Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/40

34 when found the characters were almost as fresh as when the ancient sculptors laid down their tools. It is built of immense blocks of porphyry put together with mortar. A stairway of fifty-seven steps leads to the top, which is sixty feet square. The stone facing of the sides is covered with hieroglyphics of serpents, crocodiles, and other emblems which remind one of the monuments of ancient Egypt. Some, indeed, have supposed that the builders of the old Mexican pyramids belonged to the same family of nations, and have even gone so far as to say that some of the work they left is as old as that of Egypt. Humboldt, who visited some of these ruins, traced their resemblance not only to Egyptian but to Assyrian architecture, and says of their decaying palaces, "They equaled those of ancient Greece and Rome in ornamentation."

About four hundred years passed away, and the Toltecs disappeared from Mexico; war, pestilence and famine did their work among these interesting people. They left accounts of their nation and polity in carefully written or pictured histories, some of which were extant when Cortez came; none of them can now be found. One of the early Aztec chieftains made a bonfire of some of these books, and the Spaniards, in their fanatical zeal to blot out all traces of heathenism, destroyed libraries of these and other valuable records which would now be worth more to the world than all the monkish legends that ever were written.

But there was much that could not be blotted out. The Aztec measurement of time—more perfect than any known to the Greeks and the Romans—was taught to them by these old astrologers, who seem to have known the precise length of the tropical year. The ingenious