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Aztec   Listen
adjective
Aztec  adj.  Of or relating to one of the early races in Mexico that inhabited the great plateau of that country at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1519.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Aztec" Quotes from Famous Books



... a member of the Aztec Club, which was organized during the occupation of the City of Mexico by the American officers who had stormed the capital; and on the occasion of one of its annual meetings, which that year was held in Philadelphia, I was permitted to accompany him to that city. It was the longest journey ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... people of one country and those of another, which rather surprised me. He said nothing of the two great classes, the rulers with much European blood, and the peons, largely or altogether Indian. There must be all sorts of Latin Americans, rich and poor, mixed blood of many strains, Castilian and Aztec and Inca, and whatever other people were here when Columbus set the fashion for American voyages. But this is where this 'missionary father-in-law' hit the heart of the trouble: Latin America has all sorts and conditions of men, but everywhere it has the same church. And it is a church ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... gallop of buffalo and wild horses. Southern negroes caught the infection. Even the scattered Aztecs of Mexico gathered around the ruins of their ancient temple at Cholula and waited a Messiah who should pour floods of lava from Popocatapetl, inundating all mortals not of Aztec race. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... and plains were covered with high grass and the country was not cut up with ravines and gullies as it is now. This has been brought about through over-stocking the ranges. On the Little Colorado we could cut hay for miles and miles in every direction. The Aztec Cattle Company brought tens of thousands of cattle into the country, claimed every other section, overstocked the range and fed out all the grass. Then the water, not being held back, followed the cattle trails and cut the country up. Later, tens of thousands of cattle died because of drought and ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... which various nations and successive epochs had woven before the shining features of truth. To-day peering into the golden Gardens of the Sun at Cuzco; to-morrow clambering over Thibet glaciers, to find the mystic lake of Yamuna; now delighted to recognize in Teoyamiqui (the wife of the Aztec God of War) the unmistakable features of Scandinavian Valkyrias; and now surprised to discover the Greek Fates sitting under the Norse tree Ygdrasil, deciding the destinies of mortals, and calling themselves Nornas; she spent her days in pilgrimages ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... of having gratuitously gleaned their entire contents, was in keeping with every other ludicrous phase of his distorted nature. He looked upon me as a paragon of stupidity; and I fear I considered him a piece of personal property, and felt as much pride in the possession as did Barnum in his Aztec children. ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong

... In many abandoned quarries in Mexico and Central America unfinished blocks of granite and porphyry are found, which are supposed to have been the work of the Toltecs, and abandoned by them at the time of the invasion of the fierce Aztec. Assuming this to be the fact, we can readily conceive why the half-raised mass of copper in the Minnesota Mine should also be abandoned; for a people suddenly scattered as the Toltecs were—so suddenly as to leave temples half finished, and blocks of stone ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... return later. The myths of the origin of things may be studied without a knowledge of the whole Aztec Pantheon. Our authorities, though numerous, lack complete originality and are occasionally confused. We have first the Aztec monuments and hieroglyphic scrolls, for the most part undeciphered. These merely attest the hideous and cruel ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... buccaneers, put out in their crazy, ill-found craft, to rob and slay the Spaniard; while the mystery of the unknown still lay upon it; long after the mystery had mostly gone out of it, save for the mystery of the Aztec; it remained the Land of Romance when New England was fully settled and Virginia already an old colony; it was the English Land of Romance while King George's redcoats fought side by side with the colonials, to drive the French out of the continent ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... The phrase, popularized by newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin c.1975, has been said to derive from carnie slang for magic acts and 'freak show' displays that depend on 'trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for whom the hearts of huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were regularly cut out. Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet another round of fantasy-based marketing promises, hackers often feel analogously disheartened. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... of origin in some indefinitely remote past. We find these on the Maya side narrated in the sacred book of the Kiches, the Popol Vuh, in the Cakchiquel Records of Tecpan Atitlan, and in various pure Maya sources which I bring forward in this volume. The Aztec traditions refer to the Huastecs, and a brief analysis of them will ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various

