To the south-west of this stands the building, in shape a quadrangle, to

which the absurd name of House of Pigeons has been given in allusion to

a series of nine gables, of which eight are still standing, which form a

false front, each gable pierced with thirty rectangular openings in

seven horizontal rows. The whole building is 240 feet long. In the

centre of the front, which looks northward, is an arch 10 feet wide,

leading into what was once the courtyard of the building. The other

wings of the quadrangle are in hopeless ruin. To the south of the House

of Pigeons is another small courtyard enclosed once on the east and west

by buildings, with a mound on the south side up which runs a

well-preserved stairway. At the south-west corner of the Governor's

Palace is a large truncated pyramid between 60 and 70 feet high and

about 270 feet at the base. The top is about 70 feet square, and some 15

feet from it on the north side is a ledge or terrace which suggests that

the buildings which once stood on this mound were similar in design to

those which we have described as still standing on the mound called the

House of the Dwarf.

[Illustration: THE PALACE, UXMAL.]

Around Uxmal no excavations of any moment have been made. The owner of

the land, Señor Don Augusto Peon, very courteously told us that if we

were able to delay our departure he would grant us all facilities for

spade-work among the ruins. Unfortunately we could not alter our

arrangements; but undoubtedly there is a large field for work here,

which will amply reward archæologists in those days when the "dog in the

manger" policy of the Mexican "Jacks in office" is a thing of the past,

and intelligent land-owners such as Señor Peon can assist students in

every way instead of having their hands fettered by absurd Federal

rules. But though no excavation work has been done, many pieces of

sculpture have been unearthed from a surface layer of débris. Such was a

column 5 feet high tapering toward the base, where it had a diameter of

20 inches while at the top it measured 28, and ornamented with two rows

of hieroglyphics. Another sculpture, found by Stephens, is a seat or

couch carved out of a single block of stone and measuring 3 feet 2

inches in length and 2 feet in height. Its design is a double-headed

animal of the jaguar type, but which Stephens thought to represent

lynxes. Its interest lies in the fact that the representation of some

such ceremonial seat was found at Palenque, as we shall presently show.

CHAPTER XII

COPAN AND QUIRIGUA

Time did not allow of, nor indeed had we ever contemplated, a visit to

Guatemala and the ruins of Copan and Quirigua, or to those scarcely less

important ones in the State of Chiapas and around the Usumacinta River.

But these are so intricately connected with the problems of the origin

of Mayan civilisation and with those views which we venture to advance

in a later chapter, that we have thought it best to give here some

account of the results of the exploration and excavation work among

these groups.

The ruins of Copan are situated in the frontier country of Guatemala and

the Republic of Honduras on the east bank of the Copan River, which

flows into the Motagua, finally emptying into the Bay of Honduras near

Omoa. The name Copan seems to be strictly that of a district or

province; but it is now used as the title of a village which has sprung

up among the ruins. Of the history of Copan in the century immediately

succeeding the Spanish Conquest, somewhat confusing accounts are given.

The truth is that north-westward of the ruins, right in the heart of

Guatemala proper, stands a town "Coban," and the past of these two

places would appear to have become a good deal mixed. The Spanish

historian Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzman relates that a town of the

name, which he places in the old province of Chiquimula de Sierras, was

besieged by Hernandes de Chaves in 1530.[6] A desperate resistance was

made by the Indians in defence of an entrenchment formed of strong beams

of timber, the interstices filled with earth, with loopholes for the

discharge of arrows. Finally a Spanish horseman blundered through at one

weak spot and the Indians were routed. The account of this battle cannot

very easily be reconciled with the description of ruined Copan given by

J. L. Stephens and Mr. A. P. Maudslay. Stephens describes it as

surrounded by a wall of cut stone well laid, and of what seems the

incredible height of a hundred feet. But allowing for any exaggeration

of enthusiasm (he was there in 1839, and it was the first Mayan ruin he

had ever set eyes upon), it seems certain that the old Copan was a

powerful and well-fortified city, and Mr. Maudslay is probably right in

his suggestion that it had been abandoned before the Spanish Conquest.

This is certainly suggested, if not actually corroborated, by the only

Spanish account of the ruins extant. Writing at the time of the

Conquest, Licienciado Diego Palacio, an officer of the Audiencia de

Guatemala, reports to King Philip II. of Spain on the 8th March, 1576,

as follows: "I endeavoured with all possible care to ascertain from the

Indians through the traditions derived from the ancients, what people

lived here or what they knew or had heard from their ancestors

concerning them. But they had no books relating to their antiquities nor

do I believe that in all this district there is more than one, which I

possess. They say that in the ancient times there came from Yucatan a

great lord who built these edifices, but that at the end of some years

he returned to his native country, leaving them entirely deserted. And

this is what appeared to be most likely, for tradition says that the

people of Yucatan in time past conquered the provinces of Uyajal,

Lacandon, Vera Paz, Chiquimula, and Copan, and it is certain that the

Apay language which is spoken here is current and understood in Yucatan

and the aforesaid provinces. It also appears that the designs of these

edifices are like those which the Spaniards first discovered in Yucatan

and Tabasco." It is quite certain that Copan was in ruins in 1576,

because Palacio's letter continues, "On the road to the city of San

Pedro, in the first town within the province of Honduras called Copan,

are certain ruins and vestiges of a great population and of superb

edifices and splendour as it would appear they could never have been

built by the natives of that province."

