1887.] 229 [Brinton. 



Were the Toltecs an Historic Nationality ? 



By Daniel G. Brinton^ 3I.D. 



{Read before the American PhilosopJiical Society, Sept. 2, 1S87.) 



In the first edition of my Myths of the New World,* published 

 in 1868, 1 asserted that the story of the city of Tula and its 

 inhabitants, the Toltecs, as currently related in ancient Mexican 

 history, is a myth, and not history. This opinion 1 have since 

 repeated in various publications,t but writers on pre-Columbian 

 American civilization have been very imwilling to give up their 

 Toltecs, and here lately M. Charnay has composed a laborious 

 monograph to defend them.| 



Let me state the question squarely. 



The orthodox opinion is that the Toltecs, coming from the 

 north (-west or -east), founded the cit}"- of Tula (about forty 

 miles north of the present city of Mexico) in the sixth century 

 A.D. ; that their State flourished for about five hundred years, 

 until it numbered nearly four millions of inhabitants, and 

 extended its sway from ocean to ocean over the whole of Cen- 

 tral Mexico ; § that it reached a remarkably high stnge of culture 

 in the arts ; that in the tenth or eleventh century it was almost 

 totally destroj^ed by war and famine ; || and that its fragments, 



* Myths of the New World. By D. G. Brinton. Chap, vi, passim. 



t Especially in American Hero Myths, a Study in the Native Religions of the Western Con- 

 tinent, pp. 35, 64, 82, etc. (Philadelphia, 1882). 



X M. Charnay, in his essay. La Civilisation Tolteqm, published in the Sevue d'Ethno- 

 graphie, Tome iv, p. 281, 1885, states his thesis as follows: "Jo veux prouver I'existence 

 du Tolti^qne que certains ont uii'e ; je veux prouver que les civilisations Americaines ne 

 sont qu'une seule et mome civilisation ; enfin, je veux prouver que cettc civilisation est 

 toltC'que." I consider each of these statements an utcer error. In his Anciames Villes 

 d?t Nouveau Monde, >!. Charnay has gone so far as to give a map showing the migrations 

 of the ancient Toltecs. As a translation of this work, with this map, has recently been 

 published in this country, it appears to me the more needful that the baseless character 

 of the Toltec legend be di.stiiictly stated. 



§ Ixtlilxochitl, in his Jiclariones Historicas {in Lord Kingsborough's Antiquities of 

 Mexico, Vol. ix, p. 333), says that during the reign of Topiltzin, liist king of Tula, the 

 Toltec sovereignty extended a thousand leagues from north to south and eight hundred 

 from east to west ; and in the wars that attended its downfall five million six hundred 

 thousand persons were slain ! ! 



II Sahagun (Hist, de la Nuet^a Fspaiia, Lib. viii, cap. 5) places the destruction of Tula in 

 the year 319 B. C. ; Ixtlilxochitl (Historia Chichmera, iii, cap. 4) ))rings it down to 969 

 A. D. ; the Codex Ramirez (p. 25) to 1168 ; and so on. There is an equal variation about 

 the date of founding the city. 



