Page:The Native Races of the Pacific States, volume 2.djvu/135



traditions of several of the most advanced nations point to a wide-spread civilization introduced among a numerous and powerful people by Votan and Zamná, who, or their successors, built the cities referred to, and founded great allied empires in Chiapas, Yucatan and Guatemala; and moreover, the tradition is confirmed by the universality of one family of languages or dialects spoken among the civilized nations, and among their descendants to this day. I deem the grounds sufficient, therefore, for accepting this Central American civilization of the past as a fact, referring it not to an extinct ancient race, but to the direct ancestors of the peoples still occupying the country with the Spaniards, and applying to it the name Maya as that of the language which has claims as strong as any to be considered the mother tongue of the linguistic family mentioned. As I have said before, the phenomena of civilization in North America may be accounted for with tolerable consistency by the friction and mixture of this Maya culture and people with the Nahua element of the north; while that either, by migrations northward or southward, can have been the parent of the other within the traditionally historic past, I regard as extremely improbable. That the two elements were identical in their origin and early development is by no means impossible; all that we can safely presume is that within historic times they have been practically distinct in their workings.

There are also some rather vague traditions of the first appearance of the Nahua civilization in the regions of Tabasco and Chiapas, of its growth, the gradual establishment of a power rivalling that of the people I call Mayas, and of a struggle by which the Nahuas were scattered in different directions, chiefly northward, to reappear in history some centuries later as the Toltecs of Anáhuac. While the positive evidence in favor of this migration from the south is very meagre, it must be admitted that a southern origin of the Nahua culture is far more consistent with fact and