Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

But while the arts of civilisation were being fostered on those southern plateaux of the Andes, another seat of native American civilisation had been founded on the corresponding plateaux of the northern continent, and the Aztecs were building up an empire even more marvellous than that of the Incas. The site of the latter is among the most remarkable of all the scenes consecrated to such memories. On the lofty table-land which lies between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, at an elevation of nearly seven thousand five hundred feet, the valley of Mexico lies engirdled by its ramparts of porphyritic rock, like a vast fortress provided by nature for guarding the infancy of American civilisation. Here was the scene of the heroic age of Toltec Art, where the foundations of all later progress were laid, and architecture achieved its earliest triumphs in the New World on the temples and towers of Tula, the ruined remains of which attracted the attention of the Spaniards at the time of the Conquest. But the history of the Toltecs and their ruined edifices stands on the border lines of romance and fable, like that of the Druid builders of Carnac and Avebury. To them, according to tradition and such historical evidence as is accessible, succeeded their Aztec or Mexican supplanters, along with the Acolhuans, or Tezcucans, as they were latterly called from their capital Tezcuco. Mr. Edward B. Tylor describes an ancient arch which still stands there. It is a skew-bridge of twenty feet span, built with slabs of stone set on edge in the form of a roof resting on two buttresses; and is an ingenious approximation to the true arch.[^[82]] On the opposite shores of the same Mexican lake, the largest of five inland waters that diversified the surface of that great table-land valley, stood Tezcuco and Mexico, the capitals of the two most important states within which the native civilisation of the North American continent developed itself. From the older Toltecans, the encroaching Tezcucans are believed to have derived the germs of that progress, which is best known to us in connection with the true Aztec or Mexican state. Legends of the golden age and heroic races of Anahuac abound, and have been rendered into their least extravagant forms by the patriotic zeal of Ixtlilxochitl, a lineal descendant of the royal line of Tezcuco. But the true Mexicans are acknowledged to be of recent origin, and the founding of Mexico is assigned to a.d. 1326. Among the special evidences of their civilisation is their calendar. 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 nearly eleven days in error, compared with that of the barbarian nation whose civilisation they so speedily effaced. But the difference thus noted represented in the European calendar the accumulated error of upwards of sixteen centuries; so that the approximation of Mexican computation to true solar time is probably only a proof of the recent adjustment of their calendar; and so confirms the probability of the founding of the Mexican capital within two centuries of its overthrow. But the founders of Tenochtitlan, as the new capital was called, were a vigorous, enterprising, and ferocious race. The later name of Mexico was derived from the Aztec war-god Mexitli, whose favours to his votaries enabled them to form a powerful state by conquest, to enrich themselves with spoil, and to replace the rude structures of their city’s founders with substantial and ornate buildings of stone.

Whatever gloze of mild paternal absolutism may linger around our conceptions of the prehistoric chronicles of Peru, a clearer light illuminates the harsh realities of Mexican sovereignty. The god of war was the supreme deity of the Aztecs, worshipped with hideous rites of blood. Their civil and military codes, according to the narrative of their conquerors, were alike cruel as that of Draco; and their religious worship was a system of austere fanaticism and loathsome butchery, which seemed to refine the cruelties of the Red Indian savage into a ritual service fit only for the devil. But besides their hideous war-god, the Mexican mythology was graced by a beneficent divinity, named Quetzalcoatl, the instructor of the Aztecs in the use of metals, in agriculture, and in the arts of government. This and similar elements of Mexican mythology have been regarded as traces of a milder faith inherited from their Toltecan predecessors. The idea is one supported by many probabilities, as well as by some evidence. The early history of the Northmen, however, in which we witness the blending of a rich poetic fancy, wherein lay the germ of later Norman romance and chivalry, with cruelties pertaining to a creed little less bloody than that of the Mexican warrior, shows that no such theory is needed to account for the incongruities of the religious system of the Aztecs. In truth, the ferocity of a semi-barbarous people is often nothing more than its perverted excess of energy; and, as has been already noted in reference to the Caribs, is more easily dealt with, and turned into healthful and beneficent action, than the cowardly craft of the slave. It is only when such hideous rites are consciously engrafted on the usages of a people already far in advance of such a semi-barbarous childhood, as in the adoption of the Inquisition by Spain at the commencement of its modern history, that they prove utterly baneful; because the nation is already past that stage of progress in which it can naturally outgrow them.

Hideous, therefore, as were the human sacrifices, with their annual thousands of victims; the offerings of infants to propitiate Tlaloc, their rain-god; and the loathsome banquets on the bodies of their sacrificed victims:—if indeed this be not an exaggeration of Spanish credulity and fanaticism;—it is nevertheless difficult to concur in the verdict of the gifted historian of The Conquest of Mexico, that “it was beneficently ordered by Providence that the land should be delivered over to another race who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily extended wider and wider, with extent of empire.” The rule of the conquerors, with their Dominican ministers of religion, was no beneficent sway; and its fruits in later times have not proved of such value as to reconcile the student of that strange old native civilisation of the votaries of Quetzalcoatl, to its abrupt arrestment, at a stage which can only be paralleled by the earlier centuries of Egyptian progress.

