and melted in the water; then they made a race of wooden
mannikins, but these were useless creatures without heart or
mind, and they were destroyed by a great flood and pitch poured
down on them from heaven, those who were left of them being
turned into the apes still to be seen in the woods. After this
comes the creation of the four men and their wives who are the
ancestors of the Quichés, and the tradition records the migrations
of the nation to Tulan, otherwise called the Seven Caves, and
thence across the sea, whose waters were divided for their passage.
It is worth while to mention these few early incidents of the
national legend of Guatemala, because their Biblical incidents
show how native tradition incorporated matter learnt from
the white men. Moreover, this Central American document,
mythical as it is, has an historical importance from its bringing
in names belonging also to the traditions of Mexico proper.
Thus Gucumatz, “Feathered Serpent” corresponds in name to
the Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl; Tulan and the Seven Caves are
familiar words in the Aztec migration traditions, and there is
even mention of a chief of Toltecat, a name plainly referring
to the famed Toltecs. Thus the legends of the Popol-Vuh
confirm what is learnt from comparing the culture of Central
America and Mexico proper, that, though these districts were
not connected by language, the intercourse between them had
been sufficient to justify the anthropologist in including both
districts in one region. Historical value of the ordinary kind may
be found in the latter part of the Popol-Vuh, which gives names
of chiefs down to the time when they began to bear Spanish
names and the great city of Quiché became the deserted ruin of
Santa Cruz. The Maya district of Yucatan has also some vestiges
of native traditions in the manuscript translated by D. Pio Perez
(in Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan) and in the remarkable
16th century Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan by Diego de
Landa, published by Brasseur de Bourbourg (Paris, 1864). As
in the Guatemala traditions, we hear of ancient migration from
the Mexican legendary region of Tula; and here the leaders are
four famous chiefs or ancestors who bear the Aztec name of the
Tutul-Xiu, which means “Bird-Tree.” Unfortunately for the
historical standing of these four ancestors, there are in the Aztec
picture-writings representations of four trees, each with a bird
perched on it, and placed facing the four quarters, which make
it probable that the four Tutul-Xiu of tradition may be only
mythic personifications of the four cardinal points (see Schultz-Sellack
in Zeitschr. f. Ethn., 1879, p. 209). Nevertheless, part of
the later Maya records may be genuine—for instance, when they
relate the war about three centuries before the Spanish conquest,
when the king of Chichen-Itza destroyed the great city of Mayapan.
Though the Central American native kings have too little
interest for traditions of them to be dwelt on here, they bring
into view one important historical point—that the ruined cities
of this region are not monuments of a forgotten past, but that
at least some of them belong to history, having been inhabited
up to the conquest, apparently by the very nations who built
them.
Turning now to the native chronicles of the Mexican nations, these are records going back to the 12th or 13th century, with some vague but not worthless recollections of national events from times some centuries earlier. These traditions, in some measure borne out by linguistic evidence of names, point to the immigration of detachments of a widespread race speaking a common language, which is represented by the Aztec, still a spoken language in Mexico. This language was called nahuatl, and one who spoke it as his native tongue was called nahuatlacatl, so that modern anthropologists are following native precedent when they use the term Nahua for the whole series of peoples now under consideration. Earliest of the Nahua nations, the Toltecs are traditionally related to have left their northern home of Huehuetlapallan in the 6th century; and there is other evidence of the real existence of the nation. Their name Toltecatl signifies an inhabitant of Tollan (land of reeds), a place which has a definite geographical site in the present Tulan or Tula, north of the valley of Anahuac, Where a Toltec kingdom seems to have had its centre. To this nation was due the introduction of maize and cotton into Mexico, the skilful workmanship in gold and silver, the art of building on a scale of vastness still witnessed to by the mound of Cholula, said to be Toltec work, and the Mexican hieroglyphic writing and calendar. With the Toltecs is associated the tradition of Quetzalcoatl, a name which presents itself in Mexican religion as that of a great deity, god of the air, and in legend as that of a saintly ruler and civilizer. His brown and beardless worshippers describe him as of another race, a white man with noble features, long black hair and full beard, dressed in flowing robes. He came from Tulan or from Yucatan (for the stories differ widely), and dwelt twenty years among them, teaching men to follow his austere and virtuous life, to hate all violence and war, to sacrifice no men or beasts on the altars, but to give mild offerings of bread and flowers and perfumes, and to do penance by the votaries drawing blood with thorns from their own bodies. Legend tells stories of his teaching men picture-writing and the calendar, and also the artistic work of the silversmith, for which Cholula was long famed; but at last he departed, some say towards the unknown land of Tlapallan, but others to Coatzacoalcos on the Atlantic coast on the confines of Central America, where native tradition still keeps up the divine names of Gucumatz among the Quichés and Cukulcan among the Mayas, these names have the same meaning as Quetzalcoatl in Aztec, viz. “Feathered Serpent.” Native tradition held that when Quetzalcoatl reached the Atlantic he sent back his companions to tell the Cholulans that in a future age his brethren, white men and bearded like himself, should land there from the sea where the sun rises and come to rule the country. That there is a basis of reality in the Toltec traditions is shown by the word toltecatl having become among the later Aztecs a substantive signifying an artist or skilled craftsman. It is further related by the Mexican historians that the Toltec nation all but perished in the 11th century by years of drought, famine and pestilence, a few only of the survivors remaining in the land, while the rest migrated into Yucatan and Guatemala. After the Toltecs came the Chichimecs, whose name, derived from chici, dog, is applied to many rude tribes; they are said to have come from Amaquemecan under a king named Xolotl, names which being Aztec imply that the nation was Nahua; at any rate they appear afterwards as fusing with more cultured Nahua nations in the neighbourhood of Tezcuco. Lastly is recorded the Mexican immigration of the seven nations, Xochimilca, Chalca, Tepaneca, Acolhua, Tlahuica, Tlascalteca, Azteca. This classification of the Nahuatlac tribes has a meaning and value. It is true that Aztlan, the land whence the Aztecs traced their name and source, cannot be identified, but the later stages of the long Aztec migration seem historical, and the map of Mexico still shows the names of several settlements recorded in the curious migration map, published by Gemelli Careri (Giro del mondo, Venice, 1728) and commented on by Humboldt; among these local names are Tzompanco, “place of skulls,” now Zumpango in the north of the Mexican valley, and Chapultepec, “grasshopper hill,” now a suburb of the city of Mexico itself, where the Aztecs are recorded to have celebrated in 1195 the festival of tying up the “bundle of years” and beginning a new cycle.
The Aztecs moving from place to place in Anahuac found little welcome from the Nahua peoples already settled there. One of the first clear events of the Aztec arrival is their being made tributary by the Tepanecs, in whose service they showed their warlike prowess in the fight near Tepeyacac, where now stands the famous shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Thus they overcame the Acolhuas, who had made Tezcuco a centre of prosperity. By the 13th century the Aztecs by their ferocity had banded their neighbours together against them; some were driven to take refuge on the reedy lake shore at Acoculco, while others were taken as captives into Culhuacan. The king of this district was Coxcoxtli, whose name has gained an undeserved reputation even in Europe as “Coxcox, the Mexican Noah,” from a scene in the native picture-writing where his name appears together with the figure of a man floating in a dug-out tree, which has been mistaken even by Humboldt for a representation of the