The ruins are, as we have said, on the river-bank, and Stephens

concluded, judging from the dispersal of the stone remains found

throughout the woodlands, that the city had a river frontage of some two

miles. On the western bank the only ruin is one on the top of a mountain

2,000 feet high, and it seems probable that this was an isolated shrine,

and that the city did not extend to the western bank. A very important

feature of Copan--one to which we shall have to refer in a later

chapter--is the absence of all remains of palaces or private buildings

such as we have described at Chichen and Uxmal.

The existing ruins consist of pyramidal structures and terraces, but

apparently without any relics of buildings crowning them. The chief ruin

is that which Stephens calls the temple. It is an oblong enclosure, the

river-wall of which is no less than 624 feet long and varies in height

from 60 to 90 feet. It is built of cut stones from 3 to 6 feet in length

and 1 1/2 broad. The other three sides of this enclosure consist of

ranges of steps and pyramidal structures varying in height, measured on

the slope, from 30 to 140 feet. Near the south-west corner of the

river-wall Stephens found a recess which he suggests was once occupied

by a colossal monument fronting the water. Beyond are the remains of two

small pyramids between which he found traces of a gateway, probably the

chief entrance to the city on the riverside. The south side of the

enclosure has in its eastern corner a huge pyramid 120 feet high on the

slope. To the right of this are other terraces and pyramids with what

was probably a gateway into a quadrangle 250 feet square. Here Stephens

found many sculptured stones, notable among these a series of gigantic

sculptured heads ranged in rows half-way up the side of one of the

pyramids. These he took to be death's-heads, but he afterwards

reconsidered this decision and suggested that they were intended for

apes' heads. For this view he found corroboration in the remains of a

colossal ape carved in stone which lay fallen near by, and which

certainly seems to suggest that the early occupants of Copan may have

reckoned a monkey deity in their mythology. Remarkable, too, was the

carving of a head and bust which appears to be a distinct effort at

portraiture.

Facing eastward, 6 feet from the pyramid base, he found the first of

those many stelae, the upright stones which give Copan its special

interest in the Mayan controversy. We here reproduce his representation

of it. It is 13 feet high, 4 feet wide, and 3 feet deep, and is

sculptured on all four sides from base to summit. It had originally been

coloured, the red paint still adhering in places. Some 8 feet away there

was a large block of sculptured stone, easily identifiable as an altar.

On it was carved, in the front, a full-length figure; on the sides are

hieroglyphics. These stelae and altars are the peculiar features of the

Copan ruins. Nothing like them has been discovered so far in Yucatan,

and from them it is possible to draw certain deductions, as we shall

endeavour to do later. A little further on, Stephens found another stela

of the same size. The eastern side of the enclosure consists of an

almost continuous pyramid-shaped structure, broken here and there by

isolated pyramids. At right angles to it, a confused range of terraces,

ornamented with death's-heads, branch off into the forest. This plan of

building appears to have continued throughout the north side till the

river-wall was again reached.

Stephens says that he found no entire pyramid, each mound consisting of

at most two or three pyramid sides, and joined, Siamese-twin fashion, to

erections of the same kind. The outer side of the pyramidal mound, which

thus appears to have formed a confused and rough continuous border for a

huge square, littered with stelae and their altars, was broken here and

there by stairways, the steps about 18 inches square. These stairs had

originally been painted. The interior of this enclosed space was

occupied by a series of smaller pyramidal mounds and many stelae. One of

the most remarkable of these latter is notable as being, though about

the same height as the last shown, shaped differently, being broader at

the top than at the base.

Near it is a most remarkable altar. Like the stelae, the Copan altars

are monolithic. Each one, Stephens reports, appears to have special

reference to its stela, the carvings differing. The four corners of this

monolith had been carved into ball-shaped feet, upon which the altar

rested. The whole was 6 feet square and 4 high. The top is carved with

hieroglyphics. The four sides are sculptured, each with four human

figures in bas-relief, and it is noteworthy that this is the only

example of such carving found by Stephens; all the stelae and altars

being in bold alto-relief. The west side of the sculptures appears to be

the chief one, for there the principal figures are represented as

addressing each other, while on the other sides the figures are seated

as if mere attendants at a ceremonious meeting between chiefs. It will

be noticed in the pictures reproduced that the figures are all seated in

a peculiar cross-legged fashion, suggestive of nothing so much as the

attitude of the figures on the Buddhist stupas. Each man appears to sit

on a cushion which displays a glyph, probably his name or office.

