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Anahuac written by Edward Burnett Tylor

E >> Edward Burnett Tylor >> Anahuac




We find two sorts of stone hammers in Europe. Solid hammers belong to
the earliest period. They are made of longish rolled pebbles; some are
shaped a little artificially, and are grooved round to hold the handle,
which was a flexible twig bent double and with the two ends tied
together, so as to keep the stone head in its place. The hammers of a
later period of the "stone age" are shaped more like the iron ones our
smiths use at the present day, and they have a hole bored in the middle
for the handle. In Brittany, where Celtic remains are found in such
abundance, it is not uncommon to see stone hammers of the latter kind
hanging up in the cottages of the peasants, who use them to drive in
nails with. They have an odd way of providing them with handles, by
sticking them tight upon branches of young trees, and when the branch
has grown larger, and has thus rivetted itself tightly on both sides of
the stone head, they cut it off, and carry home the hammer ready for
use.

Though the Mexicans carried the arts of knife and arrow-making and
sculpturing hard stone to such perfection, I do not think they ever
discovered the art of making a hole in a stone hammer. The handles of
the axes shown in the picture-writings are clumsy sticks swelling into
a large knob at one end, and the axe-blade is fixed into a hole in this
knob. Some of the Mexican hammers seem to have had their handles fixed
in this way; while others were made with a groove, in the same manner
as the earlier kind of European stone hammers just described.

When we consider the beauty of the Mexican stonecutter's work, it seems
wonderful that they should have been able to do it without iron tools.
It is quite clear that, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, they used
bronze hatchets, containing that very small proportion of tin which
gives the alloy nearly the hardness of steel. We saw many of these
hatchets in museums, and Mr. Christy bought some good specimens in a
collection of antiquities which had belonged to an old Mexican, who got
them principally from the suburb of Tlatelolco, in the neighbourhood of
the ancient market-place of the city. Such axes were certainly common
among the ancient Mexicans. One of the items of the hieroglyphic
tribute-roll in the Mendoza Codex is eighty bronze hatchets.

A story told by Bernal Diaz is to the point. He says that he and his
companions, noticing that the Indians of the coast generally carried
bright metal axes, the material of which looked like gold of a low
quality, got as many as six hundred such axes from them in the course
of three days' bartering, giving them coloured glass-beads in exchange.
Both sides were highly satisfied with their bargain; but it all came to
nothing, as the chronicler relates with considerable disgust, for the
gold turned out to be copper, and the beads were found to be trash when
the Indians began to understand them better. Such hard copper axes as
these have been found at Mitla, in the State of Oajaca, where the
ruined temples seem to form a connecting link between the monuments of
Teotihuacan and Xochicalco and the ruined cities of Yucatan and
Chiapas.

We want one more link in the chain to show the use of the same kind of
tools from Mexico down to Yucatan, and this link we can supply. In Lord
Kingsborough's great work on Mexican Antiquities there is one
picture-writing, the Dresden Codex, which is not of Aztec origin at
all. Its hieroglyphics are those of Palenque and Uxmal; and in this
manuscript we have drawings of hatchets like those of Mexico, and fixed
in the same kind of handles, but of much neater workmanship.

But here we come upon a difficulty. It is supposed that the pyramids of
Teotihuacan, as well as most of the great architectural works of the
country, were the work of the Toltec race, who quitted this part of the
country several centuries before the Spanish Conquest. It seems
incredible that bronze should have been in use in the country for so
long a time, and not have superseded so bad a material as stone for
knives and weapons. We have good evidence to show that in Europe the
introduction of bronze was almost simultaneous with the complete disuse
of stone for such purposes. It is true that Herodotus describes the
embalmers, in his time, as cutting open the bodies with "an Ethiopic
stone" though they were familiar with the use of metal. Indeed the
flint knives which he probably meant may be seen in museums. But this
peculiar usage was most likely kept up for some mystical reason, and
does not affect the general question. Almost as soon as the Spaniards
brought iron to Mexico, it superseded the old material. The "bronze
age" ceased within a year or two, and that of iron began.