... of the Aztec names are shortened in many instances out of consideration for the patience of the reader; thus 'Popocatapetl' becomes 'Popo,' 'Huitzelcoatl' becomes 'Huitzel,' &c. The prayer in Chapter xxvi. is freely rendered ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... ancient peoples would be likely to contain representations of gesture signs, which subject is treated of below, it is proper to examine if traces of such gesture signs may not be found in the Egyptian, Chinese, and Aztec characters. Only a few presumptive examples, selected from a considerable number, are now presented in which the signs of the North American Indians appear to be included, with the hope that further investigation by collaborators ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... is Aztec, though I didn't buy it in Mexico. I gave about a pound for the jar and found ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... of time when first the Humanity of God touched the divine aspiration in man, fulfilling, under the skies of Palestine, the dim, yet infallible instinct of every race from eastern Mongol to western Aztec. "The Soul, naturally Christian," responds to this touch, even though blindly and erratically, and so from generation to generation the multitudes stand waiting to welcome the Gospel of Humanity with palms ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... bless him at the same time. After selling his linens at a great advance on the cost price, considering he had only paid his daughter for them, and having given a series of the most successful concerts ever known in those latitudes, Signor G—— set forth for the Aztec City. As the relations of meum and tuum were not upon the most satisfactory footing just then at Vera Cruz, he thought it most prudent to carry his well-won treasure with him to the capital. His progress thither was a triumphal procession. Not Corts, not General Scott, himself, marched ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... the rattlesnake as grandfather and king of snakes who is able to give fair winds or cause tempest. Among the Hopi (Moqui) of Arizona the serpent figures largely in one of the dances. The rattlesnake was worshipped in the Natchez temple of the sun; and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl was a serpent-god. The tribes of Peru are said to have adored great snakes in the pre-Inca days; and in Chile the Araucanians made a serpent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... She was a woman shaped like a pyramid. Even her head, on which the black coarse hair was bobbed high, finished in a peak—the unmistakable mark of the ancient Aztec blood in her veins. Her shoulders sloped away from her three chins and it seemed as though the greatest circumference of her body must be at her ankles, for her skirt flared. Rosita had guessed at her waist-line and had tied a string there, for her dress was a one-piece ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long

... rich gold mine in Mexico is known by the picturesque and mysterious name of The Four Fingers. It originally belonged to an Aztec tribe, and its location is known to one surviving descendant—a man possessing wonderful occult power. Should any person unlawfully discover its whereabouts, four of his fingers are mysteriously removed, and one by one returned to him. The appearance ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... Montezuma, the Aztec priests had engrafted upon these simple ceremonies not only a burdensome ceremonial, and a polytheism similar to that of Eastern nations, but, as we have seen, human sacrifices and even cannibalism had become prominent features in religious worship. Throughout the entire ceremonial and religious ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... some of that "one flesh" of which we all are made; but the blood—to go into finer distinctions—the blood, as distinguished from the milk of her Alibamon foster-mother, was the blood of the royal caste of the great Toltec mother-race, which, before it yielded its Mexican splendors to the conquering Aztec, throned the jeweled and gold-laden Inca in the South, and sent the sacred fire of its temples into the North by the hand of the Natchez. For it is a short way of expressing the truth concerning Red Clay's tissues to say she had the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... Prescott about his book, with which I was perfectly charmed. I think his descriptions masterly, his style brilliant, his purpose manly and gallant always. The introductory account of Aztec civilization impressed me exactly as it impressed you. From beginning to end, the whole history is enchanting and full of genius. I only wonder that, having such an opportunity of illustrating the doctrine of visible judgments, he never remarks, when Cortes and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... slim, dark little man, with long, matted black hair. His face was hatchet-shaped and not unlike an Aztec's. The eyes were informed by an eager brilliance. He had a heap of little paper-covered books in one hand and an extinct cigar in the other. He placed the books upon ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... which we do to that of the equine or the porcine, the experiment would not have been left untried so long. In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind. The families which take most pride in their purity are the most degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the coming man, the highest form of well-balanced qualities—moral, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... is in the garden, like a sort of pool, With walls of honeysuckle and orchids all around; The humming birds are always making a sleep sound; In the night there's the Aztec nightingale; But when the moon is up, in Nicaragua, The moon of Nicaragua and the million stars, It's the human heart that sings, and the heart of Nicaragua, To the pleading, plaintive music ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... folklorist. But, whatever the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may be, no one would explain them as the result of community of race between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are the expression of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs of an original community ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled about town until he had picked up the jefe politico, a handsome Mexican, built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here the stealing of ore by workmen is ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... grass-grown street, and were again on the prairie, when a shot rang out behind us, the bullet cutting up the dust away to the left. "By G—— he's on the shoot," cried our friend; "ride, boys!" and so we rode. Much has been written and said of cities old and new, of Aztec and Peruvian monuments, but I venture to offer to the attention of the future historian of America this sample of the busted up city of Kearney and its solitary indweller, who had snakes in his boots and ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... of the Aztec name of the City of Light, Tulan (properly, Tonatlan), in these accounts, as they were rehearsed by the early converted natives, naturally misled historians to adopt the notion that these divine culture heroes were "Toltecs," and even in the ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton

