To the later Aztecs, the Toltecs were the wisest and most skilled people who ever lived, the inventors of civilization itself, ruled from the golden city of Tollan by a priest-king who fled into the sunrise vowing to return. Beneath that legend lies a real Postclassic city, Tula, in central Mexico (c. 900–1150 CE), famous for its giant stone warrior columns, its colonnaded halls, and its skull racks. How much the Aztec dream of Tollan matches the archaeological reality of Tula is one of the genuinely unresolved problems of Mesoamerican history.
The Aztecs believed the greatest people who ever lived had come before them: the Toltecs, master craftsmen and sages of a golden city called Tollan, where cotton grew already colored and ears of maize were as long as a man's arm. In later legend, a priest-king named Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was said to have been driven from Tollan by the god Tezcatlipoca, leaving toward the eastern sea in stories that later became tangled with the disputed idea of a promised return. Aztec kings claimed Toltec blood to prove they had the right to rule, and the very word "Toltec" came to mean something close to "master artist." The trouble is that almost everything the Aztecs told about the Toltecs was written down centuries after Tollan fell, and the real city behind the legend, Tula in central Mexico, was a hard military place of stone giants and skull racks. The golden age may be half a memory and half a myth, and pulling the two apart has defeated scholars for a hundred years.