Fig. 75.—Ticul Hieroglyphic Vase.
The figure which thus reawakened patriotic sympathies in the descendants of Montezuma’s subjects is a rude disproportioned idol, strikingly contrasting with the elaborate hieroglyphical devices and well-proportioned figures and decorations which accompany the grotesque mask in the Casa de Piedra of Palenque. In the latter, the principal human figures present the remarkable profile of the ancient Central American race, as shown on a vase dug up among the ruins of Ticul (Fig. 75), with the prominent nose, retreating forehead and chin, and protruding under-lip, so essentially different from the features either of the Mexicans or northern Indians. The subject race on whom they tread are characterised by a diverse profile, with overhanging brows, a Roman nose, and a well-defined chin; while their costume is equally indicative of a different origin.
But the sculpture of the Mexican Calendar Stone embodies evidence of an amount of knowledge and skill not less interesting for us than the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Palenque tablets; and was believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakable relations to the ancient science of south-eastern Asia. Mr. Stephens has printed a curious exposition of the chronology of Yucatan, derived from native sources by Don Juan Pio Perez. From the correspondence of their mode of computing time with that adopted by the Mexicans, he assumes that it probably originated with them; but at the same time he remarks that the inhabitants of Mayapan, as the Peninsula was called at the period of Spanish invasion, divided time by calculating it almost in the same manner as their ancestors the Toltecs, differing only in the particular arrangement of their great cycles. Their year commenced on the 16th of July, an error of only forty-eight hours in advance of the precise day in which the sun returns there to the zenith, on his way to the south, and sufficiently near for astronomers who had to make their observations with the naked eye. Their calendar thus presents evidence of native and local origin. According to Humboldt, the Mexican year began in the corresponding winter half of the year, ranging from the 9th to the 28th of January; but Clavigero places its commencement from the 14th to the 26th of February.
If my ideas as to a marked inferiority in the terra-cottas and sculptures of the Mexicans, and the very questionable proofs of their architectural achievements, are correct, they tend to confirm the inference, that not to the Aztecs, but to their more civilised Toltec predecessors, must be ascribed that remarkable astronomical knowledge in the arrangement of their calendar, which exhibits a precision in the adjustment of civil to solar time, such as only a few of the most civilised nations of the Old World had attained to at that date. But, so far as an indigenous American civilisation is concerned, it matters little whether it be ascribed to Toltec or Aztec origin. Of its existence no doubt can be entertained; and there is little more room for questioning, that among races who had carried civilisation so far, there existed the capacity for its further development, independently of all borrowed aid. The fierce Dane and Norman seemed to offer equally little promise of intellectual progress in their first encroachments on the insular Saxon. But out of such elements sprung the race which outstripped the Spaniard in making of the land of Columbus a New World; and, left to its own natural progress, the valley of Anahuac, with its mingling races, might have proved a source of intellectual life to the whole continent. But modern Mexico has displaced the ancient capital of Montezuma; cathedral, convents, and churches, have usurped the sites of Aztec teocallis; its canals have disappeared, and its famous causeways are no longer laved by the waters of the Tezcucan Lake. It is even denied by those who have personally surveyed the site, that the waters of the lake can ever have overflowed the marshes around the modern capital, or stood at a much nearer point to it than they do at present.[[96]] Fresh doubts seem to accumulate around its mythic story. The ruined masonry of its vanished palaces and temples may be assumed to have been all swallowed up in the edifices which combine to make of the modern capital so striking an object, amid the strange scenery of its elevated tropical valley. But Mexico was not the only city, nor even the only great capital, of the valley.