Between the two chief interlocutors is carved a pair of glyphs. It is

remarkable, as Stephens points out, that the figures do not appear to be

armed. This is quite the exception among Mayan monuments, and if

Stephens is correct in believing that there is no representation of

weapons in any of the ruins at Copan,--and he is corroborated by Mr.

Maudslay, who made a careful survey,--he would seem to be certainly

justified in his conclusion that the ancient inhabitants were not

pre-eminently fighters. We shall show that another most important

conclusion is possible.

Close to this altar Stephens found the ruins of two towers at each side

of a staircase. Half-way up was a pit, lined with stone, 5 feet square

and 17 deep. At the bottom was an opening leading to a chamber 10 feet

long, 5 feet odd wide, and 4 feet high. At each end of the chamber was a

niche. It was clearly a sepulchral vault, and a Colonel Galindo, who, in

1770, was the first man to visit Copan with a view to archæological

investigations, put this beyond dispute by his discovery on the floor

and in the niches of a number of vases and dishes of pottery, more than

fifty of which he declared were full of human bones packed in lime. He

also found several sharp-edged and pointed knives of _chaya_, a kind of

flint, and a small head carved in jade, its eyes nearly closed, the

lower part of the face distorted, and the back symmetrically pierced

with holes. There could be no doubt as to the use of this curious

carving. We have ourselves seen in Yucatan exquisite pieces of jade cut

into face form and pierced. These were talismanic plastrons, worn by the

priests on their breast much as the Lord Mayor of London wears the City

Badge. We shall suggest later that these badges constitute valuable

evidence as to the origin of the building civilisation. In the

reproduction of the elliptical tablet from the palace at Palenque on p.

217, just such an amulet is seen decorating the breast of the deity

there figured. Colonel Galindo also found many jade beads and large

quantities of periwinkle shells. It might be here worth mention that we

ourselves found in a ruin we were examining on Cozumel island, a large

conch shell filled with charcoal which was actually embedded in the

outer wall. Its position forbade the idea of it or the charcoal having

got there by mere chance.

[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF ON SOUTH SIDE OF ALTAR AT COPAN.]

[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF ON WEST SIDE OF ALTAR AT COPAN.]

Just above this sepulchral vault Stephens found a passage-way opening

through the side of the pyramid, and running as far as the river-wall,

where there was an oblong opening which has caused the ruins to be

locally known as _Las Ventanas_ (the windows). The passage-way was just

large enough for a man to crawl through on his stomach. Stephens looked

in vain for any remains of buildings. Juarros,[7] the Spanish historian

of Guatemala, quoting Fuentes, declared that between two of the pyramids

at Copan "was suspended a hammock of stone, containing two human

figures, one of each sex, clothed in Indian style. Astonishment is

forcibly excited in viewing this structure, because, large as it is,

there is no appearance of the component parts being joined together; and

though entirely of one stone and of an enormous weight, it may be put in

motion by the slightest impulse of the hand." For this Stephens also

looked, but in vain, though he found an Indian who declared that his

grandfather had spoken of such a relic. The whole account sounds

incredible.

Stephens discovered the stone quarries of Copan, a range of hills some

two miles north from the river, running east to west. Out of the side of

the hill the pre-Columbian masons had cut the materials for the many

stelae, pyramids, and steps which lay in the plain below. Stephens found

many blocks which had been quarried and then rejected for some defects;

and in one ravine leading towards the river was a huge monolith, larger

than any used in the ruins, which had been left thus half-way on its

journey to the city. How such huge masses of stone were carried over

even two miles of woodland must always remain one of the greatest of the

many puzzles which the erection of the cyclopean Mayan buildings

presents to baffled archæology.

To the south of the enclosure described, Stephens found within terraced

walls a group of stelae and altars. He thinks that these walls and their

statues formed an annexe of the large enclosure which he is probably

right in calling the main temple. The stelae were quite close together

and are of such interest both artistically and archæeologically that we

cannot resist the temptation of reproducing some of them from Stephens's

excellent plates. The monoliths averaged 12 feet in height, and are such

masses of ingenious ornamentation as would arrest attention even if

found as relics of a race the civilisation of which was perfectly

understood. But here we have a series of the most intricate alto-reliefs

undertaken with such success that they can be accurately copied after

many centuries. Stephens found at the Copan quarries blocks of

half-prepared stone with hard flints embedded in them. These blocks had

been rejected by the workmen for the very excellent reason that their

only tools were flint chisels, and with these, of course, they could not

shape smoothly the side of the stone which contained flints. At the back

of one of the stelae Stephens found that flints had been picked out,

leaving holes which formed flaws in the sculpture. Nothing can more

plainly indicate the limitations imposed upon these wonderful artists by

the circumstances of their culture. They were in the Stone Age, but it

was a Stone Age so glorified by their skill that it would put to shame

many modern nations armed with tools of precision. Mr. A. P. Maudslay

visited Copan in 1884, and in the course of his investigations excavated

one of the mounds. He corroborates the statement of Stephens that the

monuments of Copan show no traces of buildings such as are found in

Yucatan. The mound excavated ran almost to a point. On the east side

were the remains of steps. The upper part was formed of rough blocks of

stone interspersed with layers of cement and sand. The lower part of the

mound was formed of stone and earth, and below ground-level, digging 12

feet down, he found nothing but solid earth. Some 6 feet from the top of

the mound he came across a vessel of pottery containing "a bead-shaped

piece of green stone, pierced, with a diameter of 2-3/4 inches; six jade

beads (the remains of a necklace); four pearls and small rough figures

cut out of pearl-oyster shells; the jade whorl of a spindle; some pieces

of carved pearl shells. At the bottom of the pot was some red powder and

several ounces of quicksilver."

