Anahuac written by Edward Burnett Tylor

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The above explanation by Humboldt is a plausible one. But in Central
America altars not unlike this, and with grooves upon the top, stand in
front of the great stone idols; and this curious monument may have been
nothing after all but an ordinary altar to sacrifice birds and small
animals upon.

[Illustration: THREE VIEWS OF A SACRIFICIAL COLLAR. _Carved out of hard
mottled greenstone. (In Mr. Christy's Collection.) This is 17 inches
long, and varies from 11 to 16 inches in width. The arms are 4 inches
wide and 3 inches deep; and are 8 inches apart at about half their
length._]

Senor Leon Ramirez, the curator, had come to the Museum to meet us, and
we went over the collection of smaller objects, which are kept up
stairs in glass-cases,--at any rate out of the way of the soldiers.

Here are the stone clamps shaped like the letter U, which were put over
the wrists and ankles of the victims, to hold them down on the
sacrificial stone. They are of hard stone, very heavy and covered with
carvings. It is remarkable that, though the altars for human sacrifices
are no longer to be found, these accessory stone clamps, or yoke-like
collars, are not uncommon. A fine one from Mr. Christy's collection is
figured. _(See opposite page.)_

The obsidian knives and arrow-heads are very good, but these I have
spoken of already, as well as of the stone hammers. The axes and
chisels of stone are so exactly like those found in Europe that it is
quite impossible to distinguish them. The bronze hatchet-blades are
thin and flat, slightly thickened at the sides to give them strength,
and mostly of a very peculiar shape, something like a T, but still more
resembling the section of a mushroom cut vertically through the middle
of the stalk.

The obsidian mask is an extraordinary piece of work, considering the
difficulty of cutting such a material. It was chipped into a rude
outline, and finished into its exact shape by polishing down with
jeweller's sand. The polish is perfect, and there is hardly a scratch
upon it. At least one of the old Spanish writers on Mexico gives the
details of the process of cutting precious stones and polishing them
with _teoxalli_ or "god's sand." Masks in stone, wood, and terra-cotta
are to be seen in considerable number in museums of Mexican
antiquities. Their use is explained by passages in the old Mexican
writers, who mention that it was customary to mask the idols on the
occasion of the king being sick, or of any other public calamity; and
that men and women wore masks in some of the religious ceremonies. A
fine mask of brown lava (from Mr. Christy's collection), which has been
coloured, is here figured. _(See illustration.)_ The mirrors of
obsidian have the same beautifully polished surface as the obsidian
mask shows; and those made of nodules of pyrites, cut and polished, are
worth notice.

The Mexicans were very skilful in making pottery; and of course there
is a good collection here of terra-cotta vases, little altars and
incense-dishes, rattles, flageolets, and whistles, tobacco-pipes and
masks. Some of the large vases, which were formerly filled with skulls
and bones, are admirable in their designs and decorations; and many
specimens are to be seen of the red and black ware of Cholula, which
was famous at the time of the Conquest, and was sent to all parts of
the country. The art of glazing pottery seems only to have been
introduced by the Spaniards, and to this day the Indians hardly care to
use it. The terra-cotta rattles are very characteristic. They have
little balls in them which shake about, and they puzzled us much as the
apple-dumpling did good King George, for we could not make out very
easily how the balls got inside. They were probably attached very
slightly to the inside, and so baked and then broken loose. We often
got little balls like schoolboys' marbles, among lots of Mexican
antiquities, and these were most likely the balls out of broken
rattles.

Burning incense was always an important part of the Mexican ceremonies.
When the white men were on their march to the capital, the inhabitants
used to come out to meet them with such plates as we saw here, and burn
copal before the leaders; and in Indian villages to this day the
procession on saints' days would not be complete without men burning
incense, not in regular censers, but in unglazed earthen platters such
as their forefathers used.

[Illustration: THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF AN AZTEC MASK. _Sculptured out
of hard brown lava. Twelve inches high; ten inches wide. (From Mr.
Christy's Collection.)_]

Our word _copal_ is the Mexican _copalli_. There are a few other
Mexican words which have been naturalized in our European languages, of
course indicating that the things they represent came from Mexico.
_Ocelotl_ is _ocelot_; _Tomatl_ is _tomata_; _Chilli_ is the Spanish
_chile_ and our _chili_; _Cacahuatl_ is _cacao_ or cocoa; and
_Chocolatl_, the beverage made from the cacao-bean with a mixture of
vanilla, is our chocolate.

