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By Root 724 0

general area of central Mexico goes back at least to the seventh century AD, when the monumental city of Teotihuacán was destroyed by fire: at that time the Pipil community are supposed to have moved south, through some interaction with the then dominant Toltec civilisation. The Toltecs left little concrete trace except a memory hallowed among the Aztecs who assumed control of central Mexico after them: but of the Pipil descendants who are left today, living far to the south in El Salvador, twenty or so still speak a form of Nahuatl. The straightforward assumption is that Nahuatl was the language of almost all the people living in the Valley of Mexico around the turn of the first millennium AD, encircling what was then a vast lake: the Tepanecs of Atzcapotzalco on the north-western shore, the states of Tezcoco and Culhuacán, apparently successors of the Toltecs, on the eastern. There were also areas of Nahuatl farther afield, westward in Jalisco on the Pacific coast, and eastward in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, perhaps remnants of an earlier empire, centred on the Toltecs or even Teotihuacán.

Comparative studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown Nahuatl as almost the southernmost member of a family, known as Uto-Aztecan or Yuta-Nawan, which extends in a wide swath as far north as the Shoshone and Paiute peoples in modern Oregon. This reconstructed linguistic geography fits with the Aztecs’ foundation legend, by which they claimed to have come from Aztlan (’heron place’), an island somewhere unknown in the north-west. So they may have learnt their Nahuatl before they came to the Valley of Mexico in 1256, initially as vagrants and scavengers and eaters of snakes.† Yet they always represented themselves as a branch of the Chichimeca people, renowned hunter-gatherer nomads of the north. If this story is true, they must have learnt their Nahuatl fairly late; for the Chichimeca or Pame language is related to Otomí, also spoken north and west of the Valley of Mexico, but quite unlike Nahuatl. The Aztecs may have been like the Normans in France, settling and learning a new language before projecting it through conquest.

First squatting in the western region of Chapultepec, then chased out and enlisting as mercenaries with Culhuacán (another people who claimed descent from the Chichimeca), they accepted a very lowly billet on the lava beds of Tizaapan.

’Good,’ Coxcoxtli [king of Culhuacan] said. ‘They are monstrous, they are evil.

Perhaps they will meet their end there, devoured by snakes,

for it is the dwelling-place of many snakes.’

But the Mexicans were overjoyed when they saw the snakes.

They cooked them, they roasted them and they ate them…

After twenty-five years of this, they brought matters to a head, requesting a Culhuacán princess, presumably as a bride, but then committing a characteristic atrocity on her.

Then they slew the princess and they flayed her,

and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

Huitzilopochtli [Humming-bird on the Left, the Aztecs’ tribal god] then said:

’O my chiefs, go and summon Achitometl [the princess’s father].’

The Mexicans went off, they went to summon him.

They said, ‘O our lord, O my grandson, O lord, O king…

your grandfathers, the Mexicans beseech you, they say,

’May he come to see, may he come to greet the goddess.

We invite him.’…

And when Achitometl arrived in Tizaapan, the Mexicans said in welcome:

’You have wearied yourself, O my grandson, O lord, O king.

We, your grandfathers, we, your vassals, shall cause you to become ill.

May you see, may you greet your goddess.’*

’Very good, O my grandfathers,’ he said.

He took the rubber, the copal, the flowers, the tobacco and the food offering,

and he offered them to her, he set them down before the false goddess whom they had flayed.

Then Achitometl tore off the heads of the quail before his goddess:

he still did not see the person before whom he was decapitating the quail.

Then he made the offering of incense and the incense-burner