In attempting to trace back the history of the remarkable population found in occupation of the Mexican territory when first invaded by the Spaniards, we learn, by means of various sources of information already referred to, but chiefly on the authority of Ixtlilxochitl’s professed interpretations of picture-writings, no longer in existence; and of traditions of old men, concerning events reaching back from seven or eight, even to twelve centuries before their own time: that the Toltecs, advancing from some unknown region of the north, entered the territory of Anahuac, “probably before the close of the seventh century.” They were, according to their historian, already skilled in agriculture and the mechanical arts, familiar with metallurgy, and endowed with all the knowledge and experience out of which grew the civilisation of Anahuac in later ages. In the time of the Conquest, extensive ruins are said to have indicated the site of their ancient capital of Tula, to the north of the Mexican valley. The tradition of such ruined cities adds confirmation to the inferences derived from those more recently explored in regions to the south; and still the name of Toltec in New Spain is synonymous with architect: the mythic designation of a shadowy race, such as glances fitfully across the first chapters of legendary history among the most ancient nations of Europe. But subsequent to those Pelasgi of the New World, there followed from unknown regions of the north the Chichimecas, the Tepanecs, the Acolhuans or Tezcucans, the Aztecs of Mexicans, and other inferior tribes; so that, as we approach a more definite period of history, we learn of a league between the States of Mexico and Tezcuco and the kingdom of Tlacopan, under which the Aztec capital grew into the marvellous city of temples and palaces described by Cortes and his followers. But Don Fernando de Alva claimed descent on his mother’s side from the Imperial race of Tezcuco; and he has not failed to preserve, or to create the memorials of the glory of that imperial city of the laguna. It contained upwards of four hundred stately edifices for the nobles. The magnificent palace of the Tezcucan emperor “extended from east to west, twelve hundred and thirty-four yards, and, from north to south, nine hundred and seventy-eight. It was encompassed by a wall of unburnt bricks and cement, six feet wide and nine high for one-half of the circumference, and fifteen feet high for the other half. Within this enclosure were two courts. The outer one was used as the great market-place of the city, and continued to be so until long after the Conquest. The interior court was surrounded by the council-chambers and halls of justice. There were also accommodation there for foreign ambassadors; and a spacious saloon, with apartments opening into it, for men of science and poets, who pursued their studies in this retreat, or met together to hold converse under its marble porticoes.”[[97]] In this style the native historian describes the glory of ancient Tezcuco. A lordly pile, provided for the fitting accommodation of the sovereigns of Mexico and Tlacopan, contained three hundred apartments, including some fifty yards square. Solid materials of stone and marble were liberally employed both on this and on the apartments of the royal harem, the walls of which were incrusted with alabasters and richly tinted stucco, or hung with gorgeous tapestries of variegated feather-work. Some two leagues distant, at Tezcotzinco, was the favourite residence of the sovereign; on a hill, “laid out in terraces, or hanging-gardens, having a flight of five hundred and twenty steps, many of them hewn in the natural porphyry. In the garden on the summit was a reservoir of water, fed by an aqueduct carried over hill and valley for several miles on huge buttresses of masonry. A large rock stood in the midst of this basin, sculptured with hieroglyphics representing the years of Nezahualcoyotl’s reign, and his principal achievements in each. On a lower level were three other reservoirs, in each of which stood a marble statue of a woman, emblematic of the three estates of the empire. Another tank contained a winged lion,”—but here the modern historian grows incredulous, and appends a (?) before proceeding in accordance with his authorities to add—“cut out of the solid rock, bearing in his mouth the portrait of the emperor.”
The authority for all this wrote in the beginning of the seventeenth century; but his narrative receives some confirmation from architectural remains still visible on the hill of Tezcotzinco. They are referred to by Latrobe and Bullock as relics of an era greatly more remote than that of Aztec civilisation; and more recently Mr. Tylor describes the hill of Tezcotzinco as terraced, and traversed by numerous roads and flights of steps cut in the rock. It is connected with another hill by an aqueduct of immense size constructed with blocks of porphyry, and with its channel lined with a hard stucco, still very perfect. Baths also remain, cut out of the solid rock; and on the summit of the hill, overlooking the ancient city, sculptured blocks of stone furnish evidence that the tales of architectural magnificence are not wholly fabulous. Mr. Christy, his travelling companion, made excavations in the neighbouring mounds, and was rewarded by the discovery of some fine idols of hard stone, and “an infinitude of pottery and small objects.” But the spirit of Spanish romance still asserts its influence. Bullock, in his Six Months in Mexico, describes the remains of the royal fountain of Tezcotzinco as a “beautiful basin, twelve feet long by eight wide, having a well five feet by four deep in the centre”; while Latrobe, in his Rambles in Mexico, reduces the dimensions of the royal bath to “perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, not large enough for any monarch bigger than Oberon to take a duck in!”
Of the great pyramid or teocalli of Huitzilopotchtli in old Mexico, no vestige now remains, unless such as is reputed to lie buried under the foundations of the cathedral which occupies its site. But time and fate have dealt more tenderly with the scarcely less famous pyramid of Cholula. The ancient city of that name, when first seen by Cortes, was said to include, within and without its walls, about forty thousand houses, or according to ordinary rules of computation, two hundred thousand inhabitants. But whatever its ancient population may have been, while the fruits of Spanish conquest have advanced it to the rank of capital of the republic of Cholula, they have left only sixteen thousand as the number of its occupants. Still, Cholula was unquestionably one of the most famous of the cities of the New World: a sacred Mecca for the pilgrims of Anahuac.