Cacao-beans were used by the Mexicans as money. Even in Humboldt's
time, when there was no copper coinage, they were used as small change,
six for a halfpenny; and Stephens says the Central Americans use them
to this day. A mat in Mexican is _petlatl_, and thence a basket made of
matting was called _petlacalli_--"mathouse." The name passed to the
plaited grass cigar-cases that are exported to Europe; and now in Spain
any kind of cigar-case is called a _petaca_.

The pretty little ornamented calabashes--used, among other purposes,
for drinking chocolate out of--were called by the Mexicans _xicalli_, a
word which the Spaniards made into _jicara_, and now use to mean a
chocolate-cup; and even the Italians have taken to it, and call a
tea-cup a _chicchera_.

There is a well-known West Indian fruit which we call an _avocado_ or
_alligator-pear_, and which the French call _avocat_ and the Spaniards
_aguacate_. All these names are corruptions of the Aztec name of the
fruit, _ahuacatl_.

Vanilla and cochineal were first found in Mexico; but the Spaniards did
not adopt the unpronounceable native names, _tlilxochitl_ and
_nocheztli_. Vanilla, _vainilla_, means a little bean, from _vaina_,
which signifies a scabbard or sheath, also a pod. _Cochinilla_ is from
_coccus_, a berry, as it was at first supposed to be of vegetable
origin. The Aztec name for cochineal, _nocheztli_, means
"cactus-blood," and is a very apt description of the insect, which has
in it a drop of deep crimson fluid, in which the colouring matter of
the dye is contained.

The turkey, which was introduced into Europe from Mexico, was called
_huexolotl_ from the gobbling noise it makes. (It must be remembered
that x and j in Spanish are not the same letters as in English, but a
hard guttural aspirate, like the German ch). The name, slightly altered
into _guajalote_, is still used in Mexico; but when these birds were
brought to Europe, the Spaniards called them peacocks (_pavos_). To get
rid of the confusion, it became necessary to call the real peacock
"_pavon_" (big peacock), or "_pavo real_" (royal peacock). The German
name for a turkey, "Waelscher Hahn," "Italian fowl," is reasonable, for
the Germans got them from Italy; but our name "turkey" is wonderfully
absurd.

There may be other Mexican words to be found in our language, but not
many. The Mexicans were cultivating maize and tobacco when the
Spaniards invaded the country, and had done so for ages; but these
vegetables had been found already in the West India islands, and had
got their name from the language of Hayti, _mahiz_ and _tabaco_; the
latter word, it seems, meaning not the tobacco itself, but the cigars
made of it.

I do not recollect anything else worthy of note that Europe has
borrowed from Ancient Mexico, except Botanic Gardens, and dishes made
to keep hot at dinner-time, which the Aztecs managed by having a pan of
burning charcoal underneath them.

To return to the Museum. There are stamps in terra-cotta with
geometrical patterns, for making lines and ornaments on the vases
before they were baked, and for stamping patterns upon the cotton cloth
which was one of their principal manufactures, as it is now. Connected
with the same art are the _malacates_, or winders, which I have already
described. Little grotesque heads made of baked clay, like those I have
mentioned as being found in such immense numbers on the sites of old
Mexican cities, are here by hundreds. I think there were, besides, some
of the moulds, also in terra-cotta, in which they were formed; at any
rate, they are to be seen, so that making the little heads must have
been a regular trade. What they were for is not so easy to say. Some
have bodies, and are made with flat backs to stand against a wall, and
these were probably idols. The ancient Mexicans, we read, had
household-gods in great numbers, and called them _Tepitotons_, "little
ones." The greatest proportion, however, are mere heads which never had
had bodies, and will not stand anyhow. They could not have been
personal ornaments, for there is nothing to fasten them on by. They are
rather a puzzle. I have seen a suggestion somewhere, that when a man
was buried, each surviving member of his family put one of these heads
into his grave. This sounds plausible enough, especially as both male
and female heads are found.

One shelf in the museum is particularly instructive. We called it the
"Chamber of Horrors," after the manner of Marlborough House, and it
contains numbers of the sham antiquities, the manufacture of which is a
regular thing in Mexico, as it is in Italy. They are principally vases
and idols of earthenware, for the art of working obsidian is lost, and
there can be no trickery about that[18]; and as to the hammers,
chisels, and idols in green jade, serpentine, and such like hard
materials, they are decidedly cheaper to find than to make. The Indians
in Mexico make their unglazed pottery just as they did before the
Conquest, so that, if they imitate real antiques exactly, there is no
possibility of detecting the fraud; but when they begin to work from
their own designs, or even to copy from memory, they are almost sure to
put in something that betrays them.

