Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/362

338 Outside its few centres of learning and luxury, the numerous tribes under Montezuma's rule were dwellers in caves, living by the chase and in no way sharing in the benefits of the Aztec polity. In morals and manners, the Aztecs were inferior to the Toltecs, and though they adopted and continued the civilisation of their predecessors, they were devoid of their intellectual and artistic qualities, and turned their attention more to war and commerce as the surest means for riveting their supremacy on their neighbours. When Cortes arrived, Texcoco and Tlacopan, though still calling themselves independent, and ruled by sovereigns who held themselves co-equal with Montezuma, were rapidly sinking into a condition of vassalage. The Aztec religion was likewise of a militant order; it was polytheistic and readily admitted the gods of conquered or allied nations into its pantheon. Upon the milder cult of the older religious systems they had adopted, these devotees of the war-god speedily grafted their own horrible practices of human sacrifices, which augmented in number and ferocity until the temples became veritable charnel houses. With such a barbarous religious system draining their very life's blood, and a relentless despotism daily encroaching on their liberties, it is small wonder that Cortes was hailed as a liberator by the subject peoples of Mexico.

In the third chapter of his Historia Antigua, Don Manuel Orozco y Berra examines what he terms the two schools, the religious and the philosophical, whose teachings concerning the origin and early history of the Mexicans are based upon the interpretation of the ancient and authentic Mexican painting, now preserved in the National Museum in Mexico, and which came into the possession of the historian Ixtlilxochitl from his royal ancestors of Texcoco. The religious reading of this unique Chronicle (it is always Orozco y Berra who is my authority) sought to harmonise its chronology, and certain primitive events in the national history, with the biblical story, and all the early writers of this school, Carlos de Siguenza, Gemelli Careri, Clavigero, Veytia, and others, found in it an account of the creation, the flood, the tower of Babel, the dispersion of the nations, and other incidents of the mosaic records.

The philosophical school, of which Humboldt was the chief, following other lines, arrived, however, at a similar result, and connected the foundation of Mexico with the cessation of the deluge, and thus the problem of the origin of American races and animals was solved.

Don Fernando Ramirez, some time Curator of the Mexican National Museum, by showing the interpretation of both these schools to be mere illusions, demolished their conclusions, and interpreted the picture as merely representing the wanderings of the Mexicans in the valley itself, covering an area of about nine miles and a period of hardly more than 443 years, calculating from 1325 back to 882, the earliest chronological sign in the painting; while the water represented, is not the flood of but the neighbouring lake of Chalco.

The complex question of the relation in which the Maya and Toltec