MEXICAN HISTORY AND ARCHEOLOGY. 31 



If we leave the interior of this building, we may now obtain an accurate and 

 excellent idea of its outside from the minute drawings of Mr. Sawkins, in Plate 

 No. 2. It is a monument which cannot fail to strike the student of American 

 architectural archa3ology as being the first effort of the aborigines that not only 

 abandons the vertical and pyramidal, but absolutely reverses the latter, and, at the 

 same time, indulges in a style of elaborate and regular adornment which far sur- 

 passes many remains of Etruscan art, and may almost be said to resemble the 

 Greek. These exteriors have been constructed with great labor as well as in- 

 genuity. Above the ground, the building, — whose interior wall is formed of adobes, 

 or sun-dried bricks, — is cased, for about five feet, with a pyramidal base of stone 

 slabs about two inches thick ; and, from this point, the walls, still of stone, and 

 sharply cut, begin to incline outwards till they reach a height of near twenty-five 

 feet. Each of the seven exterior walls, as seen in Plate 2, is divided into nine 

 compartments, corresponding with the sepulchral recesses or vaults we noticed on 

 the interior. From the point where the walls strike outwards from the perpen- 

 dicular, all the comers and divisions appear to be formed by stouter stones than the 

 slabs which encase the base. The bands, which are the frames, as it were, of each 

 of these sixty-three divisions, are all of solid stone, cleanly and sharply chiselled ; 

 while the ornamental figures contained in the squares are formed by a Mosaic work 

 of small square stones, artistically placed beside each other, in high relief, and 

 imbedded in a mass of adamantine cement, similar to that which covers the inte- 

 rior walls. The spectator who looks at one end of this singular building, with its 

 basket-like outline and beautiful adornments, might almost fancy that he stood in 

 front of a gigantic sarcophagus, designed and sculptured in advanced periods of 

 Grecian and Roman art. 1 



About half a mile west of these ruins, Mr. Sawkins found a large, dark red, 

 porphyritic column, which, for the sake of illustration, he has taken the liberty to 

 represent in Plate No. 2, as lying near the edifice. It had probably been carried 

 off from the building by some vandals, and abandoned before they could devote it 

 to their private uses. The artist states that the marks of the chisel or chipping 

 tool are still visible on this column, and remarks that many blocks, from these and 

 other edifices of the valley, were employed in building the church which is seen in 

 Plate No. 1. To the southwest, near the point indicated in the picture by the 

 union of the three hills with the plain, Mr. Sawkins saw the ruins of many other 

 edifices, but all were so dilapidated that nothing could be made out. Wherever 

 he detected the remains of cement or mortar, either on the roads, in the open air, or 

 on walls, he found it still perfectly hard and serviceable, and but little injured 

 either by time or attrition. There seems to have been a great fondness among the 

 Zapotecs for red, and it is alleged that a color, which is so unpicturesque in archi- 

 tecture, seems to have been plentifully distributed over the exterior as well as the 

 interior of the remarkable edifice we have been considering. 



Plate No. 3 exhibits the characteristics of the image-remains of the Zapotecs. 



1 Humboldt says that the walls extend, on a line, about forty metres, and are five or six high : a 

 metre, in round numbers, is 39/ English inches. 