As soon as the Spaniards came, they began to introduce drawing as it
was understood in Europe; and from that moment the peculiarities of
Mexican art began to disappear. The foreheads of the Mexican races are
all very low, and their painters and sculptors even exaggerated this
peculiarity, to make the faces they depicted more beautiful,--so
producing an effect which to us Europeans seems hideously ugly, but
which is not more unnatural than the ideal type of beauty we see in the
Greek statues. After the era of the Spaniards we see no more of such
foreheads; and the eyes, which were drawn in profiles as one sees them
in the full face, are put in their natural position. The short squat
figures become slim and tall; and in numberless little details of
dress, modelling, and ornament, the acquaintance of the artist with
European types is shown; and it is very seldom that the modern
counterfeiter can keep clear of these and get back to the old standard.

Among the things on the condemned shelf were men's faces too correctly
drawn to be genuine, grotesque animals that no artist would ever have
designed who had not seen a horse, head-dresses and drapery that were
European and not Mexican. Among the figures in Mayer's _Mexico_, a vase
is represented as a real antique, which, I think, is one of the worst
cases I ever noticed. There is a man's head upon it, with long
projecting pointed nose and chin, a long thin pendant moustache, an eye
drawn in profile, and a cap. It is true the pure Mexican race
occasionally have moustaches, but they are very slight, not like this,
which falls in a curve on both sides of the mouth; and no Mexican of
pure Indian race ever had such a nose and chin, which must have been
modelled from the face of some toothless old Spaniard.

Mention must be made of the wooden drums--_teponaztli_--of which some
few specimens are still to be seen in Mexico. Such drums figured in the
religious ceremonies of the Aztecs, and one often hears of them in
Mexican history. I have mentioned already the great drum which Bernal
Diaz saw when he went up the Mexican teocalli with Cortes, and which he
describes as a hellish instrument, made with skins of great serpents;
and which, when it was struck, gave a loud and melancholy sound, that
could be heard at two leagues' distance. Indeed, they did afterwards
hear it from their camp a mile or two off, when their unfortunate
companions were being sacrificed on the teocalli.

The Aztec drums, which are still to be seen, are altogether of wood,
nearly cylindrical, but swelling out in the middle, and hollowed out of
solid logs. Some have the sounding-board made unequally thick in
different parts, so as to give several notes when struck. All are
elaborately carved over with various designs, such as faces,
head-dresses, weapons, suns with rays, and fanciful patterns, among
which the twisted cord is one of the commonest.

Besides the drums which are preserved in museums, there are others,
carefully kept in Indian villages, not as curiosities, but as
instruments of magical power. Heller mentions such a _teponaztli_,
which is still preserved among the Indians of Huatusco, an Indian
village near Mirador in the tierra templada, where the inhabitants have
had their customs comparatively little altered by intercourse with
white men. They keep this drum as a sacred instrument, and beat it only
at certain times of the year, though they have no reason to give for
doing so. It is to be regretted that Heller did not take a note of the
particular days on which this took place; for the times of the Mexican
festivals are well known, and this information would have settled the
question whether the Indians of the present day have really any
definite recollection of their old customs.

Drums of this kind do not belong exclusively to Mexico. Among all the
tribes of North America they were one of the principal "properties"
used by the Medicine-men in their ceremonies; and among the tribes
which have not been christianized they are still to be found in use.
After we left Mexico, Mr. Christy visited some tribes in the Hudson's
Bay Territory; and on one occasion, happening to assist at a festival
in which just such a wooden drum was used, he bought it of the
Medicine-man of the tribe, and packed it off triumphantly to his
museum.

A few picture-writings are still to be seen in the Museum, which, with
the few preserved in Europe, are all we have left of these interesting
records, of which there were thousands upon thousands in Mexico and
Tezcuco. Some were burnt or destroyed during the sieges of the cities,
some perished by mere neglect, but the great mass was destroyed by
archbishop Zumarraga, when he made an attempt--and, to some extent, a
successful one--to obliterate every trace of heathenism, by destroying
all the monuments and records in the country. One of the
picture-writings hanging on the wall is very probably the same that was
sent up from Vera Cruz to Montezuma, with figures of the newly-arrived
white men, their ships and horses, and their cannons with fire and
smoke issuing from their mouths. Another shows a white man being
sacrificed, of course one of the Spanish prisoners. The pictorial
history of the migration of the Aztecs is here, and a list of tributes
paid to the Mexican sovereign; the different articles being drawn with
numbers against each, to show the quantities to be paid, as in the
Egyptian inscriptions. Lord Kingsborough's great work contains
fac-similes of several Mexican manuscripts, and in Humboldt's _Vues des
Cordilleres_ some of the most remarkable are figured and described.

