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CHAPTER VII
ANCIENT CENTRAL AMERICA AND
MEXICO, AND THEIR SCRIPTS
GENERAL SKETCH TO UNDERSTAND the particular importance of the existence of writing in ancient Mexico and Central America, one must view it in relation to the general problem of ancient culture-building. It has been shown that there is a striking similarity in place, time and culture underlying the great civilizations of antiquity. These have originated and developed, roughly speaking, simultaneously, mainly in great river valleys situated in one continuous land-area, within the northern sub-tropical belt, and nowhere else. They appeared successively later in time the further we travel, east or west, from western Asia. Their culture was based on the knowledge of writing, the employment of metals, the cultivation of wheat, the domestication of certain animals, the use of the wheel, and town-building. No other area presents this homogeneity in fundamentals. The indigenous civilization of Mexico and Central America seems—but it is far from being certain-to form in some respects an exception; it would be perhaps the only exception. It is because of this problem, which is the main reason of our dedicating a whole chapter to that region, that we must deal briefly with the other problems concerning the cultures of ancient Mexico and Central America.
"MYSTERY" OF ANCIENT MEXICO
The first European conquest in the West Indies during the last years of the fifteenth, and the first years of the sixteenth centuries, had proved to be a failure to the Spanish adventurers in search of riches. Then a rumour begun to spread that beyond the mountains of the adjacent mainland there lived the emperor of a people called the Aztecs who dwelt in golden castles and slept in golden beds and ate from golden plates. Ferdinand Cortez and his three hundred adventurers landed in Tabasco on 12th March, 1519. In two years and five months, with the help of one dozen cannon and thirteen blunderbusses he conquered the capital and annihilated the "Aztec empire."
Many ruins, some of them with carved, sculptured walls and doorways, and figures in stucco, the remnants of ancient cities and villages, are scattered over nearly all of the present Republic of Mexico, and the neighbouring countries to the south. Sculptures, great monoliths, small term-cotta masks and idols, constantly ploughed up in some parts of the country, arms, jewels, and many other objects there discovered, are proofs of a certain degree of culture attained by the native peoples. The Mexicans played various ball games with that strange thing which
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