World Civilisations

The Civilisation of Mexico

THERE is now no question as to the indigenous origin of the civilisations of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. Upon few subjects, how. ever, has so much mistaken erudition been lavished.

The beginnings of the races who inhabited these regions, and the cultures which they severally created, have been referred to nearly every civilised or semicivilised nation of antiquity, and wild if fascinating theories have been advanced with the intention of showing that civilisation was initiated upon American soil by Asiatic or European influence.

These speculations were for the most part put forward by persons who possessed but a merely general acquaintance with the circumstances of American aboriginal civilisation, and who were struck by the superficial resemblances which undoubtedly exist between American and Asiatic peoples, customs, and art-forms, but which cease to be apparent to the Americanist, who perceives in them only such likenesses as inevitably occur in the work of men situated in similar environments and surrounded by similar social and religious conditions.

The Maya of Yucatan may be regarded as the most highly civilised of the peoples who occupied the American continent before the advent of Europeans, and it is usually their culture which we are asked to believe had its seat of origin in Asia. It is unnecessary to refute this theory in detail, as that has already been ably accomplished.[By Payne in The New World called America, London 1892-99] But it may be remarked that the surest proof of the purely native origin of American civilisation is to be found in the unique nature of American art, the undoubted result of countless centuries of isolation. American language, arithmetic, and methods of time-reckoning, too, bear no resemblance to other systems, European or Asiatic, and we may be certain that had a civilising race entered America from Asia it would have left its indelible impress upon things so intensely associated with the life of a people as well as upon the art and architecture of the country, for they are as much the product of culture as is the ability to raise temples.

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