One of the most curious of the Aztec picture-writings is in the
Bodleian Library, and in fac-simile in Lord Kingsborough's _Antiquities
of Mexico_. In it are shown, in a series of little pictures, the
education of Mexican boys and girls, as prescribed by law. The child
four days old is being sprinkled with water, and receiving its name. At
four years old they are to be allowed one tortilla a meal, which is
indicated by a drawing above their heads, of four circles representing
years, and one cake; and the father sends the son to carry water, while
the mother shows the daughter how to spin. A tortilla is like an
oat-cake, but is made of Indian corn.

At seven years old the boy is taken to learn to fish, while the girl
spins; and so on with different occupations for one year after another.
At nine years old the father is allowed to punish his son for
disobedience, by sticking aloe-points all over his naked body, while
the daughters only have them stuck into their hands; and at eleven
years old, both boy and girl were to be punished by holding their faces
in the smoke of burning capsicums.

At fifteen the youth is married by the simple process of tying the
corner of his shirt to the corner of the bride's petticoat (thus
literally "splicing" them, as my companion remarked). And so on; after
scenes of cutting wood, visiting the temples, fighting and feasting, we
come to the last scene of all, headed "_seventy years_," and see an old
man and woman reeling about helplessly drunk with pulque; for
drunkenness, which was severely punished up to that age, was tolerated
afterwards as a compensation for the sorrows and infirmities of the
last period of life.

Astrological charts formed a large proportion of these
picture-writings. Here, as elsewhere, we may trace the origin of
astrology. The signs of the days and years were represented, for
convenience sake, by different animals, and objects, like the signs of
the Zodiac which we still retain. The signs remained after the history
of their origin was lost; and then--what more natural than to imagine
that the symbols handed down by their wise ancestors had some
mysterious meaning, connected with the days and years they stood for;
and then, that a man's destiny had to do with the names of the signs
that "prevailed" at his birth?

There is little to be seen here or elsewhere, of one kind of work in
which the Mexicans excelled perhaps more than in any other, the
goldsmith's work. Where are the calendars of solid gold and silver--as
big as great wheels, and covered with hieroglyphics, and the cups and
collars, the golden birds, beasts, and fishes? The Spaniards who saw
them record how admirable their workmanship was, and they were good
judges of such matters. Benvenuto Cellini saw some of these things, and
was filled with admiration. They have all gone to the melting-pot
centuries ago! How important the goldsmith's trade was accounted in old
times is shown by a strange Aztec law. It was no ordinary offence to
steal gold and silver. Criminals convicted of this offence were not
treated as common thieves, but were kept till the time when the
goldsmiths celebrated their annual festival, and were then solemnly
sacrificed to their god Xipe;[19] the priests flaying their bodies,
cooking and eating them, and walking about dressed in their skins, a
ceremony which was called _tlacaxipehualiztli_, "the man-flaying."

Museums of Mexican antiquities are so much alike, that, in general, one
description will do for all of them. Mr. Uhde's Museum at Heidelberg is
a far finer one than that at Mexico, except as regards the
picture-writings. I was astonished at the enormous quantity of stone
idols, delicately worked trinkets in various hard stones and even in
obsidian, terra-cotta tobacco-pipes, figures, and astronomical
calendars, &c., displayed there.

Mr. Christy's collection is richer than any other in small sculptured
figures from Central America. It contains a squatting female figure in
hard brown lava, like the one in black basalt which is drawn in
Humboldt's _Vues des Cordilleres_, and there called (I cannot imagine
why) an Aztec priestess. Above all, it contains what I believe to be
the three finest specimens of Aztec decorative art which exist in the
world. One of these is the knife of which the figure at page 101 gives
some faint idea, the other two being a wooden mask overlaid with
mosaic, and a human skull decorated in the same manner, of which a more
particular description will be found in the Appendix. There are two
kinds of Aztec articles in Mr. Christy's collection which I did not
observe either at Mexico or Heidelberg. These are bronze needles,
resembling our packing-needles, and little cast bronze bells, called
in Aztec _yotl_, not unlike small horse-bells made in England at the
present day; these are figured in the tribute-lists in the
picture-writings.

