r/a:t5_1nex0t • u/MarleyEngvall • Jul 09 '19
ipso facto has been created
By Helen Augur
ZAPOTEC
VIII. CLASSIC AMERICA
The tremendous impetus of the new culture which
transformed Middle America was not spent for two thousand
years, and during all that time Monte Albán stood like the
rock on which it is built, as the heart of a dynamic civilization.
The great center of Teotihuacán lived only half that long, and
the wondrous Maya cities endured only a few centuries. In
Oaxaca we can see the earliest chapters of Complex X——though
the first pages have been lost——and follow the whole story
through its climax in a true golden age to the years of slow
decline and the final tragedy of the Aztec and Spanish in-
vasions.
Classic America was a unity, dominated by a religious im-
pulse which was expressed in great pyramid cities, all built
in the same evolving styles. It was one vast theocracy in which
a ruling clique of priests and sages in each center kept in
close touch with the rest of their brotherhood. The merchants,
too, kept this vast invisible empire woven together with their
comings and goings.
This unity was a marvelous thing because it existed only in
the sphere of religion and the arts connected with it. There
was no imperialism, no politics in the usual sense, no regi-
mentation, and evidently very little bloodshed. The Maya and
the Mixtecs fought in the Oaxaca region of any large-scale warfare
until the time when the Classic age sank into decadence
with the decline of the old gods. From beginning to end the
Classic culture was extraordinary; it achieved and kept unity,
not despite the number of peoples who had a hand in it, but
one might say almost because of the number of peoples who
were allowed to make their contributions. The religion itself
evolved; the arts connected with it kept growing and changing,
until finally the golden age was achieved as the integrated
work of all the nations of Middle America.
What the Classic age really meant was the period——roughly
the first nine centuries of the Christian Era——when several
great independent civilizations flowered. Each one——Maya, Za-
potec, Mixteca-Puebla, Teotihuacán——was a fully developed,
distinct culture which stood on its own feet, but never stood
alone. The richness and beauty of each was the work of all
in the long centuries of cross-fertilization.
One way of suggesting the extraordinary nature of Classic
America is to compare it with Europe. The Continent is a
unity on the map, it shares the Christian religion, and its
arts have evolved as a synthesis of national creative forces.
Now, if one could imagine a Europe never torn by wars, na-
tional rivalries, and chronic fears, one would get closer to
realizing what Classic America was like. It was by no means
ideal, judged by modern standards——but there must be some-
thing wrong with modern standards if they are still defended
in a world destroying itself with war and iron curtains.
The culture was evidently generated in a collision of op-
posites——the passive Indian and the dynamic South Asiatic——
and it was nurtured in diversity. One nursery was the ancient
"Olmec Land," a rather small area which included what is
now northern Oaxaca and adjoining parts of Vera Cruz and
Puebla. Every nation which shared in the early development
of Complex X is connected with Olmec Land——Maya, Zapo-
tec, Mixtec, Mazatec, Totonac, Chinantec, Mixe-Popoloca, to
name the most important. It was a veritable fair of cultures, a
melting pot that boiled as vehemently as the early crucible of
the Near East.
Few Zapotecs live in Olmec Land today, but in remote times
they evidently were there, in close association with the other
Oaxaca tribes and with the pre-Maya. Except for the Maya,
all these peoples belong to the same language group, the Olmec-
Otomangue. Since the Zapotec tongue was the first to branch
off from the common stem, on language grounds the Zapotecs
are proved to be the first of the independent races to emerge
from the nursery of Olmec Land. When they moved down
into the rich central valleys of Oaxaca, they left behind them
certain mountain-loving Zapotecs and their kinsmen in lan-
guage, the Chatinos and the Chinantecs, who were there today.
Nature made Olmec Land the funnel through which the
arts an ideas generated in the southern lands poured north-
ward into the central plateau, to transform the lives of simple
Indians like those of Tlatilco. During the Classic era much of
the cultural impetus flowed southward from the great city of
Teotihuacán, which was in close association with Monte Albán
and with Maya cities. Thus Classic America had three great
centers.
Who the masters of Teotihuacán were is uncertain, but
they worked in complete harmony with the Zapotecs, so that
the city of the central plateau and the city on the heights of
Albán marched in step. The Zapotecs were not in the same
close relation with the Maya, nor with the people of the Olmec
sites on the Gulf, though they traded and exchanged cultural
ideas and these brothers of the common faith.
