Ajusco, of Xictli, and of the Sierra de Santa Catarina), described with so much precision by the Anales de Cuauhtitlan when it says that “the red rock boiled,” date from then.
Toward the year 700 the Toltecs were organized and elected a monarch, establishing themselves in a city to which they gave the name of another older one where they had lived in earlier times. There are reasons to believe that the first Tula, or at least the ancient place of origin of the people of Huemántzin, lay to the southeast, in the famous kingdom of the Quich’es of Chiapas, race with which the Ulmecas present more than one affinity, and the first noticed of which date back to about a thousand years B.C. Only the southern fertility and the opulent resources of that zone could engender in primitive times a culture such as that attained by that people. When the Toltecs established themselves on the Plateau, we must believe that they were already civilized. If by any chance, they came from the north on the last occasion, the origin of their culture must anyway have been in the southern districts. This is so much the more likely, since there are data of the fall of an empire in Yucatan toward the end of the sixth century A.D., which perhaps started the migration that appeared on the Plateau in 596.
The Toltec power ended about 1070-1116; but the capital elements of their civilization were transmitted to the surviving races, and at the time of the Spanish Conquest, the Acolhuas, Mexicans, Mayas, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, etc., etc., preserved them in greater or less degree. All accepted the same chronological system, which is the original and loftiest contribution of the aborigines to human culture; it is necessary to attribute it to a race which has served as trunk to the others, or which has at least, imposed its culture upon all. Tracing back in the traditions of the peoples most widely separated geographically and most foreign to each other in their languages (Cakchiquels, Mayas, Nahuas, etc.), the name of the Toltecs is always found. It is not impossible that these have received from the Ulmecas some elements of culture, which they developed until bringing them to their maximum flower and splendor; barring that they were the Ulmecas themselves.
Also, the various races, inhabitants of the ancient territory which today is Mexico, resembling each other in many characteristic qualities, reveal an extraordinary artistic tendency; in the greater number of cases they applied this skill to expressing the ideas of the theogony, the cosmogony, and principally of the astronomy and chronology
74