A foot or more above the pot Mr. Maudslay found traces of bones, but he

does not say whether they were human or animal. On the ground-level were

more bones mixed with red powder and sand, and a bead-shaped stone 3

inches in diameter. Eight or nine feet below ground-level he unearthed

the skeleton of a jaguar beneath a layer of charcoal. The teeth and part

of the skeleton had been painted red. This is very curious. It is

obvious that the animal had not served as a burnt sacrifice, or the

bones would have been charred. The flesh must have been stripped off and

the painting done before burial. Mr. Maudslay does not explain this

strange find. Might it not be that the animal was sacrificed on the

altar of the neighbouring stela as a dedicatory offering to the god in

whose honour the mound was about to be erected; a kind of consecration

sacrifice which had as its purpose the obtaining of the deity's blessing

on the new undertaking. The flesh may have been eaten or possibly burnt

after it had been removed from the bones, the skeleton being painted red

before entombment as a compliment to the colour of the deity's own

stela. Such burial of a victim after sacrifice to obtain a blessing upon

a new undertaking is a very common rite among savage peoples. Thus the

Dyaks and other peoples of Malaysia killed a slave and buried his body

in the foundations of a house.

In another small mound Mr. Maudslay found fragments of human bones, two

small axes, and portions of a jaguar's skeleton and some animal teeth

which he suggests were dog's, but which were probably jaguar's. In yet

another mound stones carved into death's-heads were found and small

stone serpents' heads. He speaks, too, of figures of jaguars carved on

either side of the stairway of one of the pyramids, and on the top step

"a human head in the jaws of an animal." He believes that he found

traces of glyphs on the facings of the steps; and the edges of many of

the stairways were elaborately carved, usually with entwining snakes.

His reports make it obvious that Stephens had not exaggerated in any

degree the wonders of Copan. It is indeed very doubtful if the Spaniards

at the time of the Conquest ever came across the ruins, though, as

Stephens points out, Cortes in his memorable journey from Mexico to

Honduras must have passed within two days' march of the city. This fact

certainly goes far to prove that in Cortes's day Copan was already

deserted, or he would have heard of it and turned aside to subdue its

cacique. But after all, this is but theorising. The Spaniards may have

seen Copan in all its wonder of carving and paint, and been so little

impressed as to leave us not a line about it. For, as even the ever

amiable Stephens admits, "the conquerors of America were illiterate and

ignorant adventurers, eager in pursuit of gold and blind to everything

else."

The ruins of Quirigua stand on a level plain covered by dense forest, a

little more than half a mile from the left bank of the Motagua River

near En Cuentros, some five miles from the town of Quirigua. They

consist of monuments almost identical in shape and arrangement with

those of Copan. Mr. Maudslay, to whose patient and scholarly researches

there for several years archæology is indebted for the remarkable

detailed account contained in the _Biologia Centrali Americana_, says

the site must have always been subject to inundations, and that the

level of the ground would appear to have been raised since the monuments

were erected.

[Illustration: FRIEZE AT PIEDRAS NEGRAS, USUMACINTA RIVER.

(From a photograph by Herr Maler.)]

[Illustration: STELA AT COPAN, GUATEMALA.]

He describes the ruins as consisting "of numerous square and oblong

mounds and terraces 6 to 40 feet high." Most of them are faced with

worked stone, and approached by steps. In the central space around which

they are grouped stand thirteen carved stelae. Six of these vary between

3 and 5 feet square, and 14 to 20 feet high out of the ground. The

altars in front of these stelae are described by Mr. Maudslay as oblong

or rounded blocks of stone shaped to represent huge turtles or

armadillos or some such animals. The largest altar found by him was

shaped like a turtle, weighed about 20 tons, rested on three slabs, and

was roughly a cube of 8 feet. He says that the carvings on the stelae

and altars are human heads or faces of animals, and that plants or

leaves never occur though there is a free use of plumes and feathers and

occasionally a plaited ribbon. Mr. Maudslay's account supports in the

main Stephens's short account of the place. The stelae the latter

describes as being twice or three times as high as those at Copan, and

always monolithic. One of which he gives a drawing is carved on the

front with the figure of a man, on the back with that of a woman. The

sides are covered with hieroglyphics in low relief just as at Copan.

