Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/52

 traditions, and the chronology of that so long mysterious race. The so-called Aztec Calendar, which would better be called the Toltec Calendar, is the expression par excellence of the culture of the subjects of Huemántzin, worthy hieroglyph of the people who left to posterity renown of artistic and wise. Here could not be met a higher condensation of beauty and of genius! There is no necessity of a better argument to prove that that race, inventor of the astronomical religion and of the worship of the beautiful twin (Quetzalcóatl), who was in reality but the morning and the evening star, had a real existence and was not a myth as has been suggested. Here is, at last, basis for the first chapter of the uncertain and so many times discussed history of the aboriginal civilizations.

But we have to subject to a rigorous study the possibility certainly not weak, that the Aztecs have been the constructors. Before all, we ought to ask ourselves: Would it be possible that the subjects of Ilhuicamina or of Axayácatl would have worked with exquisite elegance and art a stone which contains the expression of the science and traditions of another people? Although remarkable, the case is not absurd, considering that it treated of the science, traditions, and calendar, fully admitted by the nation, which they considered as the fountain of all their culture. We yet preserve the Greek Zodiac in such wise that an Athenian of the time of Hipparchus, if he were to live again, would be astonished to see in plates and maps the conception of the heavens which his contemporaries had.

But it cannot be believed that the Aztecs would fall to leave some trace, some mark, some date peculiar to themselves in a work of such an extraordinary kind. If investigators do not succeed in discovering something characteristic, some datum definitely Aztec, it will have to be decidedly admitted that, encountered where the monolith was, the Mexi limited themselves to transporting it to Tenochtitlan, erecting it in a site adequate to its merit (and the Aubin Codex, in its first pages, narrates something which might lend support to the conjecture).

We have minutely examined the monument, and we shall honestly say what appears, without claiming certainty, in so difficult a point. That it expresses Toltec ideas and dates is for us indisputable; but it is possible to admit that the Tenochca should have engraved the same fundamental ideas upon a relief, adding some date of their own, and this is what we desire that the reader shall infer from our study, limiting ourselves to presenting the elements of the analysis. The