After a photograph in Bandelier’s Archæological Tour, p. 68. He thinks it was intended to be a bearer of a torch, and has no symbolical meaning.
Bancroft (iv. ch. 7) has given a separate chapter to the antiquities of Oajaca (Oaxaca) and Guerrero, as the most southern of what he terms the Nahua people, including and lying westerly of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he speaks of it as a region but little known to travellers, except as they pass through a part of it lying on the commercial route from Acapulco to the capital city of Mexico. Bancroft’s summary, with his references, must suffice for the inquirer for all except the principal group of ruins in this region, that of Mitla (or Lyó-Baa), of which a full recapitulation of authorities may be made, most of which are also to be referred to for the lesser ruins, though, as Bancroft points out, the information respecting Monte Alban and Zachila is far from satisfactory. Of Monte Alban, Dupaix and Charnay are the most important witnesses, and the latter says that he considers Monte Alban “one of the most precious remains, and very surely the most ancient of the American civilizations.”[1023] On Dupaix alone we must depend for what we know of Zachila.
It is, however, of Mitla (sometime Miquitlan, Mictlan) that more considerable mention must be made, and its ruins, about thirty miles southerly from Mexico, have been oftenest visited, as they deserve to be; and we have to regret that Stephens never took them within the range of his observations. Their demolition had begun during a century or two previous to the Spanish Conquest, and was not complete even then. Nature is gloomy, and even repulsive in its desolation about the ruins;[1024] but a small village still exists among them. The place is mentioned by Duran[1025] as inhabited about 1450; Motolinía describes it as still lived in,[1026] and in 1565-74 it had a gobernador of its own. Burgoa speaks of it in 1644.[1027]
GENERAL PLAN OF MITLA.
After Bandelier’s sketch (Archæological Tour, p. 276). KEY:
A, the ruins on the highest ground, with a church and curacy built into the walls.
B, C, E, are ruins outside the village.
D is within the modern village.
F is beyond the river.
The earliest of the modern explorers were Luis Martin, a Mexican architect, and Colonel de la Laguna, who examined the ruins in 1802; and it was from Martin and his drawings that Humboldt drew the information with which, in 1810, he first engaged the attention of the general public upon Mitla, in his Vues des Cordillères. Dupaix’s visit was in 1806. The architect Eduard L. Mühlenpfordt, in his Versuch einer getreuen Schilderung der Republik Mejico (Hannover, 1844, in 2 vols.), says that he made plans and drawings in 1830,[1028] which, passing into the hands of Juan B. Carriedo, were used by him to illustrate a paper, “Los palacios antiguos de Mitla,” in the Ilustracion Mexicana (vol. ii.), in which he set forth the condition of the ruins in 1852. Meanwhile, in 1837, some drawings had been made, which were twenty years later reproduced in the ninth volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, as Brantz Mayer’s Observations on Mexican history and archæology, with a special notice of Zapotec, remains as delineated in Mr. J. G. Sawkins’s drawings of Mitla, etc. (Washington, 1857). Bancroft points out (iv. 406) that the inaccuracies and impossibilities of Sawkins’ drawings are such as to lead to the conclusion that he pretended to explorations which he never made, and probably drafted his views from some indefinite information; and that Mayer was deceived, having no more precise statements than Humboldt’s by which to test the drawings. Matthieu Fossey visited the ruins in 1838; but his account in his Le Méxique (Paris, 1857) is found by Bancroft to be mainly a borrowed one. G. F. von Tempsky’s Mitla, a narrative of incidents and personal adventure on a journey in Mexico, Guatemala and Salvador, 1853-1855, edited by J. S. Bell (London, 1858), deceives us by the title into supposing that considerable attention is given in the book to Mitla, but we find him spending but a part of a day there in February, 1854 (p. 250). The book is not prized; Bandelier calls it of small scientific value, and Bancroft says his plates must have been made up from other sources than his own observations.[1029] Charnay, here, as well as elsewhere, made for us some important photographs in 1859.[1030] This kind of illustration received new accessions of value when Emilio Herbrüger issued a series of thirty-four fine plates as Album de Vistas fotográficas de las Antiguas Ruinas de los palacios de Mitla (Oaxaca, 1874). In 1864, J. W. von Müller, in his Reisen in den Vereinigten Staaten, Canada und Mexico (Leipzig, in 3 vols.), included an account of a visit.[1031] The most careful examination made since Bancroft summarized existing knowledge is that of Bandelier in his Archæological Tour in Mexico in 1881 (Boston, 1885), published as no. ii. of the American series of the Papers of the Archæological Institute of America, which is illustrated with heliotypes and sketch plans of the ruins and architectural details in all their geometrical symmetry. Bancroft (iv. 392, etc.) could only give a plan of the ruins based on the sketches of Mühlenpfordt as published by Carriedo, but the student will find a more careful one[1032] in Bandelier, who also gives detailed ones of the several buildings (pl. xvii., xviii.)
SACRIFICIAL STONE.