... people. I have looked at Quebec and New Orleans, at Washington and at San Francisco, at Cincinnati and St. Louis, and it has been the result of my last conjecture that the seat of power of North America would yet be found in the Valley of Mexico,—that the glories of the Aztec capital would be renewed, and that city would become ultimately the capital of the United States of America. But I have corrected that view, and I now believe that the last seat of power on this great ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... being due to the raza Andalusiana—and beyond that the Moriscan—but as much of it coming from the ancient blood of Anahuac—possibly from the famed Malinche herself. For the young lady delineated was the Condes Almonte—descended from one of Conquistadors who had wedded an Aztec princess—the beautiful Ysabel Almonte whose charms were at the time the toast of every cercle ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... to visit Cambridge on June 3, to listen to a most valuable address by Professor Tosch, of Bonn, on Hittite and Aztec affinities. If you can meet me there and accept the hospitality of my college, the encounter may prove a turning point in Mythological ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... paces? These poor fragments of the ancient population of the Union have, if we exclude the Cherokees and Choctaws and two or three of the Gila tribes, literally nothing to show. The latter can present us with a faint trace of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and already passed by the railway. If we cannot ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... its island mountain—all combine to produce upon the spectator an irresistible impression of melancholy; and a spirit of superstitious inclinings cannot help giving way to thoughts of the supernatural. No wonder that in such a place the ancient Aztec priests should have erected an altar for their sanguinary sacrifices; and so strong is tradition, that even in modern times the lake of Ostuta and the mountain of Monopostiac, are invested with supernatural attributes, and regarded by the vulgar ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... horde of natives, so ignorant of modern warfare that some of them tried to stop cannon balls by clapping their straw hats over the mouths of the guns, could not stand their ground. Hidalgo was captured and shot, but he was succeeded by Jose Maria Morelos, also a priest. Reviving the old Aztec name for central Mexico, he summoned a "Congress of Anahuac," which in 1813 asserted that dependence on the throne of Spain was "forever broken and dissolved." Abler and more humane than Hidalgo, he set up a revolutionary government that the authorities of Mexico failed ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... detect an intention on the part of the architect. There are certain lights that have a way of dressing up the tower as a whole, giving it unity and hiding its ugliness. And at all times it has a kind of barbaric splendor. It might have come out of an Aztec mind, rather childish in expression, and seeking for beauty in an elemental way. I can imagine Aztecs living up there in a barbaric fashion, their houses piled, one above another, like our ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... (2) Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another—the constellation of the Pleiades being ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... extension of this simple instrument was the ayacachicahualiztli, "the arrangement of rattles," which was a thin board about six feet long and a span wide, to which were attached bells, rattles and cylindrical pieces of hard wood. Shaking this produced a jingle-jangle, agreeable to the native ear. The Aztec bells of copper, tzilinilli, are really metallic rattles, like our sleigh bells. They are often seen in collections of Mexican antiquities. Other names for ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton

... Vuh,'[94] and pretending to be the original text of the sacred writings of the Indians of Central America, will be received by most people with a sceptical smile. The Aztec children who were shown all over Europe as descendants of a race to whom, before the Spanish conquest, divine honours were paid by the natives of Mexico, and who turned out to be unfortunate creatures that had been tampered with by heartless speculators, are ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... persist in the belief that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But Caliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! They were pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban's Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. And the Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and condition of an Aztec—even then was he able to reason with himself: "She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will be but a first day's journey she will go—through marshy ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... the flood" is correct, not "fishes," or "freshes." The mother desires that the sea may never cease to be troubled till her sons return (verse 4, line 2). The peculiar doom of women dead in child-bearing occurs even in Aztec mythology. ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... and Montezuma met, was the customary exchange of presents. Cortes presented Montezuma with a chain of colored glass beads, and in return the Aztec ruler gave Cortes a house which was large enough to accommodate all of ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw

