Note 93 — PART I. ETHNOLOGIC AND ARCHÆOLOGIC. (continued 2)

Motolinia, in his Historia de los Indios de Nueva España, p. 5, calls the locality “el puerto llamado Tollan,” the pass or gate called Tollan. Through it, he states, passed first the Colhua and later the Mexica, though he adds that some maintain these were the same people. In fact, Colhua is a form of a word which means “ancestors:” colli, forefather; no-col-huan, my forefathers; Colhuacan, “the place of the forefathers,” where they lived. In Aztec picture-writing this is represented by a hill with a bent top, on the “ikonomatic” system, the verb coloa, meaning to bend, to stoop. Those Mexica who said the Colhua proceeded them at Tula, simply meant that their own ancestors dwelt there. The Anales de Cuauhtitlan (pp. 29, 33) distinctly states that what Toltecs survived the wars which drove them southward became merged in the Colhuas. As these wars largely arose from civil dissensions, the account no doubt is correct which states that others settled in Acolhuacan, on the eastern shore of the principal lake in the Valley of Mexico. The name means “Colhuacan by the water,” and was the State of which the capital was Tezcoco.