Toltecs a Historic Nationality?

Were the Toltecs a Historic Nationality?

By Daniel G. Brinton, M.D.

(Read before the American Philosophical Society, Sept. 2, 1887.)

In the first edition of my Myths of the New World,^[1]published in 1868, I asserted that the story of the city of Tula and its inhabitants, the Toltecs, as currently related in ancient Mexican history, is a myth, and not history. This opinion I have since repeated in various publications,^[2] but writers on pre-Columbian American civilization have been very unwilling to give up their Toltecs, and here lately M. Charnay has composed a laborious monograph to defend them.^[3]

Let me state the question squarely.

The orthodox opinion is that the Toltecs, coming from the north (-west or -east), founded the city of Tula (about forty miles north of the present city of Mexico) in the sixth century A.D.; that their State flourished for about five hundred years, until it numbered nearly four millions of inhabitants, and extended its sway from ocean to ocean over the whole of Central Mexico;^[4] that it reached a remarkably high stage of culture in the arts; that in the tenth or eleventh century it was almost totally destroyed by war and famine;^[5] and that its fragments,

[1] Myths of the New World. By D. G. Brinton. Chap. vi, passim.

[2] Especially In American Hero Myths, a Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent, pp. 35, 64, 82, etc. (Philadelphia, 1882).

[3] M. Charnay, in his essay, La Civilisation Tolteque, published in the Revue d' Ethnographie, Tome iv, p. 281, 1885, states his thesis as follows: "Je veux prouver l'existence du Toltèque que certains ont niée; Je veux prouver que les civilisations Americaines ne sont qu'une seule et meme civilisation: enfin, je veux prouver que cette civilisation est toltèque." I consider each of these statements an utter error. In his Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde, M. Charnay has gone as far as to give a map showing the migrations of the ancient Toltecs. As a translation of this work, with this map, has recently been published in this country, it appears to me the more needful that the baseless character of the Toltec legend be distinctly stated.

[4] Ixtlilxochitl, in his Relaciones Historicas (In Lord Kingsborough's Antiquilies of Mexico, Vol. ix, p. 333), says that during the reign of Topiltzin, last king of Tula, the Toltec sovereignty extended a thousand leagues from north to south and eight hundred from east to west; and in the wars that attended its downfall five million six hundred thousand person were slain!!

[5] Sahagun (Hist. de la Nueva España, Lib. viii, cap. 5) places the destruction of Tula in the year 319 BC; Ixtlilxochitl (Historia Chichmeca, iii, cap. 4) brings it down to 969 AD; the Codex Ramirez (p. 25) to 1168; and so on. There is an equal variation about the date of founding the city.

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