Another stela stands 26 feet out of the ground, and, as Stephens said,

has probably 6 or 8 feet buried. It is notable as leaning 12 feet 2

inches out of the perpendicular. The side towards the ground is

ornamented with the figure of a man.

As has been said, the general type of the ruins is identical with those

at Copan; but the monoliths, though much larger, are carved in lower

relief, and the ornamentation is distinctly less rich in design.

Stephens's supposition was that Quirigua is older than Copan. Mr.

Maudslay believes that the whole site was once paved. He notes that the

carvings exhibit no weapons. This, as we have mentioned, was specially

remarked by Stephens at Copan. There is much significance in this fact,

though we scarcely think that it justifies the presumption to which it

seems to have led Mr. Maudslay, who in a paper he wrote for _Nature_ in

1892, declares the colossal figures on the stelae of Copan to represent

female deities exclusively.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] _Recordación Florida_--an MS. account of the kingdom of

Guatemala, written in 1690, and still preserved in the city of

Guatemala.

[7] Domingo Juarros, _Historia de Guatemala_, written between

1808 and 1818.

CHAPTER XIII

PALENQUE, MENCHÉ, AND ON THE USUMACINTA

The ruins of Palenque stand shrouded in the dense forest about one

hundred miles south-east of San Juan Batista, the capital town of the

State of Tabasco. Their ancient name is unknown. For years they had been

called by the Spaniardised Indians _Casas de Piedras_ (Houses of Stone).

They lie about eight miles from the village of Palenque, from which they

take their present generally accepted name. Apart from the fact that

they are, beyond dispute, culturally the most remarkable of all the

groups of ruined cities so far discovered in Central America, they have

a very special interest in having been the first "discovered" to

archæology, and the first to fire that train of enthusiastic research

which, during the many years which have elapsed since the first romantic

accounts of them penetrated to Europe, has borne such rich fruit.

The Spanish vandals had taken good care to destroy on the sites of the

newly founded cities, such as Merida and Valladolid, all vestiges of the

ancient grandeur of Mayan buildings. If anybody troubled to remember

that in the earliest years of the Conquest the caciques of Chichen,

Uxmal and so on had proved troublesome foes, there was certainly no one

intelligent or energetic enough to bother himself with a journey to

these dead cities. And so it was that when in 1770 some stray Spanish

travellers stumbled across Palenque, the news of their discovery burst

like a bombshell in archæological Europe. It was not until 1776,

however, that the King of Spain ordered an exploration. On the 3rd of

May, 1787, one Captain Antonio Del Rio was commissioned to investigate

the romantic report of the hidden city. In his official account he

writes that on his first attempt, owing to the thickness of the woods

and a fog so dense that it was impossible for the men to distinguish

each other at five paces, the principal building was completely

concealed from their view.

[Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF PALACE AT PALENQUE.]

After a delay of a few days, occupied by him in collecting several score

of Indians to clear the woods, he was enabled to make a survey. His

written report for some unexplained reason was for years buried in the

archives of Guatemala, not seeing the light until 1822, when the

original MS. somehow fell into the hands of an English traveller who

published it in London in that year. Meantime in 1807, by the order of

Charles IV. of Spain, a Captain Dupaix visited Palenque. It was not

until 1835, twenty-eight years after his expedition, that the report of

Dupaix was published in Paris in four folio volumes at the price of

eight hundred francs.

Before Stephens's investigations the wildest reports as to the extent of

the ruins were current. These varied between sixty miles and twenty

miles. Stephens once and for all gave the lie to these fairy tales, and

showed that the ruins did not cover a square mile. But this fact does

not weigh against the assumption, so soundly based upon the grandeur and

artistic glories of the buildings, that Palenque was once a great and

powerful city; for, as elsewhere, the hundreds of dwellings which

clustered around its temples and palaces were houses of perishable

materials which long ago rotted away in the forest. The largest ruin is

the palace, which stands on an oblong mound 40 feet high, 310 feet long,

and 260 feet wide. This gigantic mound was once faced entirely with

stone. The building on it faces east, and has a frontage of 228 feet, a

depth of 180, and a height of 25. There were fourteen doorways, each

about 9 feet wide. It is of stone throughout, though the whole front was

once stuccoed and painted. The spaces between the doorways were carved

with bas-reliefs. The chief doorway is approached by stone steps. Along

the cornice outside, which projected about a foot, holes had been

drilled through the stone, which suggests that by their means an immense

sun-curtain was sometimes lowered to cover the fourteen doorways. Two

parallel corridors run lengthwise on all four sides of the building, and

it is upon the corridor to the east that all fourteen doors opened.

These corridors are about 9 feet wide. The floors are of cement; the

walls 10 feet high and plastered. The inner walls are broken by

apertures about a foot long, doubtless for the ventilation of the

interior. Some of these window slits were cross-shaped, some T-shaped.

[Illustration: ELLIPTICAL TABLET IN PALACE, PALENQUE.]

