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The Sonora Tribes.

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with the vicinity of the sea, facilitated this important transition to a higher state. Had the arrival of Europeans in the New World been delayed one or two thousand years, the civilized people of Mexico and Yucatan might have entered into communication with the Appalachic and Caribbean nations, and perhaps civilizations might have grown up in the New World also, comparable to those which existed on our Mediterranean about the time of Herodotus.

(c) The Civilized Nations of North America and their Kinsmen. -In the review of the hunting nations of North America, the tribes of Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Mexico have been passed over. Nor do we now propose to give a dry list of names, which can be better understood on an ethnographical chart. But we must notice one important result of Buschmann's researches. He united a large number of New Mexican and North Mexican languages into a single family, which he named Sonora. He paid special attention to the phonetic system, the numerals, and the grammar of the Tarahumara, Tepeguana, Cora, and Cahita languages.77 All these possess common family features; all have more or less adopted a vocabulary from the Nahuatl. This is also the case with the language of the Moqui, who inhabit six of the famous "seven cities," or villages, north-west of Zuñi. Others allied in language to the Sonora family are the Utahs, Pah Utahs, the Diggers of California, and the Shoshons, or Snake Indians, which latter, before their expulsion by the Blackfeet, lived on this side of the Rocky Mountains, and now reside on the other side, on the Snake River, to which they have given their name. The Comantshes, the dreaded robber-tribes of Northern Mexico, also belong to this group. According to Maillard, they observe a division. of the year into eighteen months of twenty days; in other words, they use the Mexican calendar. Buschmann still leaves it doubtful if we are to regard the Sonora languages—which, moreover, differ widely from one another-as the further-developed branches of a single stock, a Nahuatl primordial language; but it is certain that they all show traces of close intercourse with the ancient Mexicans. Nahuatl, the language of the latter, was spoken in full

"Abhandlungen der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften. 1863.

purity only in and about the lake district of the Mexican highlands. But, as is proved by the Aztec names of places, Nahuatl languages were locally scattered at extraordinary distances. Thus, in the neighbourhood of the South Pacific, they pervaded Guatemala; they appear with ancient ruined temples in the Mexican style in Honduras, and extend southwards to the Lake of Nicaragua. They cease entirely at Costa Rica. In the north they are spread over the whole of the present Mexican empire, with the exception of Cohahuila. But they reappear in Texas, and end in New California at the 37th degree north latitude 78 with the exception of scattered names which have reached the 50th degree of latitude. It is far inland in latitude 35, among the present Zuñi of New Mexico, that we must look for Cibola, or the "Country of the Seven Communities,” discovered by Fra Marco, a monk from Nice, and shortly afterwards (in 1540) visited and described by the Spaniard Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. He found there small villages with stone houses, two or three storeys high, built like fortresses without an entrance, so that the roofs had to be mounted by ladders. The inhabitants cultivated maize and beans, reared turkeys, clothed themselves in woven stuffs, of which the threads were spun of some vegetable fibre that was not cotton, and wore head coverings exactly like those of the Aztecs of Mexico.79 The same style of architecture is yet retained among the so-called Pueblo Indians, and was last described and depicted by Möllhausen. The language of the Pueblo Indians is in no degree connected with the Nahuatl. Somewhat like these buildings were probably the so-called Casas Grandęs, southwards near the Gila and at Chihuahua, respecting whose inhabitants so much has been written just because as yet we know nothing about them. Civilized nations lived therefore to the north of Mexico as far as the 35th degree of latitude.

The partial community of vocabulary of the Nahuatlecs and the present Snake Indians, induces us to suppose that the former may in ancient times have resembled the Shoshons, for either the Shoshons turned to the north after their contact with the Nahuat

78 Buschmann, Astekische Ortsnamen. Berlin, 1853.
79 Coronado in Ramusio's Navigationi e viaggi,

80 Möllhausen, Reise nach der Südsee.

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lecs in the south, or else the Nahuatlecs originally lived with the Shoshons in the north before they emigrated to Mexico. After the power of their kinsmen, the Toltecs, had fallen, hordes of barbarians constantly invaded Mexico from the eleventh to the fourteenth century A.D. Among these were the Nahuatl Tlascaltecs, and the Nahuatl Aztecs. Both came from the north, that is to say, in the last instance, only from the north of the present Mexico; still it is enough that their migration was in a southerly direction. On their first appearance in Mexico, they are said to have been still very barbarous in comparison with the refined Toltecs, but this merely proves that they did not bring their highest civilization with them from their northerly home, but first developed it in the south, although at the time of the irruption they had reached a degree of culture about equal to that of the Casas Grandes on the Gila, or the City Indians of Cibola in the year 1540.

