Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

[89]	Journ. Brit. Archæol. Ass. vol. v. p. 411.

[90]	History of Indian Tribes, vol. i. p. 52.

[91]	Antiquities of Wisconsin, p. 80.

CHAPTER XIV.
NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILISATION.

THE TOLTECS—IXTLILXOCHITL—THE AZTECS—AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE—AZTALAN—THE VALLEY OF MEXICO—MONTEZUMA’S CAPITAL—ITS VANISHED SPLENDOUR—MEXICAN CALENDAR—THE CALENDAR STONE—MEXICAN DEITIES—TOLTEC CIVILISATION—RACE ELEMENTS—THE TOLTEC CAPITAL—TEZCUCAN PALACES—THEIR MODERN VESTIGES—QUETZALCOATL—THE PYRAMID OF CHOLULA—THE SACRED CITY—THE MOQUI INDIANS—THE HOLY CITY OF PERU—WORSHIP OF THE SUN—ASTRONOMICAL KNOWLEDGE—AGRICULTURE—THE LLAMA—WOVEN TEXTURES—SCIENCE AND ART—NATIVE INSTITUTIONS—METALLURGY—ORIGIN OF THE MEXICANS—MINGLING OF RACES.

The Toltecs play a part in the initial pages of the New World’s story akin to the fabled Cyclops of antiquity. They belong to that vague era which lies beyond all definite records, and furnish a name for the historian and the ethnologist alike to conjure with: like the Druids or the Picts of the old British antiquary, or the Phœnicians of his American disciple. Yet it is not without its value thus to discover among the nations of the New World, even a fabulous history, with its possible fragments of truth embodied in the myth. Mr. Gallatin has compiled a laborious digest of the successive migrations and dynasties of Mexico, as chronicled from elder sources, by Ixtlilxochitl, Sahagun, Veytia, Clavigero, the Mendoza Collection, the Codex Tellurianus, and Acosta.[^[92]] The oldest dates bring the Toltec wanderers to Huehuetlapallan, a.d. 387, and close their dynasty in the middle of the tenth century; when they are superseded by Chichimecas and Tezcucans, whose joint sovereignty, by the unanimous concurrence of authorities, endured till the sixteenth century. But, meanwhile, the same authorities chronicle the foundation of Mexico or Tenochtitlan, variously in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, by Aztec conquerors; and profess to supply the dynastic chronology of Aztec power. The earliest date is not too remote for the commencement of a civilisation that has left such evidences of its later maturity; but unfortunately the various authorities differ not by years only, but by centuries. Ixtlilxochitl carries back the founding of Mexico upwards of a century farther than any other authority; and in the succeeding date, which professes to fix the election of its king, Acamapichtli, the discrepancies between him and other authorities vary from two to considerably more than two and a half centuries, and leave on the mind of the critical student impressions as unsubstantial as those pertaining to the regal dynasties of Alban and Sabine Rome. Spanish chroniclers and modern historians have striven to piece into coherent details the successive migrations into the Vale of Anahuac, and the desertion of the mythic Aztalan for the final seat of Aztec empire on the lake of Tezcuco; but their shadowy history marshals before us only shapes vague as the legends of the engulfed Atlantis.

There is something suggestive of doubt relative to much else that is greatly more modern, to find the historian of the Conquest of Mexico tracing down the migrations and conquests of the Toltecs from the seventh till the twelfth century, when the Acolhuans or Tezcucans, the Aztecs, and others, superseded them in the Great Valley. We turn to the foot-notes, so abundant in the carefully elaborated narrative of Prescott, and we find his chief or sole authority is the christianised half-breed Don Fernando de Alva, or Ixtlilxochitl, who held the office of Indian interpreter of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Compared with such an authority, Bede should be indisputable as to the details of Hengist and Horsa’s migrations, and Geoffrey of Monmouth may be quoted implicitly for the history of Arthur’s reign.

But the Aztecs, at any rate, are no mythic or fabulous race. The conquest of their land belongs to the glories of Charles V., and is contemporary with what Europe reckons as part of its modern history. The letters of its conqueror are still extant; the gossiping yet graphic marvels of his campaigns, ascribed to the pen of Bernal Diaz, a soldier of the Conquest, have been diligently ransacked for collation and supplementary detail; and the ecclesiastical chroniclers of Mexican conquest and colonisation, have all contributed to the materials out of which Prescott has woven his fascinating picture of Hernando Cortes and his great life-work. It is a marvellous historical panorama, glittering with a splendour as of the mosques and palaces of Old Granada. But a growing inclination is felt to test the Spanish chroniclers by surviving relics of that past which they have clothed for us in more than oriental magnificence; and, for this purpose, to relume that curious phase of native civilisation which the Conquest abruptly ended. Yucatan and Central America still reveal indisputable memorials of an era of native architectural skill, to which attention must be directed. But, meanwhile, it is important to note that an assumed correspondence between the architecture of Central America and that which is affirmed to have existed in Mexico at the time of the Conquest constitutes the basis of many fallacious arguments on the nature and extent of Aztec civilisation in the era of the second Montezuma. Again, the conflicting elements apparent between the barbarous rites and cannibalism ascribed to the Aztecs, and the evidences of their matured arts and high civilisation, have been the plentiful source of theories as to Toltecan and other earlier derivations for all that pertained to such manifestations of intellect and inventive genius. It is important, therefore, to determine the actual character of Mexican architecture. The remains of the extinct Mound-Builders are full of wonder for us; but the reputed magnificence of Montezuma’s capital throws their earthworks into the shade, as things pertaining to America’s childhood. Before, however, this conclusion can be accepted, it is indispensable that we test, by existing evidence, the descriptions of Mexican art and architecture handed down to us by chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A peculiar style is recognised as pertaining to the native architecture of America, which it has been the favourite fancy of American antiquaries to trace to an Egyptian or Phœnician source. Alike in general character and mode of construction, in the style of sculpture, and the hieroglyphic decorations which enrich their walls: the ruined palaces and temples of Mexico, as well as of Yucatan and Central America, have been supposed to reproduce striking characteristics of the Nile valley. But the experienced eye of Stephens saw only elements of contrast instead of comparison; and while Prescott sums up his history of Mexican conquest with this conclusion, “that the coincidences are sufficiently strong to authorise a belief that the civilisation of Anahuac was, in some degree, influenced by that of eastern Asia,” he adds, that the discrepancies are such as to carry back the communication to a period so remote as to leave its civilisation, in all its essential features, peculiar and indigenous.

It is not always easy to determine the characteristics of some of the most famous monuments of Mexican art. The ruined city of Aztalan, on the western prairies: after filling the imagination with glowing fancies of a Baalbek or Palmyra of the New World, from whence the Aztecs had transplanted the arts of an obliterated civilisation to the Mexican plateau, shrunk before the gaze of a truthful surveyor into a mere group of mounds and earthworks, presenting no other analogies than those which class them with the works of the American Mound-Builders. It may be, however, that a critical survey will reveal traits in the later Aztecs of Anahuac, rendering such an ancestral birth-land not wholly inconsistent with their actual condition when brought into contact with the civilisation of Europe. Such at least seems to be the tendency of modern disclosures; if, indeed, they do not point to the possibility that much even of the latest phase of Mexican civilisation may present closer analogies to the actual Aztalan of the Wisconsin prairies than to the fancied mother-city of the Aztecs.