From the outer corridor there is but one door leading to the inner

corridor, through which in turn thirty steps lead down to a rectangular

courtyard 80 feet long by 70 feet broad. On each side of these steps are

figures in bas-relief 9 feet odd high. On each side of this courtyard

the palace is divided into apartments, the arrangement of which,

intricate in the extreme, will be seen from the reproduction we make of

Stephens's ground-plan. A second flight of stairs leads out westward

through two corridors, and by more steps to a second courtyard 80 feet

long and 30 wide. So far the arrangements of the palace are much those

of other Mayan buildings, though on a grander scale. But the peculiar

feature is a tower on the south side of the second court. At the base it

is square, and has three storeys. Within it is a smaller tower, separate

from the outer one and containing a staircase also of stone so narrow

that only a small man could ascend. This staircase ends dead against a

stone ceiling, from which the last step is only six or eight inches.

Such a deliberate cul-de-sac stair is so incomprehensible as to defeat

one's efforts to even suggest an explanation. The Chichen Caracol

stairs, which we explored, scarcely in our view offer the same

difficulty, for they did appear to have once opened on to the platform

of an observatory turret. But Mayan buildings are indeed full of

features which are whimsical in the extreme, and suggest that either the

builders were often demented caciques or that buildings such as the

Palenque palace represent the architectural efforts of several

generations of chiefs, and that the later ones by their additions

rendered nugatory, perhaps deliberately, the designs of the first

builders.

East of the tower is another building with two corridors, one ornamented

with pictures in stucco, the centre of its wall bearing a curious

elliptical tablet here reproduced from Stephens's picture. The faces of

the figures are notable for the pronounced profile which is found here,

at Piedras Negras, and at Copan, but as far as we could see not at all

at Chichen or at other of the ruins in Yucatan proper. This tablet is,

Stephens says, the only stone carving in the palace except those already

mentioned in the courtyard. Under it once stood a table. At the end of

the corridor containing it an opening in the floor leads by steps to a

series of subterranean apartments, with windows opening from them above

the ground, thus forming a ground-floor below the level of the

corridors. Here are several more stone tables.

At the extreme south-west corner of the palace, connected with it by a

subterranean passage, is a pyramidal structure, which once had stairways

on all its faces. The sides are very steep and measure about 100 feet on

the slope. The building is 76 feet long and 25 deep. It has five doors

separated by six piers. The front is richly ornamented with stucco

designs and hieroglyphics at each end, ninety-six glyphs in each tablet.

The centre four piers are carved with human figures, two on each side

facing each other. These are very interesting, for they are, we believe,

of a design elsewhere unknown in Central America--representing women

with children in their arms. The front corridor is 7 feet wide and is

divided from the inner corridor by a massive wall having in it three

doors. At each side of the centre door is a tablet of hieroglyphics,

each 13 feet wide and 8 high, and divided into 240 glyphs. Each tablet

projects three or four inches from the wall. In the rear corridor to

which these three doors give admission is another tablet 4 feet 6 inches

by 3 feet 6 inches covered with hieroglyphics. Stephens says that the

building was called by the local Indians a school; but the padre of

Palenque suggested that it was the court-house, and that these

hieroglyphic tablets were the tables of the law. Who shall say?

To the east of this Court of Justice, if such indeed it was, is another

pyramid 134 feet high, measured on the slope, with a building on top. It

has a frontage of 50 feet, is 31 deep, and has three doorways. The whole

front is of stucco ornamentation with hieroglyphics on the piers.

Divided into two corridors, this building is probably the most

remarkable of all Mayan buildings, by reason of the altar tablet in the

inner room. It was 10 feet 8 inches wide and 6 feet 4 inches high, and

consisted of three separate stones. The middle one had been removed

before Stephens's visit. He found it lying near the stream which runs

through the group of ruins. The right-hand stone had been quite

destroyed. Stephens conjectures, probably rightly, that it was covered

with hieroglyphics like that on the left.

This is the famous "Table of the Cross," the most wonderful inscription

so far discovered in the New World; and it is well to say at once that

the title is misleading. The so-called Cross, it is suggested, is a

cosmogonical symbol of the Mayans representing the tree of life growing

out of a cube-shaped world, having as its base a fantastic head. This

may be so, though we venture to think it may have quite another origin,

as we suggest later.

Close to this building are two more which are also obviously temples.

The three have been named Temple of the Cross, Temple of the Cross No. 2

(according to Mr. W. H. Holmes), or of the Foliated Cross (according to

Mr. Maudslay), and the Temple of the Sun. In each is found the same

alleged cosmic sign, the Tree of Life. Each was doubtless a temple. The

second two buildings are almost identical in structure with No. 1. In

the Temple of the Sun is an altar-slab quite as remarkable as that in

the Temple of the Cross. It is 9 feet wide and 8 feet high, and it is

composed of three separate stones.

[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF ON PIER OF TEMPLE, PALENQUE.]

