Overview

Ancient Mexico, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, built upon an island situated in a great highland lake, the scene of the almost incredible exploits of Cortés, has long been familiar as a name to the western world. The story of the fall of Aztec civilization before the Spanish invaders has deservedly won a great hold upon popular imagination. Moreover, the existence of Aztec civilization, an organized empire with cities built of stone and rich in gold and gems, burst upon the Old World as a thing almost beyond belief. The purpose of the present work is to afford some connected account of this pre-Spanish culture, and to correlate the accounts of eyewitnesses and early visitors with the material remains which the investigations of later times have revealed. But in order to obtain a proper view of Mexican culture it is necessary to transcend the limits of Mexico itself. In the country to the south and east, in Guatemala and northern Honduras, are the remains of ruined buildings which are, both architecturally and artistically, superior to those of Mexico proper, and which had been deserted before the coming of the Spaniards. These were the work of the Maya, a people whose name is far less familiar to the general public than that of the Aztec, but who evolved a culture of their own when the Aztec were yet primitive nomadic hunters, and who furnished the latter people with the materials for that civilization which so astonished the followers of Cortés.

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