On his part, the canon Ordóñez de Aguiar, to whom are due the most trustworthy data which we possess upon the ancient inhabitants of Chiapas, stated at a little less than a thousand years before the vulgar era the apparition of the Quich'es, a people mysterious until the present, in whom, however, we are not the first to suggest affinities with the Ulmecas. Brasseur de Bourbourg discovered many most interesting things. With the establishment of the Toltec monarchy or some analogous event of importance, such as the regulation of the chronology, we have seen that the period called the fourth age of the world began.
Very well, if the third age began 1,664 years before that event, its commencement dates from the year 964 B.C. Ordóñez has discovered in the traditions of Chiapas, that "almost a thousand years" before our era, took place the apparition, and began in our territories the migrations, of the Quich'es. Brasseur de Bourbourg, with data from the codices, indicates the coming of the Ulmecas in the Plateau in the year 955 B.C., a date admitted by Chavero in relation to the Vixtoti, who were fundamentally the same people; then is "when the sun began to divide the lands between men." There is but nine years' difference from 964.
We shall have to infer that the Ulmecas and the Quich'es were the same people, which explains to us the arrival of the first from the east. Some circumstance set them in movement about a thousand years before our era, and about the year 964 or 955 they began to show themselves in the high table-land of Anahuac, coming from the direction of the Gulf, as all the traditions assert. It is necessary to admit the probability that they constructed the first pyramids and other monuments, as legend persistently claims. Sahagún, Torquemada, and various chroniclers collected the story from the lips of the Indians, and in our own days Bishop Plancarte y Navarrette urges it with powerful arguments. Also Waldeck, Lenoir, and Orozco y Berra indicate the event as a thing about three thousand years past.
Somewhere about the year 596 of the vulgar era, date suggested by Clavijero, there appeared on the Plateau, or at least began their movement, the advance guards of the Toltec migration. The best documents, the Anales de Cuauhtitlan among them, agree that the land was then occupied by the Ulmecas. Some grave event, perhaps the last manifestations of volcanic activity, developed at the time, principally in the valley of Mexico, permitting the newcomers to witness the last ruins of the catastrophe in the regions which had been occupied
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