatting female figure in hard brown lava, like the one in black basalt which is drawn in Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères, and there called (I cannot imagine why) an Aztec priestess. Above all, it contains what I believe to be the three finest specimens of Aztec decorative art which exist in the world. One of these is the knife of which the figure at [page 101] gives some faint idea, the other two being a wooden mask overlaid with mosaic, and a human skull decorated in the same manner, of which a more particular description will be found in the Appendix. There are two kinds of Aztec articles in Mr. Christy’s collection which I did not observe either at Mexico or Heidelberg. These are bronze needles, resembling our packing-needles, and little cast bronze bells, called in Aztec yotl, not unlike small horse-bells made in England at the present day; these are figured in the tribute-lists in the picture-writings.

ANTIQUE BRONZE BELLS FROM MEXICO.
Such as are often sculptured on Aztec Images.

Apropos of the mammoth bones preserved in the Mexican Museum, I must insert a quotation from Bernal Diaz. It is clear that the traditions of giants which exist in almost every country had their origin in the discovery of fossil bones, whose real character was not suspected until a century ago; but I never saw so good an example of this as in the Tlascalan tradition, which my author relates as follows.—“And they” (the Tlascalan chiefs) “said that their ancestors had told them that, in times past, there lived amongst them in settlements men and women of great size, with huge bones; and, as they were wicked and of evil dispositions, they (the ancestors of the Tlascalans) fought against them and killed them; and those who were left died out. And that we might see what stature they were of, they brought a bone of one of them, and it was very big, and its height was that of a man of reasonable stature; it was a thigh-bone, and I (Bernal Diaz) measured myself against it, and it was as tall as I am, who am a man of reasonable stature; and they brought other pieces of bones like the first, but they were already eaten through and rotted by the earth; and we were all amazed to see those bones, and held that for certain there had been giants in that land; and our captain, Cortes, said to us that it would be well to send the great bone to Castile, that His Majesty might see it; and so we did send it by the first messengers who went.”

Among other things belonging to the Spanish period is the banner, with the picture of the Virgin, which accompanied the Spanish army during the Conquest. Authentic or not, it is certainly very well painted. There is a suit of armour said to have belonged to Cortes. Its genuineness has been doubted; but I think its extreme smallness seems to go towards proving that it is a true relic, for Bullock saw the tomb of Cortes opened some thirty years ago, and was surprised at the small proportions of his skeleton. Specimens of the pottery and glass now made in the country, and other curiosities, complete the catalogue of this interesting collection.

The Mexican calendar is not in the Museum, but is built into the wall of the cathedral, in the Plaza Mayor. It is sculptured on the face of a single block of basalt, which weighs between twenty and thirty tons, and must have been transported thirty miles by Mexican labourers, for the stone is not found nearer than that distance from the city; and this transportation was, of course, managed by hand-labour alone, as there were no beasts of burden.

We know pretty well the whole system of Mexican astronomy from this calendar-stone and a few manuscripts which still exist, and from the information given in the work of Gama the astronomer and other writers. The Aztecs and Tezcucans who used it, did not claim its invention as their own, but said they had received it from the Toltecs, their predecessors. The year consisted of 365 days, with an intercalation of 13 days for each cycle of 52 years, which brought it to the same length as the Julian year of 365 days 6 hours. The theory of Gama, that the intercalation was still more exact, namely, 12½ days instead of 13, seems to be erroneous.

Our reckoning only became more exact than this when we adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and the people marched about the streets in procession, crying “Give us back our eleven days!” Perhaps this is not quite a fair way of putting the case, however, for the new style would have been adopted in our country long before, had it not been a Romish institution. It was the deliberate opinion of the English, as of people in other Protestant countries, that it was much better to have the almanack a few days wrong than to adopt a Popish innovation. One often hears of the Papal Bull which settles the question of the earth’s standing still. The history of the Gregorian calendar is not a bad set-off against it on the other side. At any rate, the new style was not introduced anywhere until sixty or seventy years after the discovery of Mexico, and five hundred years after the introduction of the Toltec calendar in Mexico.

The Mexican calendar-stone should be photographed on a large scale, and studied yet more carefully than it has been, for only a part of the divided circles which surround it have been explained. It should be photographed, because, to my certain knowledge, Mayer’s drawing gives the year, above the figure of the sun which indicates the date of the calendar, quite wrongly; and yet, presuming on his own accuracy, he accuses another writer of leaving out the hieroglyph of the winter solstice. What is much more strange is, that Humboldt’s drawing in the small edition of the Vues des Cordillères is wrong in both points. The drawing in Nebel’s great work is probably the best. As to the wax models which Mr. Christy and I bought in Mexico, in the innocence of our hearts, a nearer inspection showed that the artist, observing that the circle of days would divide more neatly into sixteen parts than into twenty, had arranged his divisions accordingly; apparently leaving out the four hieroglyphics which he considered the ugliest.