ZAPOTEC, a south Mexican nationality, the most important of a group comprising also Mixtec and half a dozen other peoples, all speaking tonal languages, and occupying a territory roughly coterminous with the state of Oaxaca. The population in this area of the so-called Zapotecan family, of which the Zapotec proper held the south-eastern part, is still overwhelmingly Indian in blood and largely native in speech. The ancient Zapotec were an important people, who probably served as intermediaries of culture between the Maya and the Nahua, but also developed traits of their own. They excelled in finely modeled figure jars of pottery. Their calendar appears to have been that of the Maya and Aztec ; their glyphs have not been read. Two important groups of ruins in Zapotec territory lie at Monte Alban and at Mitla. The former, which appear to be the earlier, comprise terraces and pyramids on a hill, and inscribed stelae and tablets. Mitla has long stone buildings, sunken or on low platforms, with stone columns, veneers of stone cut into geometric patterns, and pictographic frescoes. The population speaking Zapotec numbered 231,000 in 1895; that speaking idioms of Zapotec family, about 450,00o. ZARA, a town on the east coast of the Adriatic, formerly the capital of Dalmatia but now attached to Italy, and included in Venezia Giulia. Italian territory includes an adjacent belt with a total area of 42 sq.m., and a population of 20,324, of whom 13,229 lived within the town in 1931. Zara in this sense forms a small enclave on the coast of the Yugoslav oblast of Split. The town is placed on the north-west end of a small, low-lying peninsula separated by the Canale di Zara from the islands of Ugliano and Pasman. It is about 73 m. N.W. of Split and about 92 m. N. of E. from Ancona, with which it is connected by
steamer. The space between the peninsula on which the town stands and the adjacent mainland forms a natural, deep-water harbour, the entrance to which was in Venetian times blocked by a chain. Surrounded on three sides by the sea the town was rendered still more secure, after its capture by the Venetians in 1409, by the digging of a deep ditch on the fourth side, so as to convert the tip of the peninsula into an island. When the forti fications were reconstructed by Sanmicheli in the 16th century, a gate, the Porta di Terraferma, was erected to guard the single entrance across the ditch on the landward side.
At the end of the loth century Zara passed for the first time under Venice. For four centuries it was bandied about from Venice to Hungary and back again. Finally, in 1409 it was sold by the King of Hungary to the Republic and remained Venetian till the Republic ceased to exist. It was then ceded to Austria, passed temporarily into . French possession, forming part of the short-lived Illyrian kingdom, till in 1814 the French were driven out and it remained Austrian till the end of the World War. Its transfeience to Italy, when the rest of Dalmatia became Yugo slav, was justified by the large Italian element in the population and the continuity of Latin culture and speech.
Of the churches one of the oldest is the secularized S. Donato, probably dating from the early 9th century, and recalling S. Vitale at Ravenna. The cathedral dates from the 13th century and its treasury contains some good examples of Dalmatian silver work.
See T. G. Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria (1887) and G. Dainelli. La Dalmazia (with atlas, 1918).