... people advanced beyond savagery, and came upon evidences of that wealth which determined the future of their empire. Two years later Hernando Cortez, the greatest of the Conquistadores, was given command of the expedition which ended in the capture of Mexico and the overthrow of the Aztec power. The simple Mexicans, who had never seen a white man, first welcomed Cortez as the long expected Culture God, and the hapless Montezuma gathered as a present for the invader treasure equal in present value to the sum ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... was. If the question had concerned Aztec relics my answer would undoubtedly have been the same. And I watched him, dazedly, while he took down a silver porringer from ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... strengthened by Indian allies and by ships which he built on the lakes, Cortes, in May, 1521, began the siege of Mexico, as historians call the Aztec capital. Guatemotzin, the last of the Aztec emperors, made a desperate defence, and before its capture the city was almost destroyed. On August 12th the Spaniards made a strong assault, which so weakened the defenders ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... in the middle of the plain, appeared a ruin of adobe walls, guttered and fissured by the weather. It was undoubtedly a monument of that partially civilized race, Aztec, Toltec, or Moqui, which centuries ago dotted the American desert with cities, and passed away without leaving other record. With his field-glass Thurstane discovered what he judged to be another similar structure crowning ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures, the Aztec art, Mexican and Central American. He saw the grotesque, and a curious sort of mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in nature. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun and Loerke, of infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as if they had some ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... appearance of the delineations is such as to lead to the conclusion that the principal pigment or fluid employed in delineation has totally disappeared, carrying with it all underlying colors not of unusual permanence or not worked down with the polishing implement. The Aztec and other races of tropical America used an argillaceous, white pigment in decorating their wares, which has in many cases partially or wholly disappeared, carrying away considerable portions of the colors over which it was laid, while in other cases, ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes

... how it could be traced back through a Spanish mother to some buccaneering adventurer, Don Silva de y somebody, who made his headquarters in Mexico. And that means a trace of Mexican in the race, or at least Aztec." ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson

... said, the estafa, or sacred fire, is kept burning, and has never been permitted to go out since the time of Montezuma, from whom and his people they believe themselves descended. They are undoubtedly of Aztec race, and sun-worshippers, as were the subjects of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... number of young plants, which, after a few years of growth, mature and repeat their life cycle, while other young plants develop from the widely scattered seeds. The Spaniards at times call the plant Quiota. This word seems to be derived from quiotl, which is the Aztec name for Agave, from which plant a drink not unlike beer is produced, and suggests the possibility that there might have been a time when the succulent flower stem of the Yucca furnished drink as well ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... of it, to the Sybarites, impatient of crumpled rose-leaves. Spartan oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman patricians and Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine ciompi, Norman nobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish spahis, Spanish hidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and New England farmers,—these and a hundred other races or orders have all been parties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its object the acquisition of property, the providing of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... who study graves; their pathetic ending has long been pictured in our country's story as occurring amid the shadows of that dreadful midnight upon the banks of the Ocatahoola, when vengeful Frenchmen put them to the sword. Whence they came, whether from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec empire of the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their remnant,—if remnant there was left to flee,—and what proved its ultimate fate, no previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the unknown, scarcely more than spectral figures, they came, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... birthday of his eldest granddaughter. Dressed as a fairy, with gossamer wings, a diamond star on her forehead, and a silver wand, she received her guests. Prominent among the young people was the daughter of General Almonte, the Mexican Minister, arrayed as an Aztec Princess. Master Schermerhorn, of New York, was beautifully dressed as an Albanian boy, and Ada Cutts, as a flower-girl, gave promise of the intelligence and beauty which in later years led captive the "Little Giant" of the West. The boys ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... he declined the honor, and died (June 3, 1548) a few days after those documents arrived, being eighty years old. A cloud upon his memory is the ruthless and vandalic destruction, under his direction, of the Aztec images, manuscripts, and other records, both public and private, for which his agents made close search, not only in the City of Mexico but in all the larger cities and towns—a cruel and irreparable loss to scholars and historians. See Bancroft's ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various