A comparison of these extraordinary carvings shows great similarity in

the pose and dress of the figures; but in that of the Temple of the Sun

the figures stand on crouching fantastic forms, and between them is a

rectangular table curiously adorned and resting on two more crouching

figures. From this table project two crossed lances, the point of

intersection being hidden by a grotesque face which Mayan students have

agreed to regard as a symbol of the Sun. The main figures would seem to

be priests, or perhaps a priest and his assistant. They hold in their

hands what look like human figures for sacrifice. The key to these

wonderful bas-reliefs lies in the glyphs. Professor Forstemann would

have us believe that these are but a compilation of month and day signs,

that, in fact, the tablets are much like those almanacks which a country

grocer presents to his customers, an attractive picture in the middle,

surrounded by the days of the month. We do not believe it, we never

shall be able to believe it; and in the chapter on the glyphs we shall

attempt to show that the Professor has been run away with by his own

theories. It is far more likely that these wonderful calculiform letters

enshrine a dedicatory prayer to the presiding deity of the temple, with

perhaps a full description of the god and his attributes.

[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF ON PIER OF TEMPLE, PALENQUE.]

On the piers at each side of the temple are stone tablets carved in

bas-relief each with a figure, of which we reproduce Stephens's drawing.

They undoubtedly represent priests in full ceremonial dress. The

drawings form their own commentary. Noteworthy in the second is the

appearance of fishes in the headdress, which appears to be composed of a

bird holding a fish. Some fifteen hundred feet to the south of these

temples is yet another pyramid crowned by a building 20 feet long and 80

feet deep, which Stephens found in almost complete ruin. The most

remarkable feature of it is a bas-relief which once represented a couch,

formed of a two-headed jaguar, some portions of the figure once seated

still remaining. Of this couch design we shall have more to say when we

come to our arguments as to the origin of Mayan architecture.

Near the Temple of the Sun, Stephens found the only statue so far

discovered at Palenque. It is 10 feet 6 inches high, 2 feet 6 inches of

which is in the ground, and the sides are rounded while the back is of

rough stone. Many have been the visitors to Palenque during the

sixty-eight years which have elapsed since Stephens explored it, but

little or nothing has been discovered which would justify a reversal of

that famous archæologist's finding, viz.: that the stories of the vast

area of the ruins are mere fairy tales, and that in the buildings here

briefly described we have the relics of the only important stone

structures of a once great and powerful city. That it was desolate at

the time of the Conquest is more than likely, for it is absolutely

certain that Cortes in his march to Honduras passed within less than

thirty miles of its site; and had it then been in that full zenith of

power which the splendour of its buildings irresistibly suggests it once

enjoyed, it is incredible that the Conqueror of Mexico should not have

met its cacique in a pitched battle.

Between seventy and eighty miles to the E.S.E. of the ruins of Palenque,

on the south-western bank of the Usumacinta, are the ruins of Menché.

Some attempts have been made in recent years to identify this with that

Phantom City of which the cura of Santa Cruz del Quiche gave Stephens in

1839 an entrancing account. He (the cura) when young "had with much

labour climbed to the naked summit of the sierra from which, at a height

of ten or twelve thousand feet, he looked over an immense plain

extending to Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and saw at a great distance

a large city spread over a great space, and with turrets white and

glittering in the sun." Apart from the fact that the excellent padre had

probably allowed his imagination to run riot, there is really no ground

for aggrandising Menché at the expense of the neighbouring Palenque,

which was once undoubtedly the larger city. This portion of the

Usumacinta lies within the tribal area of the Lacandone Indians, who

still maintain their independence, and thus it is quite possible that

the city which is to-day represented by the ruins, was inhabited to a

much later date than the cities of Yucatan. M. Charnay visited the ruins

in 1880, and endeavoured to saddle them with the name "Lorillard City,"

in complimentary allusion to Mr. Lorillard, the chocolate millionaire

who had defrayed the chief cost of the French archæologist's tour. The

honour of their discovery really belongs to that earnest and unselfish

archæologist Mr. Maudslay.

The ruins consist of temples and palaces of a construction very similar

to all those buildings which are found at Palenque and around; but

Charnay says they are smaller and less richly decorated than those at

Palenque. They seem for some reason to have suffered severely from

weather-wear, for all trace of outer decoration is gone. The chief ruin

is that of a palace built on a high pyramid in six blocks, forming a

rectangle. Such is the account M. Charnay gives of it, but he states

that though the outline can be traced, the whole of the building is now

in complete ruin. About 150 yards from the river on a pyramid about 120

feet high is a building 68 feet long and about 20 feet deep, which has

three doorways. Its interior is remarkable only for the fact that it

contained a huge stone idol which is unique of its kind. M. Charnay

describes it as "a figure sitting cross-legged, the hands resting on the

knees. The attitude is placid and dignified like a Buddha statue; the

face, now mutilated, is crowned by an enormous headdress of peculiar

style, presenting a fantastic head with a diadem and medallion topped by

feathers ... the dress consists of a rich cape embroidered with pearls,

a medallion on each shoulder and in front, recalling Roman decorations.