The Mexicans called copper or bronze "tepuztli," a word of rather
uncertain etymology. Judging from the analogous words in languages
allied to the Aztec, it seems not unlikely that it meant originally
_hatchet_ or _breaker_, just as "itztli," or obsidian, appears to have
meant originally _knife_.[12]

When the Mexicans saw iron in the hands of the Spaniards, they called
it also "tepuztli," which thus became a general word for metal; and
then they had to distinguish iron from copper, as they do at the
present day, by calling them "_tliltic_ tepuztli," and "_chichiltic_
tepuztli;" that is, "black metal," and "red metal."

When the subject of the use of bronze in stone-cutting is discussed, as
it so often is with special reference to Egypt, one may doubt whether
people have not underrated its capabilities, when the proportion of tin
is accurately adjusted to give the maximum hardness; and especially
when a minute portion of iron enters into its composition. Sir Gardner
Wilkinson relates that he tried the edge of one of the Egyptian mason's
chisels upon the very stone it had evidently been once used to cut, and
found that its edge was turned directly; and therefore he wonders that
such a tool could have been used for the purpose, of course supposing
that the tool as he found it was just as the mason left it. This,
however, is not quite certain. If we bury a brass tool in a damp place
for a few weeks, it will be found to have undergone a curious molecular
change, and to have become quite soft and weak, or, as the workmen call
it, dead. We ought to be quite sure whether lying for centimes under
ground may not have made some similar change in bronze.

I have seen many prickly pears in different places, but never such
specimens as those that were growing among the stones in this old
quarry. They had gnarled and knotted trunks of hard wood, and were as
big as pollard-oaks; their age must have been immense; but,
unfortunately, one could not measure it, or it would have been a good
criterion of the age of the quarry, which had not only been excavated
but abandoned before their time. In one of the caves was a human
skeleton, blanched white and clean, and near it some one has stuck a
cross, made of two bits of stick, in the crevices of a heap of stones.

Returning to the entrance of the quarry, well loaded with stone hammers
and knives, we sat down to breakfast, in a cave, where our man had
established himself with the horses. An attempt on my part to cut
German sausage with an obsidian knife proved a decided failure.

We had already been struck by the appearance of the two pyramids of
Teotihuacan, when we passed by Otumba on our way to Mexico. The hills
which skirt the plain are so near them as to diminish their apparent
size; but even at a distance they are conspicuous objects. Now, when we
came close to them, and began by climbing to their summits, and walking
round their terraces, to measure ourselves against them, we began
gradually to realize their vast bulk; and this feeling continually grew
upon us. Modern architecture strives to unite the greatest possible
effect with the least cost; and the modern churches of southern Europe
and Spanish America, with their fine tall facades fronting the street,
and insignificant little buildings behind, show this idea in its
fullest development. Pyramids are built with no such object, and make
but little show in proportion to their vast mass of material; but then
one gets from them a sense of solid magnitude that no other building
gives, however vast its proportions may be. Neither of us had ever seen
the Egyptian pyramids. Even in Mexico these of Teotihuacan are not the
largest; for, though the pyramid of Cholula is no higher, it covers far
more ground. Were these monuments in Egypt, they would only rank, from
their size, in the second class.

As has often been remarked, such buildings as these can only be raised
under peculiar social conditions. The ruler must be a despotic
sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and
whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of
the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner
of the country and the people. The population must be very dense, or it
would not bear the loss of so large a proportion of the working class;
and vegetable food must be exceedingly abundant in the country, to feed
them while engaged in this unprofitable labour.

We know how great was the influence of the priestly classes in Egypt,
though the pyramids there, being rather tombs than temples, do not
prove it. In Mexico, however, the pyramids themselves were the temples,
serving only incidentally as tombs; and their size proves that--as
respects priestly influence--the resemblance between the two people is
fully carried out.

Like the Egyptian pyramids, these fronted the four cardinal points.
Their shape was not accurately pyramidal, for the line from base to
summit was broken by three terraces, or perhaps four, running
completely round them; and at the top was a flat square space, where
stood the idols and the sacrificial altars. This construction closely
resembled that of some of the smaller Egyptian pyramids. Flights of
stone steps led straight up from terrace to terrace, and the procession
of priests and victims made the circuit of each before they ascended to
the one above.

