CONCLUSION 



Defective and incomplete as they now are, these paintings of Mitla, 

 taken as a whole, present an important document. They are, up to 

 the present day, the only known picture writings of mythologic con- 

 tent, whose origin has been indisiDutably established, that date from 

 ancient heathen times. Since these paintings show in the style of 

 the figures and the subjects of the representations an unmistakable 

 relationship to the Borgian codex, it follows that this large, beau- 

 tifully and brilliantly executed, manuscript can not have origi- 

 nated far from the place where the designers of the frescoes of 

 Mitla received their inspiration, their knowledge, and their skill 

 in art. This place can not well have been the Zapotec country 

 itself, for, Avhile the deity, or the deities, who occupy the most 

 prominent place in these picture writings, doubtless played an impor- 

 tant part in the priest lore and the philosophy of the Zapotecs, 

 it seems that, with the exception of the idol of Teotitlan, they were 

 by no means true national forms. On the other hand, these picture 

 writings contain a large number of elements which point to ideas and 

 customs recorded precisely of the Zapotecs, but which are com- 

 pletely, or almost completely, lacking in the centers of political power 

 belonging to the Nahua tribes of later times, as well as among the 

 Mayas. It seems, therefore, that we ought not to seek the place 

 which produced and spread this culture very far from the Zapotec 

 country. I believe that these picture writings are tangible evidences 

 pointing to the idea we ought to form of the Toltecs, whose name has 

 been so often mentioned and so much abused, for they were neither 

 mere mythical forms dwelling in a fantastic region beyond the clouds 

 nor the inhabitants of a single small city, least of all an exotic civil- 

 ized race that spread over the Avhole American continent, coming 

 from the primal Asiatic home of man, lying somewhere near the 

 biblical paradise. As Father Sahagun's authority emphatically de- 

 clares, the Toltecs, or their descendants, spoke Nahuatl; yet they 

 were not the Nahua tribes of the highlands, those who later obtained 

 predominant political power, but the Nahua tribes who lived in the 

 coast region as neighbors of the Mixtec-Zapotec and the Maya tribes, 

 and who, in and by means of this contact, in active peaceful inter- 

 course with the other tribes, developed the calendar and the philoso- 

 phy connected with and emanating from it, which embraced their 

 own deities and those of other tribes, a calendar and philosophy 

 which afterward became, to a certain extent, the common property 

 of all the civilized peoples of ancient Mexico. 

 324 



