The American Egypt Part 14

Well, let us take the north-east. Who lived there? The Apalachians lived there, "a loose confederation," says Brinton, "embracing most of the nations from the Atlantic coast quite into Texas." The majority of the tribes forming this family, such as the Creeks, the Choctaws, and the Seminoles, were nomadic hunting peoples, a few only stationary, and those with no record of any civilisation. The Apalachians then are as hopeless as a source of comfort for the theorists as the Athapascans.

Wedged in between the Athapascans and the Apalachians were the Algonkins, essentially a hunting race of strictly nomad habits. Thus the three great peoples who formed the impenetrable ethnic frontier of Mexico at the time of and no doubt long anterior to the Conquest, are clearly seen to have been uncultured peoples, their only dwellings the wigwam, their chief occupation the chase, redoubtable fighters but undistinguished by those "victories of peace" which, as the poet sings, "are more renowned than war." It is fairly certain, then, that these much-talked-of Toltecs could not, nay, did not, come overland from the north. Driven thus from all hope landwards, the unfortunate theorists, having rashly embarked on the sea of myth, must now launch on a far rougher sea, namely the Atlantic or Pacific. Their heroes must have come from the Ocean. Venus-like, they arose perhaps from the foam. Seriously though, such a proposition is nearly as complete a fairy tale as the Greek legend of the G.o.ddess of Love. When one sees the maintainers of the oversea route obliged to say, as Dr. Ph. J. J. Valentini does, that any one of the points of the compa.s.s may have been the direction from which this remarkable people came, one is face to face with arguments too vague to be worthy of being called arguments at all. There is no dealing with such rash generalisations. One must leave their amiable employers to get what comfort they can from them, with just this reservation: the Toltec tradition and its dates demand the acceptance of the postulate that the Toltecs arrived in Mexico in considerable numbers; for between 648 A.D., the generally accepted date of their traditionary landing, and the twelfth century, when they were expelled by the Aztecs, there is not time for a mere handful of immigrants to have metamorphosed themselves into a nation numbering many millions, as the Toltec story insists on our believing.[9] They must therefore have landed in great quant.i.ties, and such an exodus as this presupposes, well within historic times too, must have left, no matter what land they hailed from, some record behind it. No such record exists in any quarter of the globe of an exodus of even approximate date.

So far then these Toltecs are veritable spectre people, coming from nowhere, going nowhere; like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in the mid-air of Mexico's traditionary history. Let us now pa.s.s on to Chapter 2 of the Toltec romance. This is concerned with the arrival in Mexico of the militant Aztecs. Now who are the Aztecs? D. G. Brinton, Dr.

Richardson, and all students of American ethnology agree in believing them to have been a branch tribe of the savage and warlike Athapascans.

This view is una.s.sailable on physical and philological grounds. Their arrival in Mexico is probably fairly accurately given by their traditions as towards the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century. Every one is agreed that at the time of their invasion they were simply barbaric warriors. They brought no building specifications with them. Nothing, in short, but a thirst for battle and new lands.

Now whom did they find in Mexico? They found a race whom they at once nicknamed "Toltecs." Here then, at last, we are getting to grips with these mysterious folk. "Toltec" is a pure Aztec or Nahuatl word, which is believed to have had a primary meaning of "those who dwelt at Tonalan," "place of the Sun" (some authorities, following the _Codex Ramirez_, derive it from _tolin_, "rush," _i.e._ "the place of the rushes"); but which in later Nahuatl, according to Dr. Otto Stoll, undoubtedly had the meaning of "skilled craftsman, artificer or builder." The Aztecs had never seen a building before, and they just as naturally christened the race they had conquered by an allusion to their chief characteristic,--their strange building skill,--as the coalition of Germanic tribes in the third century gained the name "Franks" from their chief characteristic, their love of freedom. What could possibly be clearer? "Toltec" is a local name, having no existence at all till the arrival of the Aztecs; a mere nickname, we shall hope to prove, for the Mexican branch of the vast family of affiliated tribes which had from prehistoric times inhabited Central America, and, a fact most important of all to grasp, inhabit it to-day. In a word, the Toltecs are the Mayans.