The larger of the two teocallis is dedicated to the Sun, has a base of
about 640 feet, and is about 170 feet high. The other, dedicated to the
Moon, is rather smaller.

These monuments were called _teocallis_, not because they were
pyramids, but because they were temples; "Teocalli" means "god's
house"--(_teotl_, god, _calli_, house), a name which the traveller
hears explained for the first time with some wonder; and Humboldt
cannot help adverting to its curious correspondence with [Greek: theou
kalia], _dei cella_. Another odd coincidence is found in the Aztec name
for their priests, _papahua_, the root of which _papa_, (the _hua_, is
merely a termination). In the Old World the word _Papa_, Pope, or
Priest, was connected with the idea of father or grandfather, but the
Aztec word has no such origin.

When the Aztecs abandoned their temples, and began to build Christian
churches, they called them also "teocallis," and perhaps do so to this
day.

The heavy tropical rains have to a great extent broken the sharpness of
the outline of these structures, and brought them more nearly to the
shape of real pyramids than they were originally; but, as we climbed up
their sides, we could trace the terraces without any difficulty, and
even flights of steps.

The pyramids consist of an outer casing of hewn stone, faced and
covered with smooth stucco, which has resisted the effects of time and
bad usage in a wonderful manner. Inside this casing were adobes,
stones, clay, and mortar, as one may see in places where the exterior
has been damaged, and by creeping into the small passage which leads
into the Temple of the Moon. Both pyramids are nearly covered with a
coating of debris, full of bits of obsidian arrows and knives, and
broken pottery. On the teocalli of the moon we found a number of recent
sea-shells, which mystified us extremely; and the only explanation we
could give of their presence there was that they might have been
brought up as offerings. A passage in Humboldt, which I met with long
after, seems to clear up the mystery. Speaking of the great teocalli of
the city of Mexico, he says, quoting an old description, that the Moon
had a little temple in the great courtyard, which was built of shells.
Those that we found may be the remains of a similar structure on the
top of the pyramid.

Prickly pears, aloes, and mesquite bushes have overgrown the pyramids
in all directions, as though they had been mere natural hills. In
Sicily one may see the lava fields of Etna planted with prickly pears:
in the ordinary course of things, it requires several centuries before
even the surface of this hard lava will disintegrate into soil; but the
roots of the cactus soon crack it, and a few years suffice to break it
up to a sufficient depth to allow of vineyards being planted upon it.
Here the same plant has in the same way affected the porous amygdaloid
with which the pyramids are faced, and has cut up the surface sadly;
but the vegetation which covers them will at any rate defend them from
the rains, and now centuries will make but little change in the
appearance of these remarkable buildings.

Near Nice there is a hill which gives a wonderfully correct idea of the
appearance of the terraced teocallis of Mexico, as they must have
looked before time effaced the sharpness of their lines. Where the
valley of the Paglione and that of St. Andre meet, the hill between
them terminates in a half pyramid, the angle of which lies toward the
south; and the inhabitants--as their custom is in southern Europe, have
turned the two slopes to account, by building them up into terraces, to
prevent the soil they have laboriously carried up from being swept down
by the first heavy rain. Seen from the proper point of view the
resemblance is complete.

From the south side of the Temple of the Moon runs an avenue of
burial-mounds, the Micaotli, "the path of the dead." On these mounds,
and round the foot of the pyramids themselves, the whole population of
the once great city of Teotihuacan and its neighbourhood used to
congregate, to see the priests and the victims march round the terraces
and up the stairs in full view of them all. Standing here, one could
imagine the scene that Cortes and his men saw from their camp, outside
Mexico, on that dreadful day when the Mexicans had cut off their
retreat along the causeways, and taken more than sixty Spanish
prisoners. Bernal Diaz was there, and tells the tale how they heard
from the city the great drum of Huitzilopochtli sending forth a strange
and awful sound, that could be heard for miles, and with it many horns
and trumpets; and how, when they had looked towards the great teocalli,
they saw the Mexicans dragging up the prisoners, pushing and beating
them as they went, till they had got them up to the open space at the
top, "where the cursed idols stood." Then they put plumes of feathers
on their heads, and fans in their hands, and made them dance before the
idol; and when they had danced, they threw them on their backs on the
sacrificial stone that stood there, and, sawing open their breasts with
knives of stone, they tore out their hearts, and offered them up in
sacrifice; and the bodies they flung down the stairs to the bottom.
More than this the Spaniards cannot have seen, though Diaz describes
the rest of the proceedings as though they had been done in his sight;
but it was not the first time they had witnessed such things, and they
knew well enough what was happening down below,--how the butchers were
waiting to cut up the carcases as they came down, that they might be
cooked with chile, and eaten in the solemn banquet of the evening.

