Conquest of Mexico
feet of the crowds who have passed over it;1 a curious fact, suggesting inferences both in regard to the age and the population of the place. Lastly, we have authority for carrying back the date of many of these ruins to a certain period, since they were found in a deserted, and probably dilapidated state by the first Spaniards who entered the country. Their notices, indeed, are brief and casual, for the old Conquerors had little respect for works of art;2 and it is fortunate for these structures that they had ceased to be the living temples of the gods, since no merit of architecture probably, would have availed to save them from the general doom of the monuments of Mexico.
If we find it so difficult to settle the age of these buildings, what can we hope to know of their architects? Little can be gleaned from the rude people by whom they are surrounded. The old Tezcucan chronicler, so often quoted by me, the best authority for the traditions of his country, reports that the Toltecs, on the breaking up of their empire,—which he places earlier than most authorities, in the middle of the tenth century,—migrating from Anahuac, spread themselves over Guatemala, Tecuantepec, Campeachy, and the coasts and neighbouring isles on both sides of the Isthmus.3 This assertion, important, considering its source, is confirmed by the fact that several of the nations in that quarter adopted systems of astronomy and chronology, as well as sacerdotal institutions, very similar to the Aztecs,4, as we have seen, were also probably derived from the Toltecs, their more polished predecessors in the land.
If so recent a date for the construction of the American buildings be thought incompatible with this oblivion of their origin, it should be remembered how treacherous a thing is tradition, and how easily the links of the chain are severed. The builders of the pyramids had been forgotten before the time of the earliest Greek historians.5 The antiquary still disputes, whether the frightul inclination of that architectural miracle, the tower of Pisa, standing as it does, in the heart of a populous city, was the work of accident or design. And we have seen how soon the Tezcucans, dwelling amidst the ruins of their royal palaces, built just before the Conquest, had forgotten their history, while the more inquisitive traveller refers their construction to some remote period before the Aztecs.6
The reader has now seen the principal points of coincidence insisted on between the civilisation of ancient Mexico, and that of the eastern hemisphere. In presenting them to him, I have
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