en been remarked, such buildings as these can only be raised
under peculiar social conditions. The ruler must be a despotic
sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and
whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of
the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner
of the country and the people. The population must be very dense, or it
would not bear the loss of so large a proportion of the working class;
and vegetable food must be exceedingly abundant in the country, to feed
them while engaged in this unprofitable labour.

We know how great was the influence of the priestly classes in Egypt,
though the pyramids there, being rather tombs than temples, do not
prove it. In Mexico, however, the pyramids themselves were the temples,
serving only incidentally as tombs; and their size proves that--as
respects priestly influence--the resemblance between the two people is
fully carried out.

Like the Egyptian pyramids, these fronted the four cardinal points.
Their shape was not accurately pyramidal, for the line from base to
summit was broken by three terraces, or perhaps four, running
completely round them; and at the top was a flat square space, where
stood the idols and the sacrificial altars. This construction closely
resembled that of some of the smaller Egyptian pyramids. Flights of
stone steps led straight up from terrace to terrace, and the procession
of priests and victims made the circuit of each before they ascended to
the one above.

The larger of the two teocallis is dedicated to the Sun, has a base of
about 640 feet, and is about 170 feet high. The other, dedicated to the
Moon, is rather smaller.

These monuments were called _teocallis_, not because they were
pyramids, but because they were temples; "Teocalli" means "god's
house"--(_teotl_, god, _calli_, house), a name which the traveller
hears explained for the first time with some wonder; and Humboldt
cannot help adverting to its curious correspondence with [Greek: theou
kalia], _dei cella_. Another odd coincidence is found in the Aztec name
for their priests, _papahua_, the root of which _papa_, (the _hua_, is
merely a termination). In the Old World the word _Papa_, Pope, or
Priest, was connected with the idea of father or grandfather, but the
Aztec word has no such origin.

When the Aztecs abandoned their temples, and began to build Christian
churches, they called them also "teocallis," an