Quetzalcoatl, the milder god of the Aztec pantheon, whose worship was performed by offerings of fruits and flowers in their season, was venerated as the divine teacher of the arts of peace. His reign on earth was the golden age of Anahuac, when its people learned from him agriculture, metallurgy, and the art of government. But their benefactor, according to the tradition handed down to the Aztecs by an elder people whom they had superseded, incurred the wrath of another of the gods. As he passed on his way to abandon the land to the rule of the terrible Huitzilopotchtli, he paused at the city of Cholula; and while he tarried there, the great teocalli was reared and dedicated to his worship. But the benevolent deity could not remain within reach of the avenger. After spending twenty years among them, teaching the people the arts of civilisation, he proceeded onward till he reached the ocean; and there embarking in a vessel, made of serpents’ skins, his followers watched his retreating bark on its way to the sacred isle of Tlapallan. But the tradition lived on among the Mexicans that the bark of the good deity would revisit their shores; and this fondly cherished belief materially contributed to the success of the Spaniards, when their huge-winged ships bore the beings of another world to the mainland of the Mexican Gulf. The legend bears all the marks of anciently derived hero-worship, in which love for a lost benefactor framed for itself a deified embodiment of his virtues. This, however, is important to note, that Aztec traditions assigned the pyramid of Cholula to an older race and era than their own. It was there when they entered the plateau; and the arts of the divine metallurgist were taught, not to them but to the Toltecs, whom they superseded. Nevertheless, the deity shared in their worship; his image occupied a shrine on the summit of the pyramid of Cholula when the Spaniards first visited the holy city; and the undying flame flung its radiance far into the night, to keep alive the memory of the good deity, who was one day to return and restore the golden age.
The present appearance of the great teocalli very partially justifies the reference made by Prescott to it as “that tremendous mound on which the traveller still gazes with admiration as the most colossal fabric in New Spain, rivalling in dimensions, and somewhat resembling in form, the pyramidal structures of ancient Egypt.” If it ever was a terraced pyramid, time and the elements have nearly effaced the traces of its original outline. On the authority of Humboldt, it is described as a pyramidal mound of stone and earth, deeply incrusted with alternate strata of brick and clay, which “had the form of the Mexican teocallis, that of a truncated pyramid facing with its four sides the cardinal points, and divided by the same number of terraces.” But the adobe of the Mexican, which is frequently styled brick, is nothing more than a mass of unbaked clay, or even mud. If such, therefore, is the supposed brick which alternated with the other materials of the mound, we can the more readily reconcile the seeming contradictions of observers. One of the latest thus describes the impression produced on his mind: “Right before me, as I rode along, was a mass of trees, of evergreen foliage, presenting indistinctly the outline of a pyramid, which ran up to the height of about two hundred feet, and was crowned by an old stone church, and surmounted by a tall steeple. It was the most attractive object in the plain; it had such a look of uncultivated nature in the midst of grain fields. It would have lost half its attractiveness had it been the stiff and clumsy thing which the picture represents it to be.” It is accordingly described by Mr. R. A. Wilson, in his Mexico and its Religion, as no more than “the finest Indian mound on this continent,” rising to a height of about two hundred feet, and crowned by an old stone church. But careful examination satisfied Mr. Tylor that it still retains the traces of a terraced teocalli. The church on its summit, dedicated to Our Lady de los Remedios, is served by a priest of the blood of the Cholulans; and the masonry and architectural skill which it displays have no doubt somewhat to do with their absence elsewhere; for if the clergy found the teocalli cased like the pyramidal terraces of Central America, with cut stone steps and facings, there can be little doubt they would go no further for a quarry for their intended church.
To the north of the Mexican valley ancient ruins arrest the gaze of the traveller, onward even to California. On the Rio Colorado and its tributaries, ruins of great extent, surveyed by recent exploring parties, are described as built with large stones, nicely wrought, and accurately squared. But nothing in their style of architecture suggests a common origin with the ruins of Mexico or Central America. They are large and plain structures, with massive walls, evidently built for defence, and with no traces of the ornamentation which abounds on the ruins of Yucatan. The Moqui Indians, the supposed remnant of the ancient builders, still construct their dwellings of stone with considerable art and skill. They are a gentle and intelligent race, small of stature, with fine black hair; and differ essentially from the Indians of the North-west. Their villages are included in one common stone structure, generally of a quadrangular form, with solid, unpierced walls externally, and accessible only by means of a ladder. These hive-like colonies are usually placed, for further defence, on the summits of the lofty plateaus, which in the region of New Mexico are detached by the broad cañons with which that remarkable region is intersected. By such means this ingenious people seek protection from the wild tribes with which they are surrounded. Thus permanently settled, while exposed to the assaults of marauders, the Moquis cultivate the soil, raise corn, beans, cotton, and more recently vegetables derived from intercourse with the Mexicans. They have also their flocks of sheep and goats; and weave their dyed wools into a variety of substantial and handsome dresses. But only a small remnant now survives, occupying seven villages on the range of the Rio del Norte.[[98]]