Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 23, 2024
According to these writings, the country where the ruins are found was occupied in successive periods by three distinct peoples, the Chichimecs, the Colhuas, and the Toltecs or Nahuas. The Toltecs are said to have come into the country about a thousand years before the Christian era.
Virginia and Roderick, having made their hazardous way down the cliffs and to their horses in silence, found their tongues loosened as they rode westward in the soft dawn. Virginia put her questions and he, as best he could, answered them. She asked eagerly of the old cliff-dwellers and he shrugged his shoulders. Aztecs, were they? Toltecs? What? Quien sabe!
China and Japan are, at this late day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas, have given absolutely nothing which the world cared to accept. But this does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced.
If the Toltecs and our Mound-Builders were the same people, they probably went from Mexico and Central America to the Valley of the Mississippi at a very remote period, as Colhuan colonies, and after a long residence there returned so much changed in speech and in other respects as to seem a distinct people. The Aztecs appear to have dwelt obscurely in the south before they rose to power.
The latter retreated back to Mexico, that their fathers had left ages before, and were the ancient Toltecs. Later on, the Aztecs, who were the southern branch of the ancient Mexicans, invaded Mexico from the south, and supplanted the Toltecs.
They introduced the cultivation of maize and cotton, constructed extensive irrigating ditches, built roads, and were a progressive race. "But where is the country," asks Humboldt, "from which the Toltecs and Mexicans issued?" They were well housed, and even elegantly clothed, maintained public schools, and commemorated passing events by elaborate sculpture and by picture-writing.
We were kind of anxious about the bridge, being afraid the Toltecs would get it back into place; but the girl, who called herself Ezela, showed us that getting the bridge back wasn't possible without help from our side. She said that the priest she'd dumped down into the canyon was the only one with the tribe at the time; the others had gone to a distant village.
They had cities and large towns; and dwelling-houses, built of timber and covered with thatch, like those common in England, were scattered over all the rural districts. Some of the cities now found in ruins were then inhabited. This peninsula had been the seat of an important feudal monarchy, which arose probably after the Toltecs overthrew the very ancient kingdom of Xibalba.
Cholula has one grand antiquity, which even the ruthless finger of Time has made little impression upon, being the remains of one of those remarkable earth-pyramids which was probably built by the Toltecs; though how they could erect a mountain without beasts of burden is an endless puzzle.
Just here, before the ethnologist arises to correct me, let it be put on record that the Taos people do not consider themselves Indians. They claim descent rather from the Aztecs, or Toltecs of the South. While the Navajo and Apache and Ute legends are of a great migration from Athabasca of the North, the pueblo legend is of a coming from the Great Underworld of the South.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking