Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/223

Rh MEXICO Mar riages. Funerals Agricul ture and food. Clothing and orna ments. Metal- work. their faces over burning chillis. The schools were extensive build ings attached to the temples, where from an early age boys and girls were taught by the priests to sweep the sanctuaries and keep up the sacred fires, to fast at proper seasons and draw blood for penance, and where they received moral teaching in long and verbose formulas. Those fit for a soldier s life were trained to the use of weapons and sent early to learn the hardships of war; children of craftsmen were usually taught by their fathers to follow their trade ; and for the children of nobles there was elaborate instruction in history, picture-writing, astrology, religious doctrines, and laws. Marriages depended much, as they do still in the East, on comparison of the horoscopes of the pair to ascertain if their birth-signs were com patible. Old women were employed as go-betweens, and the marriage ceremony was conducted by a priest who after moral exhortations united the young couple by tying their garments together in a knot, after which they walked seven times round the fire, casting incense into it ; after the performance of the marriage ceremony the pair entered together on a four days fast and penance before the marriage was completed. The funeral rites of the Mexicans are best seen in the ceremonies at the death of a king. The corpse laid out in state was provided by the priest with a jug of water for his journey, and with bunches of cut papers to pass him safely through each danger of the road the place where the two mountains strike together, the road guarded by the great snake and the great alligator, the eight deserts and the eight hills; they gave him garments to protect him from the cutting wind, and buried a little dog by his side to carry him across the nine waters. Then the royal body was invested in the mantles of his patron-gods, especially that of the war-god, for Mexican kings were warriors ; on his face was placed a mask of turquoise mosaic, and a green chalchihuite-stone as a heart between his lips. In older times the dead king was buried on a throne with his property and dead attendants round him. But after cremation came in a mourning procession of servants and chiefs carried the body to the funeral pyre to be burnt by the demon-dressed priests, after which the crowd of wives and slaves were exhorted to serve their lord faithfully in the next world, were sacrificed and their bodies burnt. Common people would not thus be provided with a ghostly retinue, but their simpler funeral ceremonies were as far as they went similar to those of their monarch. The staple food of the Mexicans before the conquest has continued with comparatively little change among the native race, and has even been adopted by those of European blood. Maize or Indian corn was cultivated on patches of ground where, as in the Hindu j&m, the trees and bushes were burnt and the seed planted in the soil manured by the ashes. A sharp-pointed planting stick, a wooden shovel, and a bronze-bladed hoe called a coatl were the simple implements. The Mexicans understood digging channels for _ irrigation, especially for the cultivation of the cacahuatl, from which they taught the Europeans to prepare the beverage chocollatl ; these native names passed into English as the words cacao, or cocoa, and chocolate. Other vegetables adopted from Mexico are the tomata (tomatl] and the chilli, used as flavouring to native dishes. The maize was ground with a stone roller on the grinding stone or mctlatl, still known over Spanish America as the mctatc, -and the meal baked into thin oval cakes called by Aztecs tlaxcalli, and by Spaniards tortilla, which resemble the chapati of India and the oat-cake of Scotland. The Mexicans were also skilful makers of earthen pots, in which were cooked the native beans called by the Spanish frijolcs, and the various savoury stews still in vogue. The juice extracted by tapping the great aloe before flowering was fermented into an intoxicating drink about the strength of beer, octli, by the Spaniards called pulque. Tobacco, smoked in leaves or cane-pipes or taken as snuff, was in use, especially at feasts. It is related that in old times Mexican clothing was of skins or woven aloe and palm fibre, but at the time of the conquest cotton was largely cultivated in the hot lands, spun with a spindle, and woven in a rudimentary loom without a shuttle into the mantles and breech-cloths of the men and the chemises and skirts of the women, garments often of fine texture and embroidered in colours. Ornaments of gold and silver, and jewels of polished quartz and green chalchihuite were worn, not only the ears and nose but the lips being pierced for ornaments. The artificers in gold and silver melted the metals by means of a reed-blowpipe and cast them solid or hollow, and were also skilled in hammered work and chasing, as some fine specimens remain to show, though the famous animals modelled with gold and silver fur, feathers, and scales have disappeared. Iron was not known, but copper and tin ores were mined, and the metals com bined into bronze of much the same alloy as in the Old World, of which hatchet blades and other instruments were made, though their use had not superseded that of obsidian and other sharp stone flakes for cutting, shaving, &c. Metals had passed into a currency for trading purposes, especially quills of gold-dust and T-shaped pieces of copper, while cocoa-beans furnished small change. The vast size of the market-squares with their surrounding porticos, and the importance of the caravans of merchants who traded with other nations, show that mercantile had risen into some