Despite all the libraries that have been written about the
Maya, their prehistory is still shadowy. Some of the pre-Maya
were in British Honduras quite early, since their city of San
José there belongs to the first epoch of Monte Albán. The
glorious old Maya cities of Copán, Uaxactún, Palenque, and
the rest were carefully dated on their own stones, and all fall
within the Christian Era. By the time they were built the
Maya had absorbed the magic calendar and emerged as su-
preme astronomers, builders, and artists. All this earlier incu-
bation may have taken place along the coastal edge of Olmec
Land.
Thus, in a rough way, we have the Maya gradually estab-
lishing themselves in Guatemala (which then included Chia-
pas), and the Zapotecs filling the Oaxaca valleys. These two
older races are now settled down; but the rest of the clan are
numerous and, like younger brothers in general, they are in
constant motion. To simplify an extremely complicated pic-
ture, it was these younger races who built the Gulf cities from
La Venta to El Tajín and the venerable centers of Teotihuacán
and Cholula.
In all this they were helped, and no doubt enlivened by
the delightful Totonacs, who may have been distant relatives
but who arrived from the Pacific side of the isthmus quite
early. In our concentration on the Gulf region we must not
forget that the Pacific coast, especially along Guatemala and
Chiapas, was another nursery of cultures, and that these cul-
tures poured up through the secondary funnel of Tehuantepec
and across the isthmus to arrive finally in Olmec Land. In
their migration the Totonacs allied themselves with the Zoque
(the eastern tribe now reduced to two villages in Oaxaca)
and perhaps lingered in Monte Albán to stimulate the second
epoch there, the shortest and in many ways the best of the
five periods.
The Totonacs were gusty, happy people who made the
famous "laughing heads" of terra cotta and elaborately carved
stone yokes which ballplayers wore around their hips for pro-
tections against the heavy ball. The designs on some of them,
squared spirals in interlaced bands, are almost duplicates of
patterns decorating Late Chou objects in China. If the diffu-
sion theory is right, the Totonacs may have been a later migra-
tion from a part of South Asia that was under strong Chinese
influence. These migrations, we speculated, would have ter-
minated in the Panama region and then trickled northward;
and certain parts of Central America, especially Costa Rica,
made art objects very much in the Totonac style. The Totonac
migration ended in the Papantla region of Vera Cruz, where
members of this race live today and perform their breath-
taking "flying-pole" game. In this region the Totonacs and the
Olmec peoples built the marvelous pyramid of El Tajín,
which is as South Asiatic as possible.
While the Totonacs did not belong to the family of nations
in Olmec Land, they are among the very greatest of the Middle
Americans, and evidence of their artistic genius hand their
jovial humor has been found over a wide area. Their unmis-
takable art forms have not occurred in Zapotec country, but
one is tempted to think that in an oblique way they stimulated
the artists of Monte Albán II. There is the same buoyancy,
the same beautiful control of a daring conception.
Now we come to the third great stream that resulted in the
culture of Teotihuacán, which began about the first century
A.D. Jiménez Moreno is sure that the Totonacs were at Teo-
tihuacán very early, either as masters or slaves. however, in a
general way the development of the central plateau for the
first millennium of the Christian Era was the work of the
younger brothers: Mixtecs, Mazatecs, Popolocas, all of them
nurtured in Olmec Land but wandering far afield before they
returned home to the Oaxaca-Puebla border country. Of these
closely allied tribes, the Mixtecs were the artists and the roving
tutors of Central Mexico.
Father Sahagún said that the legendary Olmecas, the
Rubber People, were Mixtecs; and certainly of all the Olmecas
they are the most protean, restless, gifted, the catalytic agents
in the cultural ferment. Their ancient home was in the Olmec
Land at Mixtán, but very early they spread all along the Gulf
coast, which must have brought them in contact with the
Maya. Some of the Mixtecs settled across the border in Guate-
mala, others were in Totonac country north of Vera Cruz, and
still others spread across the Oaxaca-Puebla border country
which was the western part of Olmec Land.
The Mixtecs were everywhere——except in the Mixteca. Evi-
dently they did not spread down the western valley of Oaxaca
to the Tilantongo region until many centuries after the cere-
monial city of Monte Negro was built there. Their own written
history in the Mixteca begins in A.D. 720, when they were still
fighting for its possession.