When you have realised all this, it is surely very easy to see how the Toltec myth, which has proved the undoing of so many earnest students, arose. The Aztecs came "out of the north." There is at least no doubt of that. More, there is every reason to believe that they came from the north-west, the very quarter so fanatically urged as the direction whence came the Toltecs. It is doubtful whether they could speak the language of the race they ousted; in fact it is by no means a bold a.s.sumption to declare they could not. With them they undoubtedly brought many traditions. When you grasp all this, and realise the further fact that Tula, the much-talked-of Toltec city, that place which is, it is suggested, identifiable with the present-day town forty miles north of Mexico City, became the first Aztec capital in their new land, and remained so till, under Moctezuma's leadership, they advanced and founded Tenocht.i.tlan, the present city of Mexico, the blindest and most obtuse can surely see what the truth is. The whole Toltec imbroglio is the result of a confusion between the histories of two peoples. The Aztecs came from the north: the Mayans were architects. Though they were first and foremost fighters, the conquerors appear to have taken very kindly to their conquered neighbours' civilisation. Becoming in their turn architects, nothing would be more natural than that the arrogant Aztecs should have at last arrived at such an identification of themselves with the Mayans that the traditions and histories of the two races became once and for all inextricably mingled till they formed such an indivisible tangle as to defy the efforts of chroniclers to unravel.[10]

The confusion between the story of the two peoples just as naturally resulted in the Tula portion of the Toltec myth. It was in all probability the first place at which the Aztecs saw the buildings which so astonished them, as it certainly would seem to have been the place which they chose as their early capital. The importance thus attached by them to it would very naturally in the course of time give it an importance in the history of the Toltec-Mayans who had been expelled from it. As the early stories of the two peoples became confused, Tula would be traditionally believed to be the first city of the Toltecs as well as that of their conquerors. That it was not the first city built in Mexico by the Toltec-Mayans we have not the slightest doubt. We do not go so far as D. G. Brinton: we cannot agree with him that it was built by the Aztecs or Mexicans. It probably was a town in existence at the coming of the Aztecs, though quite a small settlement of a race which had by that time dotted a large part of their present territory with far greater cities. That it had any greater significance to its founders there is not a t.i.ttle of real evidence. It was simply the first town to which the Aztecs came, and around it and its past imagination ran riot. The tendency of semi-civilised peoples to exaggerate some fact of no importance into a great feat or epoch-making event is exemplified again and again in history. Thus it is natural enough that Tula should have attained a traditionary importance out of all proportion to its real place in Toltec-Mayan history. The only ultimate authorities for the Toltec theory are the two chroniclers Ixtlilxochitl (a Mexican native) and Vietia (a Spaniard), both of whom wrote their histories subsequent to the Conquest. There is no reason to believe them wilfully misleading. They simply recorded traditions then and always current.

They had at their disposal the whole existing writings and traditions of their times. They had the picture-writings, and doubtless consulted the oldest and most intelligent of the Indians.

But what of these sources of knowledge? The picture-writings were simply the compilations of the Aztecs, and were of no great date.[11] Indeed it is certain that most of them were not written until the century previous to the Conquest. As to the Indians, it is obvious that such oral tradition as they had to communicate could be of very little real service to the historian. They were one and all enslaved and degraded by the Spaniards, and traditions, if not got from unmolested, unconquered natives, are always unreliable, as has been proved again and again by the missionaries working among subjugated races. Under such circ.u.mstances it is notorious that natives will tell any "fairy tales"

which a fertile imagination, or a desire to ingratiate themselves with their new masters, dictates.

Such then is the flimsy foundation upon which the whole Toltec structure has been reared. Now who were the people whom the Aztecs nicknamed Toltecs? We have already declared them to have been the ancestors of the present Mayans of Yucatan and the surrounding countries--in a word, Mayans themselves. Let us see if we can get some way on the road to proof of our a.s.sertion.

That a people were living in Mexico before the Aztec invasion cannot be doubted; but if, as these Toltec enthusiasts would have us believe, they were apart from any and all other American peoples, where are they to-day? From the Land of Ice to the Land of Fire, there was not a spot that was so thickly populated at the discovery of America that a weaker tribe need have been wiped out. America was so spa.r.s.ely inhabited that a conquered tribe could always find some direction to flee and form a new settlement. But if we accept the Toltec myth, we have to believe that a nation numbering some four or five millions in the eleventh century had at the time of the Conquest, four centuries later, disappeared. It is just possible, but it is most improbable. But if they did not disappear, where are we to look for this mislaid nation? Tradition says they went south. But was the country to the south of Mexico uninhabited then? For if these Toltecs were not strong enough to withstand the attacks of the Aztecs in their own strongholds, it is scarcely reasonable to suppose they would be of sufficient strength or in sufficient numbers to possess themselves of and conquer the inhabitants of a country along the fertile plains of one part of which, Guatemala, they would have found, it may be reasonably supposed, as dense a population as the Spaniards found later.

The Toltec theory presumes that the expelled architects went south and found vast empty s.p.a.ces where they continued their building operations.