It is impossible to say, on the other hand, whether it was in the present Mexico, in Guatemala, in Honduras, or in Nicaragua, that the Toltecs first took up their abode. No one, however, has undertaken to prove that it was in Nicaragua, for the Aztec names of places in that district are probably derived from a later colonization, which is also the case with Honduras. In Guatemala, the seat of one of the oldest centres of civilization, in addition to names of Aztec extraction, there are names of places and local languages derived from another civilized nation, the Quiché, who are, again, linguistically allied to the Maya, their neighbours on the peninsula of Yucatan. At the time of the discovery, the social development of the Quiché and the Yucatecs was equal to that of Mexico. When the Toltecs enriched them with their civilization, they may already have raised themselves independently to a high grade of civilization. Contact with people as civilized as the Quiché and Maya certainly were, must have had a beneficial effect upon the Nahuatls when they came from the north. It is worth noting that Aztec names of places are totally wanting in Yucatan, which probably indicates that the Maya nations must have equalled the Nahuatls in the progress of culture, for colonies are always founded by preference among inferior nations.

In the empire of Mexico itself, besides Nahuatl, entirely different

languages were spoken by the Otomi, the Mixtecs, and Zapotecs, the Matlazincs and Tarascs.81

In South America all the civilized nations live either on the plateaux between the ridges of the Cordilleras or on the shores of the Pacific. Thus the empire of the Muysca, or more correctly of the Chibcha, grew up on the highlands of Bogotá on the right bank of the Magdalena River. Further south, as far as Chili, but keeping to the ridges of the plateaux, dwelt nations speaking kindred languages; namely, the so-called Quichua tribes in Quito and Peru, and on Lake Titicaca, the Colla, now better known under the name of Aymara, which has been erroneously attributed to them. These latter were formerly regarded as the most ancient civilized nation; their language was supposed to be the so-called court language of the Emperors of Peru,82 and the temples of the sun on Lake Titicaca were believed to be the earliest buildings of the civilized races of South America. Now, however, we must look for their earliest abode in Cuzco itself. The Cara, or inhabitants of Quito, who also spoke a Quichua dialect, were said to have ascended the River Esmeralda, and to have taken possession of the plateaux.83 They manufactured artistic works in cast gold,84 and also instruments of bronze, and, like the Peruvians, observed the beginning of the solstices on pillars of stone visible at a great distance.85 Entirely different from the Quichua nations are the Yunca tribes, who lived near the coast streams on the western slopes of the Andes, but were split up into locally separate states. They have left behind them innumerable remains of spacious buildings of comparatively high art, and they were in the habit of skillfully irrigating their land. 86 The Incas of Peru, without doubt,

81 Orozco y Berra, in his Geografia de las lenguas de Mexico (1864), has given a linguistic map of Mexico, the only good feature in the whole book, as the author openly confesses that he has not philologically examined the languages, and being also unacquainted with Buschmann's researches, spreads anew errors long exploded.

82

Thoroughly refuted by Markham, Journal of Royal Geographical Society, vol. xli. 1871.

83 Velasco, Histoire du royaume de Quito. Paris, 1840.

84 Benzoni, Mondo nuovo. Venice, 1565.

85 Joseph de Acosta, Historie natural y moral de las Indias. 86 Markham, as above.

Ancient Mexicans.

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must have learnt as much from them as they in their turn had to communicate.87

At the time of the emperors, the Rio' Maule formed the boundary between Peru and Chili. To the south lived the Araucanians and their kinsmen the Patagonians. In the present Chili these people called themselves Pehuenches, or the "Westerns;" from Valdivia to Terra del Fuego, Huilliches, or the "Southerns;" in Patagonia, Tehuellsches; and, lastly, on the pampas between the Rio Negro and La Plata, Pehuelches, or the "Easterns." The old Abipones and the present inhabitants of the Gran Chaco, the desert to the west of the Paraguay, were closely allied to them in intellect and manners. Both Araucanians and Patagonians in some degree partook of the benefits of the Inca-Peruvian civilization; 88 at any rate, they resemble the inhabitants of the plateaux much more than the hunting tribes of Brazil, even if they cannot be classed among the civilized nations.

To account for the advanced social conditions in ancient Mexico and in the empire of the Peruvian Incas, many who underrated the talents of the so-called Redmen, assumed that the best germs of civilization were carried by chance from the Old World to the New. Now it was Egyptians from the Platonic island of Atlantis, or at the time of the circumnavigation of Africa under Neku; now it was Carthaginians from the colonies on the coast of the present Morocco, who were said to have made their way to Brazil; now it was Northmen, who in their voyages of discovery reached the good "wine country" (Virginia) in Central America, and in the guise of Votan, the name of a hero or an idol of the Chiapanecs, the old northern Woden was detected; now it was said that Malay Polynesians, drifting from the South Sea, landed on the western shores of America; now it was imagined that descriptions of some parts of the New World might be recognized in Chinese records of an eastern land named Fusang. All these passing guesses were so ill-founded that they were easily refuted, and never obtained real credit.

87 Miguel Cavello Balboa (Histoire du Pérou) gives ancient lists of the sovereigns of Yucatan, with a sketch of their history.

88 The Quichua terms for the higher numbers had spread as far as the Pehuelches. D'Orbigny, L'homme américain.

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