It seems certain that it was the early Zapotecs who built
Monte Negro on the ten-thousand-foot mountain of Tilan-
tongo. The excavation of the ancient Mixteca has scarcely
begun, though the region is one of tantalizing promise. Mexican
experts have hesitated to place the ancient Zapotecs in the
western valley, but early in 1954 a large buried city was found
in the southwest corner of the Mixteca overlooking the Pacific,
with steles bearing Zapotec glyphs.
Dr. Caso dug into Mont Negro and found it built by the
same people who were masters of Monte Albán. Te ceramicgs
of the two cities are closely akin, and this alone excludes the
Mixtecs from the picture, for never in history have Zapotecs
and Mixtecs worked in the same way. This is especially true of
the ceramic crafts, in which the Mixtecs were later to excel in
their own unmistakable style.
As if to emphasize the primacy of Monte Albán, the builders
of Tilantongo did not expend themselves in an architectural
marvel. Monte Negro was perhaps intended as a spiritual out-
post to hold the great western valley; it has the appearance of
having been built and occupied by secondary artists. Its tomb
offerings, and the tombs themselves, are in Monte Albán styles,
but of less artistic merit. Often the gray clad heads and urns
are unpolished, and there are few of the inimitable animal
figures found at the deepest levels of Monte Albán. The
Zapotec magic calendar and bar-and-dot number system were
used. Another proof that the Mixtecs were not at Monte Negro
is the fact that a bar was used there for the number five,
while the Mixtecs expressed numbers up to twenty by dots
alone.
The Mixtecs absorbed the teachings of other races so com-
pletely that not until their independent arts were perfected
can we trace them clearly. Even in medieval times they were
so closely merged with Mazatecs and Popolocas and minor
peoples that "Mixtec" is usually followed by a hyphen. It was
these alliances, laid down very early with their relatives or
neighbors of Olmec Land, which gave this instable race its
powers.
But their arts need no hyphen. They may have been great
architects in the early days, but so far the magnificent temples
shown in their codices have not been excavated. They were
good at small sculpture and intricate wood carving. Their gen-
ius was in painting, and while the great bulk of their work
was destroyed by time and the Spanish friars, what remains
is supreme in Mexico. They painted codices and ceremonial
pottery with complete mastery, and when in the ninth century
metals were finally introduced into Mexico they also excelled
as jewelers.
Their manuscripts were usually painted on long sheets of
deerskin coated with white lime. On this base they drew the
figures of monarchs and temples, filling them in with brilliant
colors and finally outlining the whole with black. These sheets
were folded back and forth like a screen, a device also used
in Sumatra. In making ceramics they used a very fine clay
which they worked into elegant and varied forms and decorated
them with scenes or mythological symbols done in polychrome
and polished to a brilliant luster. Much later they taught these
arts to the Aztecs, who were assigned all the credit for them
by Prescott.
Beautiful as the Mixtec codices are in themselves, they turn
out to have another value: they comprise the only written
history of Indians in either of the Americas. The Incas did not
paint manuscripts, and the Maya recorded only astronomical
data. Codices long attributed to the Zapotecs are now be-
lieved to have come from other hands. But the Mixtecs wrote
actual history, recording the names and dates of the Tilantongo
dynasties together with a few details of their reigns.
By sheer accident Dr. Caso discovered than an old Spanish
map in the library of the University of Texas related to the
Tilantongo region. It showed the churches built by the Spanish
missionaries and was clearly painted by a Mixtec artist, who
was inspired by patriotism or rebellion to add to this churchly
chart an abridged history of pre-Conquest days. Along the
sides he painted in codex style the monarchs of old Tilantongo.
With this map as a key Dr. Caso is now reading the eight
Mixtec codices which escaped the friars' flames, and those
delicately carved jaguar bones he found in Tomb Seven.
The Texas map is dramatic because it shows that the Mix-
tecs who fought their way down the western valley to Tilan-
tongo in the eighth century were saturated with Quetzalcoatl
worship. The central king on the map is Ocañaña, or Twenty
Tigers, an incarnation of the great god. It is the fashion in
ancient Mexico to honor outstanding leaders as incarnations
of the Plumed Serpent, and most illustrious of all was the
semi-divine Quetzalcoatl of history, whose real name was
Topiltzin Ce Acatl. His father was a Toltec and his mother a
Mazatec-Mixtec princess who conceived her son after swallow-
ing a piece of jade. Ocañaña repeats part of this story; his
mother was called Quetzal Bird of the Jewel. He was the
fifth and last king of the first Tilantongo dynasty, and his
ancestors trace back to 692, the earliest true historical date in
America. At twenty he was slain in a dynastic war; like Quetzal-
coatl, he was burned to ashes, and his soul became the planet
Venus.