This is presuming altogether too much. Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala, were all inhabited at that time: what the Spaniards found there proves that much.

But if you accept our suggestion that the Toltecs were but an outlying branch of the great Mayan race which possessed all Central America from Arizona and Texas to the frontier line of Nicaragua, then the miraculous disappearance of the Toltecs is not miraculous at all. They fled south among their own people, and became absorbed by a natural process in the various parts of Mayan territory, where they found buildings as great and greater than any they had built in their northern Mexican home. Far from the fugitives from the militant Aztecs being the founders of the wonderful cities in Yucatan and Guatemala, they were at the time of their flight probably much less civilised than their cousins at Chichen or Palenque.

But who were these Mayans, and where did they obtain their knowledge of building? No race can develop the art of building in stone without leaving well-marked traces of its slow growth. First, there is the rough stone building, which would be traceable in heaps of crumbling rough-hewn stones where they had fallen. Next, would come that stage when they would learn to mortar the stones together, perhaps adding rude ornamentation on the exterior walls. Very slowly the roughness would give place to better-hewn stones; patterns in the ornamentation would be evolved; and finally you would get the same ornamentation all over the country, identical as is the decoration of such cities as Kabah, Chichen, and Uxmal. But there is no crude work in Yucatan. The unornamented buildings, such as the Akad-Tzib at Chichen, are obviously of the same date as the ornamented structures. They have the same form, the same finish of stone; and everything points to the fact that the plainness of buildings was deliberate and in some way in keeping with the purpose of the edifice.

We have searched for the early stages of the Mayan building civilisation in the caves of Yucatan, where traces, if anywhere, of the embryonic efforts of the architects might be expected, but we searched in vain. Of those caves that have been inhabited there are but few that have any signs of building inside, and none with any traces of carvings. A typical cave of those which had been built in we found in Cozumel island; but it was almost certain that it had not been used as a habitation for any long period. Its front, which had stood exposed to weather and the intrusion of wild beasts, had been built up, with a doorway in the centre. Its floor of earth was found some four feet beneath the debris that had blown in and collected since its ancient occupiers had deserted it; and just under this level was found a small jar of beads and scattered around were potsherds in a layer of charcoal where the cave-dweller had done his cooking. It is the opinion of Mr.

Henry C. Mercer (_Hill-Caves of Yucatan_: Philadelphia, 1896), who in 1896 examined most of the caves of the Southern Sierras, that they were not dwellings but mere halting-places of a wandering people. He could find in them no trace of an evolution of stone-building. Of those that had any kind of carving, he says "they are random, sketchy figures, many of which suggested pictographs of North American Indians. With a few exceptions there was little of the mannerism of Yucatan about them; and if they had been inscribed on a cliff-side on the Sasquehana or in Ohio, few of them would have seemed out of place."

The objects which he found, and the depth at which he found them, only went further to prove that his conclusions were correct. Bones of animals which had served as food, charcoal, and potsherds, with earth of sometimes a foot deep between the layers, went to show that the cave was inhabited and evacuated, and then left for some years before it was again occupied. From the fact that horses' teeth were found in many of them, but always of course in the topmost layers, it may be a.s.sumed that the caves were in use (perhaps only when a rout was taking place) after the arrival of the Spaniards. But the fact that none of the potsherds discovered in the caves are like those usually found among the ruins, and especially the fact that no vases with hieroglyphics on them are found, go to show that the caves in Yucatan were but little in use, if at all, among the building Mayans. From all this it would seem safe to conclude that if these caves were ever permanent habitations, it was at a period anterior to the great building age of the Mayan race, when their civilisation was in the crude stage to which many of the North Americans had attained. This conclusion is certainly supported by the fact above referred to, that the coa.r.s.e carvings at Opichen are almost facsimiles of those of the pictographs of the Northern tribes.

Thus everything would seem to point to the conclusion that, whoever these Mayan builders were, their knowledge of architecture was not slowly evolved by them, but came to them, a veritable gift of the G.o.ds, already developed, from some foreign source. What that source was we shall endeavour to show in the next chapter. The point to be dealt with here is, What were the ethnical affinities of the Mayans themselves? To what branch of the great American family do they belong? We have endeavoured to show that the mysterious disappearance of the Toltecs and the traditionary account of their flight south point very clearly to the conclusion that the country south of Mexico was at the arrival of the Aztecs inhabited by the kindred of these so-called Toltecs.

