Page:The Native Races of the Pacific States, volume 2.djvu/121

Rh that of Toltec, never was applied as a tribal or national designation proper to any people, while such people were living. It seems probable that among the Nahua peoples that occupied the country from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, a few of the leading powers appropriated to themselves the title Toltecs, which had been at first employed by the inhabitants of Tollan, whose artistic excellence soon rendered it a designation of honor. To the other Nahua peoples, by whom these leading powers were surrounded, whose institutions were identical but whose polish and elegance of manner were deemed by these self-constituted autocrats somewhat inferior, the term Chichimecs, barbarians, etymologically 'dogs,' was applied. After the convulsions that overthrew Tollan and reversed the condition of the Nahua nations, the 'dogs' in their turn assumed an air of superiority and retained their designation Chichimecs as a title of honor and nobility.

The names of the tribes represented as entering Anáhuac after the Chichimecs, but respecting the order of whose coming there is little agreement among authors, are the following: Matlaltzincas, Tepanecs, Acolhuas, Teo-Chichimecs (Tlascaltecs), Malinalcas, Cholultecs, Xochimilcas, Chalcas, Huexotzincas, Cuitlahuacs, Cuicatecs, Mizquicas, Tlahuicas, Cohuixcas, and Aztecs. Some of these, as I have said, may have entered the valley from the immediate north. Which these were I shall not attempt to decide, but they were nearly all of the same race and language, all lived under Nahua institutions, and their descendants were found living on and about the Aztec plateau in the sixteenth century, speaking, with one or two exceptions, the Aztec tongue.

In the new era of prosperity that now dawned on Anáhuac, Culhuacan, where some remnants even of the Toltec nobility remained, under Chichimec auspices regained to a great extent its old position as a centre of culture and power. Among the new nations