After a sketch in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 233, who also gives a plan of the mound. The modern Church of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios is on the summit, where there are no traces of aboriginal works. A paved road leads to the top. A suburban road skirts its base, and fields of maguey surround it. The circuit of the base is 3859 feet, and the mound covers nearly twenty acres. Estimates of its height are variously given from 165 to 208 feet, according as one or another base line is chosen. It is built of adobe brick laid in clay, and it has suffered from erosion, slides, and other effects of time. There are some traces of steps up the side. Bandelier (pl. xv.) also gives a fac-simile of an old map of Cholula. The earliest picture which we have of the mound, evidently thought by the first Spaniards to be a natural one, is in the arms of Cholula (1540). There are other modern cuts in Carbajal-Espinosa’s Mexico (i. 195); Archæologia Americana (i. 12); Brocklehurst’s Mexico to-day, 182. The degree of restoration which draughtsmen allow to themselves, accounts in large measure for the great diversity of appearance which the mound makes in the different drawings of it. There is a professed restoration by Mothes in Armin’s Heutige Mexico, 63, 68, 72. The engraving in Humboldt is really a restoration (Vues, etc., pl. vii., or pl. viii. of the folio ed.). Bandelier gives a slight sketch of a restoration (p. 246, pl. viii.).
We proceed now to note geographically some of the principal ruins. In the vicinity of Vera Cruz the pyramid of Papantla is the conspicuous monument,[1004] but there is little else thereabouts needing particular mention. Among the ruins of the central plateau of Mexico, the famous pyramid of Cholula is best known. The time of its construction is a matter about which archæologists are not agreed, though it is perhaps to be connected with the earliest period of the Nahua power. Duran, on the other hand, has told a story of its erection by the giants, overcome by the Nahuas.[1005] Its purpose is equally debatable, whether intended for a memorial, a refuge, a defence, or a spot of worship—very likely the truth may be divided among them all.[1006] It is a similar problem for divided opinion whether it was built by a great display of human energy, in accordance with the tradition that the bricks which composed its surface were passed from hand to hand by a line of men, extending to the spot where they were made leagues away, or constructed by a slower process of accretion, spread over successive generations, which might not have required any marvellous array of workmen.[1007] The fierce conflict which—as some hold—Cortés had with the natives around the mound and on its slopes settled its fate; and the demolition begun thereupon, and continued by the furious desolaters of the Church, has been aided by the erosions of time and the hand of progress, till the great monument has become a ragged and corroded hill, which might to the casual observer stand for the natural base, given by the Creator, to the modern chapel that now crowns its summit; but if Bandelier’s view (p. 249) is correct, that none of the conquerors mention it, then the conflict which is recorded took place, not here, but on the vanished mound of Quetzalcoatl, which in Bandelier’s opinion was a different structure from this more famous mound, while other writers pronounce it the shrine itself of Quetzalcoatl.[1008]
MEXICAN CALENDAR STONE.
After a cut in Harper’s Magazine. An enlarged engraving of the central head is given on the title-page of the present volume. A photographic reproduction, as the “Stone of the Sun,” is given in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 54, where he summarizes the history of it, with references, including a paper by Alfredo Chavero, in the Anales del Museo nacional de México, and another, with a cut, by P. J. J. Valentini, in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1878, and in The Nation, Aug. 8 and Sept. 19, 1878. Chavero’s explanation is translated in Brocklehurst’s Mexico to-day, p. 186. The stone is dated in a year corresponding to a.d. 1479, and it was early described in Duran’s Historia de las Indias, and in Tezozomoc’s Crónica mexicana. Tylor (Anahuac, 238) says that of the drawings made before the days of photography, that in Carlos Nebel’s Viaje pintoresco y Arqueológico sobre la República Mejicana, 1829-1834 (Paris, 1839), is the best, while the engravings given by Humboldt (pl. xxiii.) and others are more or less erroneous. Cf. other cuts in Carbajal’s México, i. 528; Bustamante’s Mañanas de la Alameda (Mexico, 1835-36); Short’s No. Amer. of Antiq., 408, 451, with references; Bancroft’s Native Races, ii. 520; iv. 506; Stevens’s Flint Chips, 309.
Various calendar disks are figured in Clavigero (Casena, 1780); a colored calendar on agave paper is reproduced in the Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Méxique, iii. 120. (Quaritch held the original document in Aug., 1888, at £25, which had belonged to M. Boban.)
For elucidations of the Mexican astronomical and calendar system see Acosta, vi. cap. 2; Granados y Galvez’s Tardes Americanas (1778); Humboldt’s essay in connection with pl. xxiii. of his Atlas; Prescott’s Mexico, i. 117; Bollaert in Memoirs read before the Anthropol. Soc. of London, i. 210; E. G. Squier’s Some new discoveries respecting the dates on the great calendar stone of the ancient Mexicans, with observations on the Mexican cycle of fifty-two years, in the American Journal of Science and Arts, 2d ser., March, 1849, pp. 153-157; Abbé J. Pipart’s Astronomie, Chronologie et rites des Méxicaines in the Archives de la Soc. Amér. de France (n. ser. i.); Brasseur’s Nat. Civ., iii. livre ii.; Bancroft’s Nat. Races, ii. ch. 16; Short, ch. 9, with ref., p. 445; Cyrus Thomas in Powell’s Rept. Ethn. Bureau, iii. 7. Cf. Brinton’s Abor. Amer. Authors, p. 38; Brasseur’s “Chronologie historique des Méxicaines” in the Actes de la Soc. d’Ethnographie (1872), vol. vi.; Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, i. 355, for the Toltecs as the source of astronomical ideas, with which compare Bancroft, v. 192; the Bulletin de la Soc. royale Belge de Géog., Sept., Oct., 1886; and Bandelier in the Peabody Mus. Repts., ii. 572, for a comparison of calendars.
Wilson in his Prehistoric Man (i. 246) says: “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 really eleven days in error, compared with that of the barbarian nation whose civilization they so speedily effaced.”
See what Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. 333) says of the native veneration for this calendar stone, when it was exhumed. Mrs. Nuttall (Proc. Am. Asso. Adv. Sci., Aug., 1886) claims to be able to show that this monolith is really a stone which stood in the Mexican market-place, and was used in regulating the stated market-days.
We have reference to a Cholula mound in some of the earliest writers. Bernal Diaz counted the steps on its side.[1009] Motolinía saw it within ten years of the Conquest, when it was overgrown and much ruined. Sahagún says it was built for defensive purposes. Rojas, in his Relacion de Cholula, 1581, calls it a fortress, and says the Spaniards levelled its convex top to plant there a cross, where later, in 1594, they built a chapel. Torquemada, following Motolinía and the later Mendieta, says it was never finished, and was decayed in his time, though he traced the different levels. Its interest as a relic thus dates almost from the beginnings of the modern history of the region. Boturini mentions its four terraces. Clavigero, in 1744, rode up its sides on horseback, impelled by curiosity, and found it hard work even then to look upon it as other than a natural hill.[1010] The earliest of the critical accounts of it, however, is Humboldt’s, made from examinations in 1803, when much more than now of its original construction was observable, and his account is the one from which most travellers have drawn,—the result of close scrutiny in his text and of considerable license in his plate, in which he aimed at something like a restoration.[1011] The latest critical examination is in Bandelier’s “Studies about Cholula and its vicinity,” making part iii. of his Archæological Tour in Mexico in 1881.[1012]