A curious corroboration of this is to be found in the existence of a tribe known as the Huastecas, who form a colony around the Panuco River in the east of Mexico, and on the adjoining coast of the Gulf. Every ethnologist agrees that these people are pure Mayans; but the puzzle has been to explain their presence in Mexico, where to-day there are no other pure Mayans. The usual explanation is that they represent a solitary migration from Yucatan. Is this at all likely? Is it possible to believe that a mere handful of emigrants could have succeeded in making a lodgment on the Mexican coast in the face of the certain opposition they would have met with from the militant Aztecs? It would have been almost an impossibility; nor does the piece of country held by the Huastecas possess any of those features which might be expected to attract immigrants. It seems to us far more likely that these Huastecas represent a remnant of the original inhabitants of Mexico expelled by the Aztecs; that while the bulk fled southward, a small band moved eastward unnoticed, and established themselves on the Panuco River, the Aztecs being too occupied with their conquests in the south to trouble much about them. Thus with some years to consolidate their position, they either remained unmolested or were actually able to hold their own against the Aztecs till the Conquest. This seems a far more reasonable explanation of the presence of these undoubted Mayans in the east of Mexico.

As the Aztecs pushed their way into the north of Mexico, the vast majority of peaceful Mayans, no match for the warlike strangers, fled naturally south, save these few Huastecas, who, going eastward, were either strong enough to repulse their foes or took refuge in lands which did not attract the Aztecs so much as the rich valleys of Central Mexico; and thus formed a permanent settlement on the east coast, while their kinsfolk joined the Mayan populations of Yucatan and Guatemala.

But when you have a.s.sumed that the Toltecs were Mayans, you are still confronted by an ethnological problem. It has proved curiously difficult to cla.s.sify the Mayans among the other peoples of America. The Aztecs are satisfactorily accounted for as Shoshonees, a tribe of the Athapascans; and some ethnologists have tried to prove that the Mayans are also of the same stock. These efforts have proved futile. All available evidence is against such a conclusion. Physically the two peoples are quite separate, even to-day. The most casual observer, travelling in the two countries of Mexico and Yucatan, must be struck, as were we, by the marked distinction in features and general physique between the two. But a still more cogent proof of their separation is afforded by a study of the two languages. They are quite different in structure, vocabulary and everything.

But this very question of language has enabled D. G. Brinton to track the Mayans to their stock. By a careful comparison of one hundred Natchez (an Apalachian tribe) words with their equivalents in the Mayan dialects, he has proved a very remarkable affinity between the two languages. "Of these hundred," he writes, "five have affinities, more or less marked, to words peculiar to the Huastecas of the River Panuco; thirteen to words common to Huastecas and Mayan; and thirty-nine to words of similar meaning in the latter language." This linguistic similarity would be remarkable by itself. But when you find that physically such Apalachian tribes as the Seminoles and Creeks are strikingly like the Mayan type, and when you realise that this Apalachian stock was all round the land of the Mayans, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Mayans must be ultimately referred to this stock. The Apalachians joined Mexico on the north-east; they stretched down the peninsula of Florida, and probably originally inhabited Cuba and some of the West Indian islands, before the arrival there of the powerful Arawak people, who were found in the islands by the Spanish.

Being thus all round Mexico and Yucatan, it would be curious if some of the Apalachians were not found in those countries. Ethnological data are woefully lacking in all questions affecting the vast congeries of peoples which go to form the aborigines of the two Americas. But it would certainly seem that philologically, physically, and geographically we here have such evidence as points very clearly to the Mayans being a remote offshoot of the Apalachian stock.

But if they are Apalachians, they certainly did not derive their building skill from their ancestors. Florida and the Eastern States are devoid of all ancient buildings. The much discussed mounds of the Mississippi district have not the remotest relationship with the temples and palaces of Yucatan; but are probably totemic symbols, nothing more or less.

On this subject Professor Cyrus Thomas, in _Problems of the Ohio Mounds_ (Washington, 1889), writes: "Mexico, Central America and Peru are dotted with the ruins of stone edifices, but in all the mound-building area of the United States not the slightest vestige of one attributable to the people who erected the eastern structures is to be found.... Though hundreds of groups of mounds marking the sites of ancient villages are to be seen scattered over the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf States, yet nowhere can there be found an ancient house."

It is true that the island of Cuba has never been really thoroughly explored; but enough has been done to show that there are no building "finds" likely there. Senor Andres Poey in a paper on "Cuban Antiquities," read before the American Ethnological Society in 1855, speaks of the great scarcity in the island of relics of stone. Only four statues, very rude representations of anthropoid ape-like animals, had been found. As monkeys were not known to have ever existed in Cuba, it would certainly seem as if these carvings had been brought over from Yucatan, with the Mayan inhabitants of which country it is certain that the Cuban Arawaks traded. The stone implements and earthenware vases found have also, for the most part, been attributed to the same source.

