There are two well-known Aztec migration maps, first published in F. G. Carreri’s Giro del Mondo; in English as “Voyage round the world,” in Churchill’s Voyages, vol. iv., concerning which see Bancroft, ii. 543; iii. 68, 69; Short, 262, 431, 433; Prescott, iii. 364, 382. Orozco y Berra (Hist. Antiq. de Mexico, iii. 61) says that these maps follow one another, and are not different records of the same progress. Humboldt (Vues, etc., ii. 176) gives an interpretation of them in accordance with Sigüenza’s views, which is the one usually followed, and Bancroft (v. 324) epitomizes it. Ramirez says that the copies reproduced in Humboldt, Clavigero, and Kingsborough are not so correct as the engraving given in Garcia y Cubas’s Atlas geogrâfico, estadistico e histórico de la Republica Mejicana (April, 1858). Bancroft (ii. 544) gives it as reproduced by Ramirez. It is also in the Mexican edition of Prescott, and in Schoolcraft’s Indian Tribes. Cf. Delafield’s Inquiry (N. Y., 1839) and Léon de Rosny’s Les doc. écrits de l’antiq. Amér. (Paris, 1882). The original is preserved in the Museo Nacional of Mexico. A palm-tree on the map, near Aztlan, has pointed some of the arguments in favor of a southern position for that place, but Ramirez says it is but a part of a hieroglyphic name, and has no reference to the climate of Aztlan (Short, p. 266). F. Von Hellwald printed a paper on “American migrations,” with notes by Professor Henry, in the Smithsonian Report, 1866, pp. 328-345. Short defines as “altogether the most enlightened treatment of the subject” the paper of John H. Becker, “Migrations des Nahuas,” in the Compte rendu, Congrès des Américanistes (Luxembourg, 1877), i. 325. This paper finds an identification of the Tulan Zuiva of the Quichés, the Huehue-Tlapallan of the Toltecs, the Amaquemecan of the Chichimecs, and the Oztotlan (Aztlan) of the Aztecs in The valleys of the Rio Grande del Norte and Rio Colorado, as was Morgan’s view. Short (p. 249) summarizes his paper. Bancroft (v. 289) shows the diversity of views respecting Amaquemecan.
[821] Native Races, v. 167, recapitulates the proofs against the northern theory. J. R. Bartlett, Personal Narrative, ii. 283, finds no evidence for it. The successive sites of their sojourns as they passed on their journeys are given as Tlapallan, Tlacutzin, Tlapallanco, Jalisco, Atenco, Iztachnexuca, Tollatzinco, Tollan or Tula,—the last, says Bancroft, apparently in Chiapas. If there was not such confusion respecting the old geography, these names might decide the question.
[822] Writers usually place the beginnings of credible history at about this period. Brasseur and the class of writers who are easily lifted on their imagination talk about traces of a settled government being discernible at periods which they place a thousand years before Christ.
[823] References in Bancroft, v. 247, with Brasseur for the main dependence, in his use of the Codex Chimalpòpoca and the Memorial de Colhuacan.
[824] Charnay (Eng. trans., ch. 8 and 9) calls it a rival city of Tula or Tollan, rebuilt by the Chichimecs on the ruins of a Toltec city.
[825] If one wants the details of all this, he can read it in Veytia, Brasseur (Nat. Civilisées and Palenqué, ch. viii.), and Bancroft, the latter giving references (v. 285).
[826] It is frequently stated that there was a segregated migration to Central America. Bancroft (v. 168, 285), who collates the authorities, finds nothing of the kind implied. He thinks the mass remained in Anáhuac. The old view as expressed by Prescott (i. 14) was that “much the greater number probably spread over the region of Central America and the neighboring isles, and the traveller now speculates on the majestic ruins of Mitla and Palenqué as possibly the work of this extraordinary people.” Kirk, as Prescott’s editor, refers to the labors of Orozco y Berra (Geografía de las Lenguas de México, 122), followed by Tylor, (Anahuac, 189) as establishing the more recent view that this southern architecture, “though of a far higher grade, was long anterior to the Toltec dominion.”
[827] Amer. Ethno. Soc. Trans., i.
[828] Bancroft (v. 287) says: “It is probable that the name Toltec, a title of distinction rather than a national name, was never applied at all to the common people.”
[829] Brinton’s main statement is in his Were the Toltecs an historic nationality? Read before the American Philosophical Society, Sept. 2, 1887 (Phila., 1887); published also in their Proceedings, 1887, p. 229. Cf. also Brinton’s Amer. Hero. Myths (Phil., 1882), p. 86, where he throws discredit on the existence of the alleged Toltec king Quetzalcoatl (whom Sahagún keeps distinct from the mythical demi-god); and earlier, in his Myths of the New World (p. 29), he had suggested that the name Toltec might have “a merely mythical signification.” Charnay, who makes the Toltecs a Nahuan tribe, had defended their historical status in a paper on “La Civilisation Tolteque,” in the Revue d’Ethnographie (iv., 1885); and again, two years later, in the same periodical, he reviewed adversely Brinton’s arguments. (Cf. Saturday Review, lxiii. 843.) Otto Stoll, in his Guatemala, Reisen und Schilderungen (Leipzig, 1886), is another who rejects the old theory.