The day was closing in by this time; and our man was waiting with the
horses at the foot of the great pyramid; and with him an Indian, whom
we had caught half an hour before, and sent off with a real to buy
pulque, and to collect such obsidian arrows and clay heads as were to
be found at the ranchos in the neighbourhood.

Near the place we started from, two or three Indians were diligently at
work at their stone-quarry, that is to say, they were laboriously
bringing out great hewn stones from the side of the pyramid, to build
their walls with; and indeed we could see in every house for miles
round stones that had come from the same source, as was proved by the
stucco still remaining upon them, smoothed like polished marble, and
painted dull red with cinnabar.

As I write this, it brings to my recollection an old Roman trophy in
North Italy, built--like these pyramids--of a shell of hewn stone,
filled with rough stones and cement, now as hard as the rock itself.
There I saw the inhabitants of the town which stands at its foot,
carrying off the great limestone blocks, but first cutting them up into
pieces of a size that they could move about, and build into their
houses. Here and there, in this little Italian town, there were to be
seen in the walls letters of the old inscription which were once upon
the trophy; and the age of the houses shewed that the monument had
served as a quarry for centuries.

As we rode home, we noticed by the sides of the road, and where ditches
had been cut, numbers of old Mexican stone-floors covered with stucco.
The earth has accumulated above them to the depth of two or three feet,
so that their position is like that of the Roman pavements so often
found in Europe; and we may guess, from what we saw exposed, how great
must be the number of such remains still hidden, and how vast a
population must once have inhabited this plain, now almost deserted.

Two days afterwards we came back. In the ploughed fields in the
neighbourhood we made repeated trials whether it was possible to stand
still in any spot where there was no relic of old Mexico within our
reach; but this we could not do. Everywhere the ground was full of
unglazed pottery and obsidian; and we even found arrows and clay
figures that were good enough for a museum. When we left England, we
both doubted the accounts of the historians of the Conquest, believing
that they had exaggerated the numbers of the population, and the size
of the cities, from a natural desire to make the most of their
victories, and to write as wonderful a history as they could, as
historians are prone to do. But our examination of Mexican remains soon
induced us to withdraw this accusation, and even made us inclined to
blame the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things
that surrounded them.

I do not mean by this that we felt inclined to swallow the monstrous
exaggerations of Solis and Gomara and other Spanish chroniclers, who
seemed to think that it was as easy to say a thousand as a hundred, and
that it sounded much better. But when this class of writers are set
aside, and the more valuable authorities severely criticised, it does
not seem to us that the history thus extracted from these sources is
much less reliable than European history of the same period. There is,
perhaps, no better way of expressing this opinion than to say that what
we saw of Mexico tended generally to confirm Prescott's History of the
Conquest, and but seldom to make his statements appear to us
improbable.

There are other mounds near the pyramids, besides the Micaotli. Two
sides of the Pyramid of the Sun are surrounded by them; and there are
two squares of mounds at equal distances, north and south of it,
besides innumerable scattered hillocks. There are some sculptured
blocks of stone lying near the pyramids, and inside the smaller one is
buried what appears to be a female bust of colossal size, with the
mouth like an oval ring, so common in Mexican sculptures.

The same abundance of ancient remains that we found here characterizes
the neighbourhood of all the Mexican monuments in the country, with one
curious exception. Burkart declares that in the vicinity of the
extensive remains of temples known as _Los Edificios_, near Zacatecas,
no traces of pottery or of obsidian were to be found.

