I have said nothing of the proper names in this paragraph. They are remarkable for the fact that three out of the four are unquestionably Nahuatl or Aztec, and hence they have given occasion for considerable theorizing in favor of the “Toltec” origin of the Maya civilization, and also of the Nahuatl descent of the princely family of the Tutulxiu.
Their name is the only one in the paragraph with a distinctively Maya physiognomy. It is a compound of xiu, the generic term for herb or plant, and tutul, a reduplicated form of tul, an abundance, an excess, as in the verb tutulancil, to overflow, etc. (Diccionario de Ticul, MS.). It would appear therefore to be a local name, and to signify a place where there was an abundance of herbage. The surname is Xiu only, and as such is still in use in Yucatan.
But it may also be claimed that even this is a Nahuatl name; for also in that tongue xiuitl means a plant, as well as a turquoise, a comet, a year, and in composition a greenish or bluish color; while tototl is a bird or fowl. The Maya xiu and the Nahuatl xiuitl (in which itl is a termination lost in composition) are undoubtedly the same word. Which nation borrowed it from the other? It is certainly a loan-word, for these two languages have no common origin, while, as we might expect from neighbors, each does have a number of loan-words from the other.
I answer that the Maya xiu is unquestionably a loan from the Nahuatl, and my reason for the opinion is that while in Maya the root xiu is sterile and has no relations to other words (unless perhaps to xiitil, to open like a flower, to brood as a bird, to augment, to grow), in Nahuatl it is a very fertile root, and nearly thirty compounds of it can be found in the dictionaries (See Molina, Vocabulario de la Lengua Mexicana, fol. 159, verso). But the composition of the name follows the Maya and not the Nahuatl analogy.
That in either language the name Tutulxiu can be translated “Bird-tree” (Vogelbaum), as is argued by Dr. Carl Schultz-Sellack (Archiv für Ethnologie, Band XI, 1879), and on which translation he bases a long argument, is very doubtful. It certainly could not in Maya; and in Nahuatl, tototl in composition would drop both its terminal consonants.
The remaining names, Nonoual, Zuiua, Tula-pan, clearly indicate their Nahuatl origin. Zuiua, which was erroneously printed in Pio Perez’s version as Zuina is Zuiva; Nonoual is Nonohual; Tulapan, literally “the standard of Tula,” refers to the famous city of the Toltecs, presided over by Quetzalcoatl. All these names are borrowed directly from the myth of this hero-god.
Zuiven was the name of the uppermost heaven, the abode of the Creator Hometeuctli, the father of Quetzalcoatl, and the place of his first birth as a divinity. In later days, when the Quetzalcoatl myth had extended to the Kiches and Cakchiquels, members of the Maya family in Guatemala, “Tulan Zuiva” was identified with the Aztec Chicomoztoc, the famous “Seven Caves,” “Seven Ravines,” or “Seven Cities,” from which so many tribes of Mexico, wholly diverse in language and lineage, claimed that their ancestors emerged in some remote past (compare the Codex Vaticanus, Lam. I; Codex Zumarraga, chap. I, with the Popol Vuh, pp. 214, 227). To this spot the ancestors of the Guatemalan tribes were reported to have gone to receive their gods; from it issued the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli; in it still were supposed to dwell his mother and other mighty divinities; and Quetzalcoatl was again the youngest born of Iztac Mixcohuatl, the mighty lord of the Seven Caves (Motolinia, Historia de los Indios de Nueva España p 10, etc.).
Tula, properly Tollan, a syncopated form of Tonatlan, which means “the place of the Sun,” was a name applied to a number of towns in Mexico, all named after that magnificent city inhabited by the Tolteca (“dwellers in the place of the Sun”), servants and messengers of the Light-God their ruler, the benign, the virgin-born Quetzalcoatl. The common tradition ran that it was destroyed by the wiles of Tezcatlipoca, the brother, yet the eternal enemy, of Quetzalcoatl, and that at its destruction the Toltecs disappeared, no one knew whither, while Quetzalcoatl, after reigning a score of years in Cholula, journeyed far eastward to the home of the Sun, where he enjoyed everlasting life.
Nonohual also had a place in this myth. It was a mountain over against Tulan. There it was that the eldest sister of Quetzalcoatl resided. When he was made drunken by the insidious beverage handed him as a healing draught by Tezcatlipoca, he sent for this sister, held to her lips the intoxicating cup, and with her passed a night of debauch, the memory of which filled him with such shame that nevermore dared he face his subjects. Such is the story recited at length in the Aztec chronicle called the Codex Chimalpopoca.
Nonoalco was also the name of a small village near the city of Mexico which still appears on the maps. Sahagun tells us that some extreme eastern tribes in Mexico called themselves Nonoalca (Historia de la Nueva España, Lib. X, cap, XXIX, p 12); and the licenciate Diego Garcia de Palacio mentions “quatro lugares de Indios que llaman los Nunualcos” as dwelling, in his time (1576), in the eastern part of the province of San Salvador, of Aztec descent, and who had recently come there. (Carta al Rey de España, p. 60, New York, 1860). It should be mentioned in reference to these names and all others of similar vocalization, that both in Maya and Nahuatl the Spanish constantly confound the short ŏ and ŭ. As the Bachelor Don Antonio Vasquez Gastelu observes: “usan de la o algunos tan obscuramente, que tira algo à la pronunciacion de la u vocal” (Arte de lengua Mexicana, fol. 1, verso, La Puebla de los Angeles, 1726).