Metallurgic arts were carried in some respects further by the Mexicans than by the Peruvians. Silver, lead, and tin were obtained from the mines of Tasco and Pachuca; copper was wrought in the mountains of Zacotollan, by means of galleries and shafts opened with persevering toil where the metallic veins were imbedded in the solid rock; and there, as at the Lake Superior copper regions, the traces of such ancient mining have proved the best guides to modern searchers for the ores. The arts of casting, engraving, chasing, and carving in metal, were all practised with great skill. Vessels both of gold and silver were wrought of enormous size: so large, it is said, that a man could not encircle them with his arms; and the abundant gold was as lavishly employed in Mexico as in Peru, in the gorgeous adornment of temples and palaces. Ingenious toys, birds and beasts with moveable wings and limbs, fish with alternate scales of silver and gold, and personal ornaments in great variety, were wrought by the Mexican goldsmiths of the precious metals, with such curious art, that the Spaniards acknowledged the superiority of the native workmanship over anything they could achieve. When Cortes first entered the capital of Montezuma in 1513, the Mexican ruler received him in the palace built by his father Axayacatl, and hung round his neck a decoration of the finest native workmanship. The shell of a species of craw-fish, set in gold, formed the centre, and massive links of gold completed the collar, from which depended eight ornaments of the same metal, delicately-wrought in imitation of the prized shell-fish.

The arts thus practised on the great plateau extended to the most southern limits of the North American continent. The ancient graves of the Isthmus of Panama have been ransacked by thousands in recent years, from the temptation which the gold relics they contain hold out to their explorers. Those include representations of beasts, birds, and fishes, frogs, and other objects, imitated from nature, often with great skill and ingenuity. One gold frog which I examined had the eyes hollow, with an oval slit in front, and within each a detached ball of gold, which appeared to have been executed in a single casting. This insertion of detached balls is frequently met with in the pottery, as well as in the goldsmith’s work of the Isthmus, and is singularly characteristic of a peculiar phase of local art. Human figures, and monstrous or grotesque hybrids wrought in gold, with the head of the cayman, the eagle, and other animals, attached to the human form, are also found in the same graves; but, so far as my own opportunities of observation enable me to judge, the human figure generally exhibits inferior imitative skill and execution to the representations of other animate subjects. But all alike display abundant metallurgic art. Soldering as well as casting was known to the ancient goldsmith, and the finer specimens have been finished with the hammer and graving-tool. Judging from the condition of the human remains found in those huacas of the peninsula, they are probably of a much higher antiquity than the era of Mexican civilisation; and lying as they do in the narrow isthmus between the twin continents, they suggest the probability of a common source for the origin of Peruvian and Aztec arts.

But while the Mexicans wrought their ingenious toys, lavished their inexhaustible resources of gold and silver in personal decoration, and adorned their public edifices with scarcely less boundless profusion than the Peruvians, they had learned to some extent the practical value of gold and other metals as a convenient currency. By means of this equivalent for the gold and silver coinage of Europe, the interchange of commodities in the great markets of Mexico was facilitated, and an important step in the progress towards a higher stage of civilisation secured. This metallic currency consisted of pieces of tin cut in the form of a T or stamped with a similar character, and of transparent quills filled with gold dust. These were apparently regulated to a common standard by their size: for the use of scales and weights, with which the Peruvians were familiar, appears to have been unknown in Mexico.

The nature of the Mexican currency accords with the knowledge and experience of a people among whom metallurgic arts were of comparatively recent origin. The easily fused tin, and the attractive and accessible gold-dust, supplied ready materials for schooling the ingenious metallurgist in the use of the metals. Copper was probably first employed when found in a pure metallic state, as among the old miners of Lake Superior; while the art of fusing, taught by the Aztec Tubal-Cain, was tried only on the readily-yielding tin. By this means the arts of smelting and moulding the ores would be acquired, and applied to copper, silver, and gold, as well as to tin. Accident might suggest the next important stage, that of metallic alloys; but under the circumstances alike of Peruvian and Mexican civilisation, progressing in regions abounding with the most attractive and easily-wrought metals, it is not difficult to conceive of the independent discovery of the useful bronze alloy. Yet by the standard composition of their bronze, far more than by the ingenious intricacy of their personal ornaments, utensils, and architectural decorations, the actual progress of the Incas or of the Aztecs may fairly be tested. The delight of the savage in personal adornment precedes even the needful covering of his nakedness, and the same propensity long monopolises the whole inventive ingenuity of a semi-barbarous people; while the useful bronze tools embody the true germs of incipient civilisation. Tested by such a standard, the metallurgic arts of Peru furnish evidence of very partial development.

The alloy of copper and tin, when destined for practical use in manufacture, is found to possess the most serviceable qualities when composed of about ninety per cent. of copper to ten of tin; and so near is the approximation to this theoretical standard among the bronze relics of the ancient world, that the archæologists of Europe have been divided in opinion as to whether they should assume a Phœnician or other common origin for the weapons, implements, and personal ornaments of that metal found over the whole continent; or that the mixed metal, derived from a common centre, was manufactured in various countries of Europe into the objects of diverse form and pattern abounding in their soil, or deposited among their sepulchral offerings.

But the approximation to a uniform alloy is no more than would inevitably result from the experience of the extreme brittleness resulting from any undue excess of the tin. Accident, or the natural proximity of the metals or ores, as they occur in the mineral regions of England, may have furnished the first disclosure of the important secret. But that once discovered, the subsequent steps were inevitable. Having ascertained that he could produce a harder and more useful compound than the pure copper by alloying it with tin, the native metallurgist would not fail to vary the proportions of the latter till he had obtained a sufficiently near approximation to the best bronze, to answer the purposes for which it was designed. No interchange of experience was necessary to lead the metallurgists of remote regions to similar results; nor would a closer correspondence between the proportionate ingredients of the native American and European bronze than has yet been detected, indicate more than common aims, and the inevitable experience, consequent on the properties of the varying alloy, leading to corresponding results.

The following table of analyses of ancient European bronze relics will suffice to show how little foundation there is for the assumption of any common origin for the alloy of which they were made; and the corresponding evidence of proportionate ingredients disclosed by analyses of native American bronzes, disproves the theory of any European or other foreign source for the metallurgic arts of the New World.