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The priests were numerous and powerful. They practised fasts, vigils,
flagellations, and many of them lived in monastic seclusion.
The Aztecs, like the Egyptians, had progressed through all the three
different modes of writing--the picture-writing, the symbolical, and the
phonetic. They recorded all their laws, their tribute-rolls specifying
the various imposts, their mythology, astronomical calendars, and
rituals, their political annals and their chronology. They wrote on
cotton-cloth, on skins prepared like parchment, on a composition of silk
and gum, and on a species of paper, soft and beautiful, made from the
aloe. Their books were about the size and shape of our own, but the
leaves were long strips folded together in many folds.
They wrote poetry and cultivated oratory, and paid much attention to
rhetoric. They also had a species of theatrical performances.
Their proficiency in astronomy is thus spoken of by Prescott:
"That they should be capable of accurately adjusting their festivals by
the movements of the heavenly bodies, and should fix the true length of
the tropical year with a precision unknown to the great philosophers of
antiquity, could be the result only of a long series of nice and patient
observations, evincing no slight progress in civilization.
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