[Illustration: ANTIQUE BRONZE BELLS FROM MEXICO. _Such as are often
sculptured on Aztec Images._]

Apropos of the mammoth bones preserved in the Mexican Museum, I must
insert a quotation from Bernal Diaz. It is clear that the traditions of
giants which exist in almost every country had their origin in the
discovery of fossil bones, whose real character was not suspected until
a century ago; but I never saw so good an example of this as in the
Tlascalan tradition, which my author relates as follows.--"And they"
(the Tlascalan chiefs) "said that their ancestors had told them that,
in times past, there lived amongst them in settlements men and women of
great size, with huge bones; and, as they were wicked and of evil
dispositions, they (the ancestors of the Tlascalans) fought against
them and killed them; and those who were left died out. And that we
might see what stature they were of, they brought a bone of one of
them, and it was very big, and its height was that of a man of
reasonable stature; it was a thigh-bone, and I (Bernal Diaz) measured
myself against it, and it was as tall as I am, who am a man of
reasonable stature; and they brought other pieces of bones like the
first, but they were already eaten through and rotted by the earth; and
we were all amazed to see those bones, and held that for certain there
had been giants in that land; and our captain, Cortes, said to us that
it would be well to send the great bone to Castile, that His Majesty
might see it; and so we did send it by the first messengers who went."

Among other things belonging to the Spanish period is the banner, with
the picture of the Virgin, which accompanied the Spanish army during
the Conquest. Authentic or not, it is certainly very well painted.
There is a suit of armour said to have belonged to Cortes. Its
genuineness has been doubted; but I think its extreme smallness seems
to go towards proving that it is a true relic, for Bullock saw the tomb
of Cortes opened some thirty years ago, and was surprised at the small
proportions of his skeleton. Specimens of the pottery and glass now
made in the country, and other curiosities, complete the catalogue of
this interesting collection.

The Mexican calendar is not in the Museum, but is built into the wall
of the cathedral, in the Plaza Mayor. It is sculptured on the face of a
single block of basalt, which weighs between twenty and thirty tons,
and must have been transported thirty miles by Mexican labourers, for
the stone is not found nearer than that distance from the city; and
this transportation was, of course, managed by hand-labour alone, as
there were no beasts of burden.

We know pretty well the whole system of Mexican astronomy from this
calendar-stone and a few manuscripts which still exist, and from the
information given in the work of Gama the astronomer and other writers.
The Aztecs and Tezcucans who used it, did not claim its invention as
their own, but said they had received it from the Toltecs, their
predecessors. The year consisted of 365 days, with an intercalation of
13 days for each cycle of 52 years, which brought it to the same length
as the Julian year of 365 days 6 hours. The theory of Gama, that the
intercalation was still more exact, namely, 12-1/2 days instead of 13,
seems to be erroneous.

Our reckoning only became more exact than this when we adopted the
Gregorian calendar in 1752, and the people marched about the streets in
procession, crying "Give us back our eleven days!" Perhaps this is not
quite a fair way of putting the case, however, for the new style would
have been adopted in our country long before, had it not been a Romish
institution. It was the deliberate opinion of the English, as of people
in other Protestant countries, that it was much better to have the
almanack a few days wrong than to adopt a Popish innovation. One often
hears of the Papal Bull which settles the question of the earth's
standing still. The history of the Gregorian calendar is not a bad
set-off against it on the other side. At any rate, the new style was
not introduced anywhere until sixty or seventy years after the
discovery of Mexico, and five hundred years after the introduction of
the Toltec calendar in Mexico.

The Mexican calendar-stone should be photographed on a large scale, and
studied yet more carefully than it has been, for only a part of the
divided circles which surround it have been explained. It should be
photographed, because, to my certain knowledge, Mayer's drawing gives
the year, above the figure of the sun which indicates the date of the
calendar, quite wrongly; and yet, presuming on his own accuracy, he
accuses another writer of leaving out the hieroglyph of the winter
solstice. What is much more strange is, that Humboldt's drawing in the
small edition of the _Vues des Cordilleres_ is wrong in both points.
The drawing in Nebel's great work is probably the best. As to the wax
models which Mr. Christy and I bought in Mexico, in the innocence of
our hearts, a nearer inspection showed that the artist, observing that
the circle of days would divide more neatly into sixteen parts than
into twenty, had arranged his divisions accordingly; apparently leaving
out the four hieroglyphics which he considered the ugliest.

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