kindled in Chapultepec, which event took plave in 1247 according to the study of Don Alfredo Chavero. Clavijero and Humboldt thought the same.
The year 1323, named in the Codex Fuenleal or Icazbalceta, is that of the foundation of Tenochtitlan, when the Indians began to construct substantial houses, an event somewhat subsequent to their finding the cactus (nochtli) as is inferred from the comparison of the data of the Anales de Cuauhtitlan and of the Codex Aubin. The said year 1323 corresponding to 5720 of the aborigines may be found on the monolith.
Finally, the year 1479 of our era is the one mentioned by the friar Diego Durán and may be referred to the 13-ácatl of the tablet. Nevertheless, this native date fits equally to the dates 1323 and 699 A.D. Perhaps the triple anniversary, the triple 13-ácatl, gave origin to the construction of the relief, admitting the latest of the dates (1479); in no case, however, was it the beginning of the historic or fifth sun, as Seler, Joyce, and Spinden claim, because the new era, for the Toltecs as for the Mexicans, who afterward adopted the tochtli, began with Ce técpatl, sign inscribed near the face of the sun, where such a meaning truly fitted it. We will say again: either the subjects of Motecuhzoma were a family from the Toltec trunk, or the great stone of the museum is a monument of the race of Quetzalcóatl and Huemántzin.
Our interpretation is supported upon the authorities quoted; at the same time they received irrefrangible weight which the stone, from today even more than ever, the first chapter of the history of Mexico, gives them.
THE FIRST CHAPTER OF MEXICAN HISTORY
Founded then in the monument itself and other authorities who present data in agreement with it, we believe that we can assert, now with certainy, the following facts:
The Toltec race has a historic reality and attained notable advancement.
It arrived on the Mexican Plateau about the year 596 of the Christian Era; there were just ending, in particular in the valley of Mexico, violent manifestations, probably eruptive, which buried under their lavas human relics and fossils of the Quaternary and Pleistocene. This was the catastrophe to which they attributed the end of the third age of the world, considering the remains of the animals that they found to be those of giants. Apparently the flows of tezontle (lava of
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