Disinterred City

A celebrated and great city, very rich and respected, very wise and strong, [where the people] lived in fine palaces, some made of pure jade, some of silver, and some of emeralds without flaw.

Thus, from Aztec hearsay, a 16th-century Franciscan friar described the legendary city of Tulsa, capital of Mexico's ancient Toltec empire and once ruled by the bearded emperor Quetzalcoatl.

Trucks & Toothbrushes. By last week in a little town (called "Tula," like many another Mexican hamlet) 50 miles north of Mexico City, a sweating crew of some 30 workmen had laid down their shovels and picks to await the finish of Mexico's rainy season. Their patient digging, off & on for three years, had finally uncovered this important fact: The ruined pyramid, palaces, monuments and artifacts their spades had been turning up were those of ancient Tula. For two square miles, nine feet under the dry, caked earth trod by barefoot Mexicans and their mincing burros, stretched the remains of the Toltec capital. To complete its excavation would take at least another ten years. But the Tula find already ranked historically as the most important since Carnegie Institution scientists unearthed the famed Mayan temples of Chichen Itza in Yucatan 15 years ago.

Mexican archeologists, working carefully with equipment that ranged from trucks to toothbrushes, had found no palaces of jade or emeralds. Already excavated: a great pyramid used for sacrificial rites, the magnificent, though ruined, temple of Quetzalcoatl; a double T-shaped "basketball" court used in ancient ceremonial ball games; two eight-ton monolithic statues, among the largest ever found in Mexico. As yet unexcavated, but measured and probed, were several large palaces, some containing as many as 30 rooms.

Quetzalcoatl Vindicated. The finding of ancient Tula is a feather in the pith helmets of two Mexican archeologists who followed their hunch it was there in the face of learned opposition. Alfonso Caso, head of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, rejected the theory that the ancient Toltec capital had already been rediscovered in the famed ruins (also of Toltec workmanship) at Teotihuacan. So did a young, Cambridge-educated archeologist named Jorge Acosta, who had taken up digging after touring Europe as a champion tennis player. The Cardenas government chipped in 3,000 pesos ($621). By the time Archeologist Acosta had disinterred his pyramid, the Mexican government had upped its grant by another 11,000 pesos.

Final identification of Case's and Acosta's diggings as the true city of Tula caused a sudden scrambling and realignment of the picture-puzzle of ancient Mexican history. It proved that the harsh, militaristic Aztecs .earned most of their civilized graces from the gifted Toltecs they had swallowed up 400 years before Cortez arrived. It proved that wandering Toltecs had inspired some of the most magnificent feats of Mayan architecture. Not only boosted were the reputations of Archeologists Caso and Acosta, but that of the bearded god Quetzalcoatl as well. For it proved that the people over whom he ruled deserved their reputation as the most civilized race that ever inhabited the sunbaked valley of Mexico.

The patriarch of scientific archeology, the man who made ancient Egypt intelligible to the modern mind, was at rest with the countless mummies he had disinterred: Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, 89, died last week in Jerusalem.

In 1880, when Sir Flinders first began to dig, the obsessive historical sense of Western civilization was no longer satisfied by such unreliable prehistoric chroniclers as Herodotus and Homer. So, as Schliemann went to Troy and Sir Arthur Evans to Crete, young Flinders Petrie abandoned the Anglo-Saxon ruins of England (his first love) and began digging out the glories of Egypt from the silt of centuries.

Later in Palestine, Petrie made what he called his greatest find in 50 years: the Israel Tablet, which verifies in granite the Old Testament statements that the Jews lived in Palestine 500 years before the Assyrian invasion of 722 B.C. Other archeologists, notably the late great James Henry Breasted, dug as brilliantly into the antique past. But none denied having built on the dramatic ruins uncovered over 62 years by Sir Flinders Petrie.

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