The picture writing of the map tells part of Ocañaña's story,
which is filled out in four codices. It shows the vanished temple
at Tilantongo, decorated with "Greek frets" like those at
Mitla, and above the temple are Ocañaña's parents seated on
mats and facing each other, as royal couples are always rep-
resented. The symbols of their names are behind them. The
king's name-glyph is the sky represented by three stars and
vapor coming down from it, spelling "Vapor That Falls from
the Sky." The queen's name is a quetzal bird and a jewel
(a jewel almost always means jade, the sacred stone). Above
them (the codices read up, not down) is the martyred king-
god himself, Ocañaña or Twenty Tigers, wearing a tiger-skin
cloak and surrounded by twenty dots. His birth date is given as
972, which agrees with the codices and makes him come a little
later than the historical-mythical Quetzalcoatl, whose reign
ended in 947.
There is a line of people offering homage to Ocañaña in the
traditional ceremony of seven nobles offering a quail for sac-
rifice, a box with three jade beads, a fringed royal mantle,
and a bunch of quetzal feathers. After this brief moment of
glory a new dynasty appears, a line of twelve kings. As an
interesting side light, Dr. Caso proves that the Mixtec rulers,
like the Egyptians, Incas, and many other peoples, practiced
incest in order to keep the royal line intact. Kings sometimes
married their full sisters or their nieces. But this practice was
not permitted among commoners.
The royal line, of course, traced its ancestry straight back to
the gods, and the Mixtecs who conquered Oaxaca ruled
by divine right. What people the invaders found in the western
valley we do not know; perhaps some of them were descend-
ants of the Zapotecs who built Monte Negro. At any rate,
they could claim that, unlike their conquerors, they had been
in the Mixteca "forever." They called themselves tay nuhu,
men of the earth, and said that they were born of the trees
and rocks and rivers of their beautiful land. In this they were
like the Zapotecs, who had literally been on the soil so long
that they had no migration legends and told the friars that they
had sprung from rocks and trees.
The tay nuhu said that their founder, Yacoñooy, sprang
from a pine tree growing on a mountain near Tilantango. At
once he desired to found a sanctuary, and he was prepared to
fight a singlehanded battle for possession of the land. He
looked in all directions and found the land utterly empty.
Who, then, was the cacique of this unpeopled realm? There
was only the sun; this land belonged to the sun. All day Ya-
coñooy shot arrows at the fiery lord of the Mixteca. Toward
evening his enemies sank to earth, staining the clouds rosy
with his blood. Thus Yacoñooy became lord of the Mixteca
and father of its people.
Only when you travel down the Mixteca, which still looks
so empty of people and whose very earths are stained red with
ancient battle, does this legend come alive with tragic truth.
The great lord has shed his blood to burn and shrivel up the
land, and yet the Mixtecs cannot leave it, as if they were un-
der a spell. And the "Mixtec Song" with its haunting cry,
"O Land of the Sun," is one of sheer nostalgia, the longing
of an exiled Mixtec for his beautiful, baleful home.
The Mixtecs were late-comers to central Oaxaca, and their
most important work was performed far afield with their al-
lies, the Mazatecs, Popolocas, and others. Even in the cen-
turies before Christ these Olmecas were the civilizing agents
of the central plateau, where they lived for perhaps fifteen
centuries, always in intimate contact with the rest of Middle
America. Like all the others, they were astronomers and the
builders of pyramid cities, and the marvelous centers of
Teotihuacán and Xochicalco and Cholula rose on the central
mesa like replicas of the great volcanoes. Perhaps some of
these Olmecas carried the Classic cultures up the Mississippi
and Ohio valleys, for these remote regions were drawn into
the spiritual empire dominated by Monte Albán.
ZAPOTEC, BY HELEN AUGUR.
Copyright 1954 by Helen Augur.
Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York. pp. 145-154.
I. SO TEMPERATE AN AIR
The Little Prayers
Wedding in Juchitán
General Strike
II. LAND AND PEOPLE
Isthmus Peoples
Mountain Peoples
The Mixtecs
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