proportion to military interests. Nor was the wealth and luxury of Mexico and Art and surrounding regions without a corresponding development of art. pastime. The stone sculptures such as that remaining of Xochicalco, which is figured by Humboldt, as wejl as the ornamented woodwork, feather- mats, and vases, are not without artistic merit. The often-cited poems attributed to Nezahualcoyotl may not be quite genuine, but at any rate poetry had risen above the barbaric level, while the mention of ballads among the people, court odes, and the chants of temple choirs would indicate a vocal cultivation above that of the instrumental music of drums and horns, pipes and whistles, the latter often of pottery. Solemn and gay dances were frequent, and a sport called the bird-dance excited the admiration of foreigners for the skill and daring with which groups of performers dressed as birds let themselves down by ropes wound round the top of a high mast, so as to fly whirled in circles far above the ground. The ball-game of the Mexicans, called tlachtli, was, like tennis, the pas time of princes and nobles ; special courts were built for it, and the ball of india-rubber (perhaps the first object in which Europeans became acquainted with this valuable material) might not be touched by the hands, but was driven against the walls by blows of the knee or elbow, shoulder or buttock. The favourite game ofpatolli has been already mentioned for its similarity to the pachisi of modern India. The accounts given by Spanish writers of the Central Americans Ceiitrul- in their state after the Spanish conquest are very scanty in com- American parison with the voluminous descriptions of Aztec life. They bring culture, out perfectly, however, the fact of close connexion between the two civilizrtions. Some Central- American peoples were actually Mexican in their language and culture, especially the Pipils of Guatemala and a large part of the population of Nicaragua, but these were descend ants of Aztecs or allied peoples who in the comparatively modern times of Aztec power invaded and colonized these distant countries (see Buschmann, Aztck. Ortsnamcn, viii., ix.). With regard to the Central-American nations proper, especially the Mayas of Yucatan and the Quiches of Guatemala, who dwelt in the cities and wor shipped in the temples of Chichen-Itza and Uxmal, Falenque and Copan, the problem of Aztec connexion is deeper and obscurer. How closely related these nations were in institutions to the Mexicans appeal s, not only in their using the same peculiar weapons, such as the spear-thrower and the toothed club or maquahuitl, but in the similarity of their religious rites, such as drawing blood from their bodies as an act of penance, and sacrificing human victims by cutting open the breast and tearing out the heart; the connexion is evident in such special points as the ceremony of marriage by tying together the garments of the couple, or in holding an offender s face over burning chillis as a punishment ; the native legends of Central America make mention of the royal ball-play, which was the same as the Mexican game of tlachtli already mentioned. At the same time many of the Central-American customs differed from the Mexican ; thus in Yucatan we find the custom of the youths sleeping in a great bachelor s house, an arrangement common in various parts of the world, but not in Mexico ; the same remark applies to the Maya exogamous law of a man not taking a wife of his own family name (see Diego de Landa, Relation de Yucatan, cd. Brasseur de Bourbourg, p. 140), which does not correspond with Mexican custom. We have the means of comparing the personal appearance of the Mexicans and Central Americans by their por traits on early sculptures, vases, &c. ; and, though there does not appear any clear distinction of race-type, the extraordinary back- sloping foreheads of such figures as those of the bas-reliefs of Palenque prove that the custom of flattening the skull in infancy prevailed in Central America to an extent quite beyond any such habit in Mexico. It is from the ruined cities now buried in the Central- American forests that we gain the best information as to the nations who built them. The notion sometimes propounded that these famous cities were of great antiquity and the work of extinct nations has no solid evidence ; some of them may have been already aban doned before the conquest, but others were inhabited, and by the ancestors of the Indians who now build their mean huts and till their patches of maize round the relics of the grander life of their ancestors. In comparing these ruins through the districts of Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Honduras, it is evident that, though they are not the work of a single nation, but of two or more highly distinct in language, yet these nations had the great bond of a common system of pictorial or written characters. One speci men of a Central-American inscription may give a general idea of them all, whether it be from the sculptured facade of a temple sketched by Catherwood, or from the painted deerskin called the Dresden Codex (reproduced in Kingsborough), or from the chapter of Diego de Landa where he professes to explain and translate the characters themselves. These consist of combinations effaces, circles, lines, &c., arranged in compartments in so complex a manner that hardly two are found alike. How they conveyed their meaning, how far they pictorially represented ideas or spelt words in the different languages of the country, is a question not yet answered in a complete way; Landa s description (p. 320) gives a table of a number of their elements as phonetically representing letters or syllables, but, though there may be a partial truth in his rules, they