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All who have seen them speak much as Dupaix speaks of the perfection of the masonry, the admirable design and finish of the work, and the beauty of the decorations. Their beauty, says M. Charnay, can be matched only by the monuments of Greece and Rome in their best days. One fact presented by some of the edifices at Mitla has a certain degree of historical significance.
She has been in Mexico City for a few days, having just returned from Mitla, where she met Professor Northrop. It is rumored that Professor Northrop has succeeded in smuggling out of the country a very important stone bearing an inscription which, I understand, is of more than ordinary interest.
Those who have sought to discredit what is told of the Aztec civilization and the empire of Montezuma have never failed to admit fully the significance of Copan, Palenque, and Mitla.
Such hard copper axes as these have been found at Mitla, in the State of Oajaca, where the ruined temples seem to form a connecting link between the monuments of Teotihuacán and Xochicalco and the ruined cities of Yucatan and Chiapas. We want one more link in the chain to show the use of the same kind of tools from Mexico down to Yucatan, and this link we can supply.
My friend Bandelier, in the course of his admirable analysis of the ruins at Mitla, has made clear to me how easy it is to attribute to scientific knowledge work that is the result only of manual skill.
And for the whole we paid the regular price of eighty-seven centavos twenty-five each for the animals, and twelve centavos for the man something less than the twenty pesos demanded the day before at Tehuacan. The evening we were at Mitla, Señor Quiero came hurrying to our room and urged us to step out to the corridor before the house to see some Mixes.
When the padre knew of our disappointment, he hastened to his prelate, told him that an eminent American archaeologist, with a party of four, wished to visit Mitla, but had no interpreter; might he not accompany these worthy gentlemen, in some way serving mother church by doing so?
At first a trip was made, by horse, from Oaxaca into the Mixteca Alta, where Mixtecs and Triquis were studied. Again starting from Oaxaca, we traveled over our old trails of 1896, through the mountains to Tehuantepec, returning by the high-road in common use. Zapotecs were studied at Mitla and Tehuantepec, and the Mixes, Juaves, and Chontals in various towns and villages.
We slept on beds, made of boards laid upon sawhorses, in a grain store-room, where rats were running around all night long. The next day, we were again at Mitla. It was a festival day, that of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle. In the evening there were rockets, the band played, and a company of drummers and chirimiya blowers went through the town.
Their skill in architecture and architectural ornamentation did not enable them to build such cities as Mitla and Palenque, and their “picture writing” was a much ruder form of the graphic art than the phonetic system of the Mayas and Quichés. It does not appear that they ever went so far in literary improvement as to adopt this simpler and more complete system for any purpose whatever.
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