... something more—the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed /jacal/ near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking /mescal/. Back of the /jacal/ a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... pool one night that he had been a doctor—that he loved the peace and quiet of his island home—that years back the Seminoles had saved his life. He had since devoted his own life to their service. They were a pitiful, hunted remnant of a great race who were kindred to the Aztec. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow under a south wind ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... discovery, let me tell you that," he declared. "I am familiar with the Aztec, Toltec and Pueblo ruins, and here I find no similarity. Besides, we are out of their latitude. An ancient race of people—very ancient indeed lived in this canyon. How long ago, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey

... extending himself. No matter what the nationality of a guest might be—and the guests were of many nationalities—he could talk with that guest in his own language or in any other language the guest might fancy. I myself was sorely tempted to try him on Coptic and early Aztec; but I held off. My Coptic is not what it once was; and, partly through disuse and partly through carelessness, I have allowed my command of early Aztec to fall off pretty badly these last ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... stronger piped the compelling melody. Why, here are the mountains! God bless them! Nay, brother, God has blessed them; blessed them with unbounded calm, with boundless strength, with unspeakable peace. You can take your troubles to the mountains. If you are Pueblo, Aztec, you can select some big mountain and pray to it, as its top shows the red sentience of the on-coming day. You can take your troubles to the sea; but the sea has troubles of its own, and frets. There is commerce on the sea, and the people who live near it are fretful, greedy, grasping. ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... doctrines and legends. It is not, indeed, a literal restoration; but no esoteric interpretation can make it very different from an attempt to rationalize for Europeans ancient Druidism, or for Americans Aztec fables and symbolism. This kind of revival appeals in a certain way to the Rajahs whom English rule has reduced to antiquarian curiosities; they too are survivals from primitive religious and social ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... whatever incongruity there was between his lively Latin extravagance and Miss Mannersley's Puritan precision and intellectual superiority. They had gone to Mexico; Mrs. Saltillo, as was known, having an interest in Aztec antiquities, and he being utterly submissive to her wishes. For myself from my knowledge of Enriquez's nature, I had grave doubts of his entire subjugation, although I knew the prevailing opinion was ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... day, where I expected to buy some presents for my mother and sisters. But I was in a pickle as to what to give Esther, and on consulting Miss Jean, I found that motherly elder sister had everything thought out in advance. There was an old Mexican woman, a pure Aztec Indian, at a ranchita belonging to Las Palomas, who was an expert in Mexican drawn work. The mistress of the home ranch had been a good patron of this old woman, and the next morning we drove over to the ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... romancer of a higher order. "Trepanned" is a story of adventure in Virginia and the Spanish Main. A Kentish boy is trepanned and carried off to sea, and finds his fill of adventure among Indians and buccaneers. The central episode of the book is a quest for the sacred Aztec temple. The swift drama of the narrative, and the poetry and imagination of the style, make the book in the highest sense literature. It should appeal not only to all lovers of good writing, but to all who care for the record of ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... a conquering race, formed in part by a coalition of tribes and a combination of cults. From the records (none of which are contemporaneous) it appears that there was a very considerable specialization of function in the Aztec deities. These were probably local gods with universal functions gradually differentiated. Huitzilopochtli, apparently a patron of vegetation (with three annual festivals corresponding to agricultural seasons), became especially the god of war, in accordance with the character of the Aztecs. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... Indische Skizzen, p. 92). At a recent meeting of the British Association E.B. Tylor presented a paper in which is made an attempt to show Buddhistic influence on pre-Columbian culture in America. On comparing the Aztec picture-writing account of the journey of the soul after death with Buddhistic eschatology, he is forced to the conclusion that there was direct transmission from Buddhism. We require more proof than Aztec pictures of hell to believe any such theory; and reckon ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... and I went out to the Washington plane. It was a luxury ship, a fifty-two-passenger, four-engined DC-6, scheduled to be in the capital one hour after take-off. By morning this plane, the Aztec, would be ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe

... of the Petrified Man had been entrusted to an artist devoted to the making of clothing dummies. Instead of an Aztec or Cave Dweller cast of countenance, he had given the Petrified Man the simpering features of the wax figures seen in cheap clothing stores. The result was that, instead of gazing at the Petrified Man with awe as a wonder of nature, the audiences laughed at him, and the living freaks dubbed ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler

... that little bit of intrinsic worth of form? Is not such indeed the fact? What else is the meaning of the story of "Beauty and the Beast"? The squat and hideous Indian idol, the scarabaeus, the bit of Aztec pottery, become attractive and desired for themselves by virtue of their halo of pleasure from dim associations. And all these values are felt as completely OBJECTIFIED, and so fulfill the requirements for "beauty in the second term." That small amount of intrinsic beauty on which to graft ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... Tolteca, to disclose the history of the dwellers in Anahuac, to make known the annals of the rise and fall of Tlascala, Otumba, Copan, or Papantla. In the great work of Lord Kingsborough are collected many important remains of Mexican and Aztec art and learning; Mr. Prescott has combined with a masterly hand the traditions of the country; and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Squier have done much in the last few years to render us familiar with the more accessible and probably most significant ruins which illustrate the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... close of the sixteenth century. The ancient Aztecs used the game of ball as a training in warfare for the young men of the nation; and that it was considered of great importance is evident from the fact that the tribute exacted by a certain Aztec monarch from some of the cities conquered by him consisted of balls, and amounted to ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... being their actual cause. Isis, her Egyptian title, literally means moisture; Ataensic, whom the Hurons said was the moon, is derived from the word for water; and Citatli and Atl, moon and water, are constantly confounded in Aztec theology." [257] One of the gods of the Dakotahs was "Unk-ta-he (god of the water). The Dakotahs say that this god and its associates are seen in their dreams. It is the master-spirit of all their juggling and superstitious belief, From it the medicine men obtain their supernatural powers, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... them, also, in many other respects, such as architecture, vegetation, domestic utensils, mode of cultivating the land, ancient pyramids, and idols, while both afford abundant tokens of a history antedating all accredited record. Toltec and Aztec antiquities bear a remarkable resemblance to the old Egyptian remains to be found in the museums of Europe and America. Speaking of these evidences of a former and unknown race still to be found in southern ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... way of time up to the digging of the Canal. Its enrichment of sculpture, painting and inscription summarizes the story of Panama and of the Pacific shore northward from the Isthmus. The architect has expressed in its upper decorations something of the feeling of Aztec art. The four inscriptions on the south faces of the arches tell how Rodrigo de Bastides discovered Panama in 1501; how Balboa first saw the Pacific Ocean in 1513; how the United States began to dig the Canal in 1904, and opened it in 1915. The four on the north faces ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... nothing in the civilization of the most advanced American races worth preserving, except their monuments. The destruction of the Aztec and Peruvian empires was, on the whole, an advantage to humanity. The darkest period of religious persecution in Europe saw nothing to compare with the sanguinary rites of Aztec worship, and bigoted, intolerant and oppressive as the Spaniards ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of the Aztec children, of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm. Plotinus was less ashamed of his whole body than I of this inconsiderate and stupid appendage. To be sure, I might swim for a certain ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... Aztec Empire, with its millions of treasure, by Cortez had already proved the valiancy of Spanish cavaliers. To add to this, the conquest of the Incas by Pizarro and his followers was regarded ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... the blood of Aztec lands, Sphinx-like, the tawny herdsman stands, A coiled riata in his hands. Devoid of hope, devoid of fear, Half brigand, and half cavalier— This helot, with imperial grace, Wears ever on his tawny face A sad, defiant ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... many interesting and beautiful towns. The city itself is rapidly becoming a handsome one, indeed an imperial one. Accommodation for visitors, however, leaves much to be desired. The country's history is of course absorbingly interesting, and the many remains of Aztec and older origin appeal much to one's curiosity. There is a capital golf-course, a great bull-ring, and a pelota court. There is much wealth, and every evening a fine display of carriages and horses. The little dogs called Perros Chinos of Mexico, also "Pelon" or hairless, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... crazy whim of us 'Americanos.' I hope he does. We can talk loudly, when he's around, about how we want to get historical relics, and the Fogers are after the same thing. There have been several expeditions down this way from rival colleges or museums after Aztec relics, and he may think we're one of them. For the golden images are historical relics all right," added ...
— Tom Swift in the City of Gold, or, Marvelous Adventures Underground • Victor Appleton

