reat museums. Their contents chiefly refer to ritual,
astrology, the calendar, annals of the kings, etc.

Most of the literary productions of the ancient Mexicans were stupidly
destroyed by the Spanish under Cortes. The first Archbishop of Mexico
founded a professorship in 1553 for expounding the hieroglyphs of the
Aztecs, but in the following century the study was abandoned. Even the
native-born scholars confessed that they were unable to decipher the
ancient writing. One of the most ancient books (assigned to Tula, the
"Toltec" capital, A. D. 660, and written by Huetmatzin, an astrologer),
describes the heavens and the earth, the stars in their constellations,
the arrangement of time in the official calendar, with some geography,
mythology, and cosmogony. In the fifteenth century the King of Tezcuco
published sixty hymns in honor of the Supreme Being, with an elegy on
the destruction of a town, and another on the instability of human
greatness.

In the same century the three Anahuac states (Acolhua, Mexico, and
Tlacopan) formed a confederacy with a constant tendency to give Mexico
the supremacy. The two capitals looking at each other across the lake
were steadily growing in importance, with all the adjuncts of public
works--causeways, canals, aqueducts, temples, palaces, gardens, and
other evidences of wealth.

The horror and disgust caused by the Aztec sacrificial bloodshed are
greatly increased by considering the number of the victims. The kings
actually made war in order to provide as many victims as possible for
the public sacrifices--especially on such an occasion as a coronation or
the consecration of a new temple. Captives were sometimes reserved a
considerable time for the purpose of immolation. It was the regular
method of the Aztec warrior in battle not to kill one's opponent if he
could be made a captive; to take him alive was a meritorious act in
religion. In fact, the Spaniards in this way frequently escaped death at
the hands of their Mexican opponents. When King Montezuma was asked by a
European general why he had permitted the republic of Tlascala to remain
independent on the borders of his kingdom, his reply was, "That she
might furnish me with victims for my gods."

In reckoning the number of victims Prescott seems to have trusted too
implicitly to the almost incredible accounts of the Spanish. Zumurraga,
the first Bishop of Mexico, asserts that 20,000 were sacrificed
annually, but Casas points o