Toltecs a Historic Nationality?

escaping in separate colonies, carried the civilization of Tula to the south, to Tabasco (Palenque), Yucatan, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Quetzalcoatl, the last ruler or Tula, himself went to the south-east, and reappears in Yucatan as the culture-hero Cukulkan, the traditional founder of the Maya civilization.

This, I say, is the current opinion about the Toltecs. It is found in the works of Ixtlilxochitl, Veitia, Clavigero, Prescott, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Orozco y Berra, and scores of other reputable writers. The dispersion of the Toltecs has been offered as the easy solution of the origin of the civilization not only of Central America, but of New Mexico and the Mississippi valley.^[6]

The opinion that I oppose to this, and which I hope to establish in this article, is as follows:

Tula was merely one of the towns built and occupied by that tribe of the Nahuas known as Azteca or Mexica, whose tribal god was Huitzilopochtli, and who finally settled at Mexico-Tenochtitlan (the present city of Mexico); its inhabitants were called Toltecs, but there was never any such distinct tribe or nationality; they were merely the ancestors of this branch of the Azteca, and when Tula was destroyed by civil and foreign wars, these survivors removed to the valley of Mexico and became merged with their kindred; they enjoyed no supremacy, either in power or in the arts; and the Toltec "empire" is a baseless fable. What gave them their singular fame in later legend was partly the tendency of the human mind to glorify the "good old times" and to merge ancestors into divinities, and especially the significance of the name Tula, "the Place of the Sun," leading to the confounding and identification of a half-forgotten legend with the ever-living light-and-darkness myth of the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca.

To support this view, let us inquire what we know about Tula as an historic site.

Its location is on one at the great ancient trails leading from

[6] Since writing the above I have received from the Comte de Charencey a reprint of his article on Xibalba, in which he sets forth the theory of the late M. L. Angrand, that all ancient American civilization was due to two "currents" of Toltecs, the western, straight-headed Toltecs, who entered Anahuac by land from the north-west, and the eastern, flat-headed Toltecs, who came by sea from Florida. It is to criticize such a vague theorizing that I have written this paper.

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