... Aztec sacrifice!" cried the professor; and they all laughed. "One would hardly have anticipated," he resumed after a pause, addressing Trednoke, "that you would have made a double conquest,—first of the men, and then of ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne

... scientist who had stopped at the ranch some time before, and he recalled enough of the talk of Aztec and Toltec and Mayas to know that none of these old civilizations could explain the things ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... blood began. If you have read up on the subject at all, you doubtless know how merciless the Spaniards were in their attitude toward the Aztecs. They killed them by thousands, in open battle and by treacherous means, and they tortured Aztec priests to force them to reveal the places where the vessels of gold used in ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

... was built on the plan of a fort. When it was originally built it was the storage place for all kinds of ammunition, Roman spears, shields, breast plates, guns, powder, ammunition of every kind and character, used by Roman Catholics for war, and was probably built by the Aztec Indians who were; under the control of the Spaniards. It was said to be 300 years old when I saw it 53 years ago. It was a two-story structure, built of adobe, or sun-dried brick. The floors of the building were ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus

... Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say. I imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that. There's a church here—a Methodist or some other kind—with a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don't assimilate except on ...
— Options • O. Henry

... Aztec [Footnote: The Aztec Indians of Mexico, like various other tribes in Central America and in Peru, had reached in many respects a high degree of civilization before the arrival of Europeans.] confederacy of Mexico, was overthrown in 1519 by the reckless Hernando ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... in Eden" of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity which the present ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... passed aboard tramp freighters between Lisbon and Rio, Leith and Natal, Tokyo, Melbourne and the Golden Gate—wherever the sea ran green; of ginseng-growing in China, shellac gathering in India, cattle-grazing in Wyoming. He spoke of Alaskan totem-poles, of Indian sign language, of Aztec monoliths buried in the forest. He sang "Lather an' Shavin's," "La Golondrina," "The Cowboy's Lament," and, clicking his fingers castanet-wise, hummed little Spanish airs whose words he would ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in the effortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string writings and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of the sunken Polynesian continent, hieroglyphs as useless as those of Memphis, nothing. Nothing! They have been tried, and were found an illusion. Think then, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... Brasseur de Bourbourg translates from the Aztec language of the "Codex Chimalpopoca" the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... possesses none of the elaborate ornamentation found in the Aztec ruins in Mexico. The exterior of the house is absolutely plain. It is sometimes seven stories in height and contains over a thousand rooms. In some instances it is built of adobe—blocks of mud mixed with straw and dried in the sun, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... animals in their nests of drawers, burn the trees again—this time they are sweet-bay; and all the joys and sorrows and rivalries and successes of Blue End and Red End will pass, and follow Carthage and Nineveh, the empire of Aztec and Roman, the arts of Etruria and the palaces of Crete, and the plannings and contrivings of innumerable myriads of children, into the limbo of games exhausted ... it may be, leaving some profit, in thoughts widened, ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells

... AN AZTEC PRINCE.—The largest tunnel in the world is that of St. Gothard, on the railroad line between Lucerne and Milan. The summit of this tunnel is 990 feet below the surface at Andermatt, and 6600 feet beneath the peak at ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various

... and three tiaras; then a company of mitred priests; next the cardinals in scarlet; and last, aloft beneath a canopy, upon the shoulders of men, and flanked by the mystic fans, advanced the Pope himself, swaying to and fro like a Lama, or an Aztec king. Still the trumpets blew most silverly, and still the people knelt; and as he came, we knelt and had his blessing. Then he took his state and received homage. After this the choir began to sing a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... disturbing Moore's Aztec researches, "here is a queer affair in the usually quiet town of Clayville. Listen to this;" and I read aloud the following "par," as I believe paragraphs are ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the Turk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... Spanish conquests in the western world by undertaking the subjugation of the Aztec empire in Mexico in 1519. A few years later Pizarro established the Spanish power in Peru. It is hardly necessary to say that Europeans exhibited an utter disregard for the rights of the people with ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... still stand, wrapped in their black shadows by night, and their purple colors by day, waiting for the passing of the Apache and the coming of the white man, who shall dig his canals in those arid plains, and build his cities upon the ruins of the ancient Aztec dwellings. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes



Words linked to "Aztec" :   Aztec marigold, Nahuatl, Aztec lily



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