THE ANCIENT ZAPOTEC COUNTRY 



Only very scant information has come down to us concerning the 

 ancient Zapotec country. The Mexicans were evidently very little 

 in touch with its inhabitants. Not even the name of the Zapotecs is 

 mentioned in any one of the lists of nations which were compiled by 

 the historians of ancient Mexico. There were always other tribes 

 between them and the Mexicans, and these bounded the ethnic horizon, 

 at least from the current Mexican point of view : nor did the other- 

 wise well-informed Mexican who gave Father Sahagun an account 

 " of all the tribes which came into this country to settle here " men- 

 tion the Zapotecs. He gives a detailed account of the tribes adjacent 

 to the Mexicans, and gives very interesting information concerning 

 some of the northern nations, but of the southern he mentions ex- 

 pressly only the Couixca, Tlapaneca, and Yopi. All the rest appear 

 to be classed under the head of nations " living at the rising of the 

 sun ", whom he designates as Olmeca TJixtotin Mixteca, and also as 

 Olmeca TJixtotin Nonoualca, or simply as Anahuaca, " maritime 

 people ". 



The great trading expeditions first brought the Mexicans in touch 

 with the Zapotec tribes, and these expeditions were directed first and 

 foremost to the Atlantic tierra caliente. Tuxtepec, on the Rio 

 Papaloapan, was the first large trading post. The next points to be 

 reached were Tabasco and Xicalango. The latter was the great cen- 

 ter where the merchants assembled from all parts of the Central 

 American world and from which led the commercial highways to 

 Chiapas, Soconusco, and Guatemala, up the Usumacinta, and across 

 the country to the Golfo Dulce and to Honduras, finally northward 

 by way of Champoton and Campeche to the more thickly populated 

 portions of the peninsula of Yucatan. The Mexican merchants seem 

 already to have found the road to Xicalango in early times and to 

 have made use of it. Perhaps they even pressed on farther from that 

 point at an early period. The various swarms of Mexican popula- 

 tion which w^e find diffused far toward the south, almost to the Isth- 

 mus, appear to have taken this route. It was not until a compara- 

 tively late date, however — and for this there exists positive proof — that 

 the Mexicans succeeded in pushing forward to the Pacific tierra 

 caliente, the fertile plains of Tehuantepec, the region of Zapotec 

 expansion, and then only after the partial subjugation of the Zapotec 

 tribes by the united strength of the states of the Mexican table-land. 



At an early period, when Mexican commerce was directed mainly 

 to the Atlantic tierra caliente, a permanent Mexican settlement was 

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