Of stone buildings the Arawaks had none. "The villages consisted," says D. G. Brinton, writing in _The American Archaeologist_ of October, 1898, "of ten to twelve communal houses, always perishable; none having been heard of as stone."

If then the Mayans are akin to the Apalachians, there is no trace among their kindred of such elementary forms of building as would have certainly been found if the architecture which has made them so famous had been naturally developed. Thus we are bound to conclude that it was exotic; that they learnt it from some foreign visitors to their territory long after they had split off and migrated thither from the Apalachian centre.

Who those foreign visitors were we will try to prove in the succeeding chapter. Here let us summarise the foregoing pages as follows:--

1. The Toltec theory is myth, not history.

2. The Toltecs were never an historical nationality.

3. The word "Toltec" was a nickname given by the invading Aztecs to the race inhabiting Mexico on their arrival.

4. The Toltecs were Mayans, the ancestors, with their kinsmen further south, of those Mayan peoples to-day, as at the Spanish Conquest, inhabiting Central America from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico to the frontier of Nicaragua.

5. The Mayans are of the Apalachian stock, and had long been settled in Central America before the invasion of the Aztecs.

6. The architectural skill of the Mayans was not developed by them naturally, but was introduced from a foreign country some centuries before the Aztecs invaded their northernmost possessions.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] The value of the Tula tradition is best gauged by a comparison of the dates given by authorities. Thus Sahagun (_Historia de la Nueva Espana_) places its destruction in 319 B.C.; Ixtlilxochitl (_Historia Chichemeca_, iii. cap. 4) brings it down to 969 A.D.; the _Codex Ramirez_ gives it as 1168 A.D.; and so on. There is an equally amazing variation about the date of its founding.

[9] Ixtlilxochitl, in his _Relaciones Historicas_, says Topiltzin was the last king of Tula; that Toltec sovereignty extended a thousand leagues from north to south, and eight hundred from east to west; and that in the wars that attended its downfall 5,600,000 persons were slain!

[10] According to Dr. Brinton, the name Nahuatl, which of late years scholars have agreed to use in the place of Aztec, does not belong to the latter people. It is an Aztec word meaning--first, to speak clearly; second, to order or command; third, to speak as one with authority. Hence it gained the sense of "astute," "superior," and Nahuatlaca were the Superior People. Dr. Brinton thinks it was another name given by the Aztecs to the dispossessed Mayans, and that as the years pa.s.sed and the legends of the two races became hopelessly confused, the Aztecs adopted the name themselves.

[11] Of Mexican traditions Dr. Brinton (_A Review of the Data for the Study of the Prehistoric Chronology of America_: 1887) says: "It is extremely doubtful if their earliest reminiscences refer to any event outside the narrow valley parcelled out between the petty states of Tenocht.i.tlan, Tezcuco and Tlacopan.... The chronicles of Mexico proper contain no fixed date prior to that of the founding of Tenocht.i.tlan in the year 1325 of our era."

CHAPTER XVI

WHO WERE AMERICA'S FIRST ARCHITECTS?

The proposition that the Mayans were taught to build by foreign visitors involves three postulates.

1. Such foreign visitors came from a land where the knowledge of architecture had reached a considerable degree of perfection.

2. They landed in Central America well within historic times.

3. They belonged to none of the so-called White Races.

These postulates very materially narrow the area of the globe in which we can profitably look for their home; and a task which at first sight appears to rival the proverbial one of looking for a needle in a haystack becomes, if approached by the light of common sense, comparatively simple.

Common sense cannot be said to have distinguished most of those who have striven heretofore to crack this architectural nut. Broadly speaking, there have been two contending bands of theorists: those who were determined at all costs to claim the architecture of Central America as home-grown; and those who, figuratively speaking, shut their eyes and with a map of the world before them and bodkin in hand, p.r.i.c.ked some spot, opened their eyes, and triumphantly declared "There's the place."

As for the first, we have done our best in the last chapter to show that they have not a leg to stand on. As for the second, they have defeated their efforts by their own vagueness. They have wandered over the earth's surface and chosen in turn any and every country which at any period of its history has been known to possess an architecture of its own. Thus have the Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Phoenicians, the Chinese, the j.a.panese, the Tatars, the Polynesians, all in turn been suggested as the originators of America's native architecture; east, west, south, north, races in nearly every continent have been commandeered to act either as the parents of the whole Mayan people or as their foreign tutors in the art of building.