Before going away, we held a solemn market of antiquities. We sat
cross-legged on the ground, and the Indian women and children brought
us many curious articles in clay and obsidian, which we bought and
deposited in two great bags of aloe-fibre which our man carried at his
saddle-bow. Among the articles we bought were various pipes or whistles
of pottery, _pitos_, as they are called in Spanish, and just as we were
mounting our horses to ride off, a lad ran to the top of one of the
mounds, and blew on one of these pipes a long dismal note that could be
heard a mile off. Our friends had filled our heads so full of robbers
and ambushes, that we made sure it was a signal for some one who was
waiting for us, and the more so as the boy ran off as soon as he had
blown his blast; and when we looked round for the people whose
antiquities we had been buying, they had all disappeared. But nothing
came of it, and we got safely back to Tezcuco. As usual, we spent a
capital evening, and separated late. The owner of the glass-works, who
had been spending the evening with us, had an adventure on his road
home. He was peaceably riding along, when two men rushed out from
behind the corner of the street, and shouted "_alto ahi_!" (halte-la).
He thought they were robbers, and started at a gallop. His hat flew
off, and the men sent two bullets singing past his head, which sent him
on quicker than ever, till he reached his house. There he got his
pistols, and came back armed to the teeth to fetch the hat, which lay
where it had fallen. The supposed robbers turned out, on enquiry next
day, to have been national guards, patrolling the street; but certainly
their proceedings were rather questionable.

We had an unpleasant visit the same night. The custom of the Casa
Grande was that after dark a watchman patrolled all night, giving a
long blast every quarter of an hour on one of these same doleful
Mexican whistles, to show that ho was not sleeping on his rounds. This
was for the outside. Inside the house, _pour surcroit de precaution_, a
servant came round to see that every one was in his room; and having
satisfied himself of this, let loose in the courtyard two enormous
bulldogs, which were the terror of the household and of the whole
neighbourhood. On this particular night, a noise at our own door woke
me from a sound sleep; and I had the pleasure of seeing a creature walk
deliberately in, looking huge and terrific in the moonlight. The beast
had been into the stable two nights before, and had pinned a cow which
was there, keeping his hold upon her till next morning, when he was got
off by the keeper. With this specimen of the bulldog's abilities fresh
in my recollection, I preferred not making any attempt to resent his
impertinent intrusion, but lay still, till he had satisfied himself
with walking about the room and sniffing at our beds, when he lay down
on my carpet; I soon fell asleep again, and next morning he was gone.
The foreigners in Mexico seem to delight in fierce bull-dogs. The Casa
Grande at Tezcuco is not by any means the only place where they form
part of the garrison. One English acquaintance of ours in the Capital
kept two of these beasts up in his rooms, and not even the servants
dared go up, unless the master was there.

Every one who has read Prescott's 'Mexico' will recollect
Nezahualcoyotl, the king of Tezcuco; and the palaces he built there for
his wives, and his poets, and the rest of his great court. These
palaces were built chiefly of mud bricks; and time and the Spaniards
have dealt so hardly with them, that even their outlines can no longer
be traced. Traces of two large teocallis are just visible, and Mr.
Bowring has some burial mounds in his grounds which will be examined
some day. There is a Mexican calendar built into the wall of one of the
churches; and, as we walked about the streets of the present town, we
noticed stones that must have been sculptured before the Spaniards
brought in their broken-down classic style, and so stopped the
development of native art. As for the rest of old Tezcuco, it has
"become heaps." Wherever they dig ditches or lay the foundations of
houses, you may see the ground full of its remains.

As I said before, when speaking of the stuccoed floors near
Teotihuacan, the accumulation of alluvial soil goes on very rapidly and
very regularly all over the plains of Mexico and Puebla, where
everything favours its deposit; and the human remains preserved in it
are so numerous that its age may readily be seen. We noticed this in
many places, but in no instance so well as between Tezcuco and the
hacienda of Miraflores. There a long ditch, some five feet deep, had
just been cut in anticipation of the rainy season. As yet it was dry,
and, as we walked along it, we found three periods of Mexican history
distinctly traceable from one end to the other. First came mere
alluvium, without human remains. Then, just above, came fragments of
obsidian knives and bits of unglazed pottery. Above this again, a third
layer, in which the obsidian ceased, and much of the pottery was still
unglazed; but many fragments were glazed, and bore the unmistakable
Spanish patterns in black and yellow.