The same ornamentation is seen on the lower part of the body, having a

much larger medallion and fringed maxtli. The arms are covered with

heavy bracelets." Around the idol M. Charnay found clay incense-burners

moulded into face forms such as have been unearthed again and again on

the Usumacinta and in Guatemala and which have proved to be in actual

daily use to-day in the temple of the Lacandone Indians. The walls of

this temple M. Charnay describes as being blackened, doubtless from the

smoke of offerings. Above the cornice of the buildings is a stone

lattice-work 14 feet high almost identical in design with that which we

have described in our account of the House of the Pigeons of Uxmal.

Close to this temple is a building 65 feet long by 52 deep. To the

south-west of this on another pyramid is a second temple, noteworthy for

the carved lintels. These represent scenes of sacrifice like those

described at Palenque; but there is more animation in the figures of the

second one, which represents a kneeling priest passing a rope through

his tongue, while over him stands another ecclesiastic, in his hands the

crozier-like wand of office which again and again occurs in Mayan

ceremonial carvings. These lintels, which were discovered by Mr.

Maudslay, were by him with infinite trouble carried to the coast and

shipped to England, and are now in the British Museum among other

exhibits of which he has been the generous donor.

This passing of a rope through the tongue represents a form of worship

of which Sahagun (_Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España_)

writes:--"They pierced a hole with a sharp itzli knife through the

middle of the tongue and passed a number of twigs, according to the

degree of devotion of the performer. These twigs were sometimes fastened

the one to the other and pulled through the tongue like a long cord."

Torquemada also speaks of these penances as occurring in Mexico: "The

priests of Quetzalcoatl provided themselves with sticks two feet long

and the size of their fist, and with them they repaired to the main

temple, where they fasted five days. Then carpenters and tool-workers

were brought, who were required to fast the same number of days, at the

end of which time they were given food within the precincts of the

temple. The former worked the sticks to the required size while the

tool-makers made knives with which they cut the priests' tongues. More

prayers followed, when all the priests prepared for the sacrifice, the

elders giving the example by passing through their tongues four or five

hundred twigs, followed by such among the young who had sufficient

courage to imitate them. But the pain was so sharp that few went through

the whole number; for although the first twigs were thinned out, they

became stouter each time, until they attained the size of a thumb,

sometimes twice as much."

In the neighbourhood of Menché a further group of ruins, those of

Piedras Negras, show abundant signs of the high level of culture which

is associated with Palenque and Menché, as will be seen by the

photograph which we are able to reproduce through the courtesy of the

accomplished and indefatigable field-worker and scholar, Herr Teobert

Maler, to whom, we believe, belongs the honour of being the first to

make known the extent and treasures of this group.

What is abundantly proved by his, Mr. Maudslay's, and other students'

researches in the Usumacinta district is that the whole country around

is rich in ruins, and many more, besides those so far located, may

possibly be discovered in the future. And here a further puzzle presents

itself. Such evidence as exists in the Spanish records seems to point to

the fact that all these cities were in a deserted, or at any rate a

decadent, state on the arrival of the Spaniards. The evidence is not by

any means conclusive, as little or no reliance can be placed on the

Spanish chroniclers, who are silent upon so much else. But such as it

is, it deserves weighing.

Granting for the moment, then, that Palenque and these other centres

were ruins at the Conquest, why was this so? An explanation might be

found in the supposition that the militant Aztecs had made extensive

raids as far south as Honduras, and had proved themselves entirely

superior to the Mayans, scattering and slaughtering them, and, possibly

after a short occupation, had returned northward, leaving the conquered

citizens too broken and fearful to attempt a restoration of their grand

centres, dreading further raids. Dr. Gann, British Commissioner at

Corosal, told us he found in Honduras wall paintings of undoubted Aztec

origin; which discovery would seem to support this view. It certainly

seems to us a more reasonable explanation than the one some students

have adopted, viz. that the cities of the Usumacinta represent an age of

culture between which and that of Northern and North-Eastern Yucatan

stretches a gap of many centuries. Any Aztec raids Honduras-wards would

certainly follow a route well south of Yucatan, and through the

Usumacinta country.

Yet another explanation might be that the victories of Cortes had the

result of driving large bodies of Aztecs southward; that these possessed

themselves of many Mayan cities; and that later, on Cortes advancing

south, they deserted them and took to the dense surrounding woods. It

must also be remembered that even if the Spanish conqueror passed within

eight or ten leagues of such a city as Palenque, and did not hear of its

existence, it might yet well be that it was still inhabited, as none of

the Indians met on the line of march would be likely to volunteer any

information to the hated whites.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ANCIENT MAYANS

There is no field of inquiry in which the imagination of students could

roam further or more uselessly than in the reconstruction of the life of

a vanished people from their ruined monuments. In attempting, as we

shall in this chapter, to place before the reader a concise sketch of

the political, religious, and social life of the Mayans at the time of

the Spanish invasion of Yucatan, we cannot too strongly emphasise our

conviction that the marvellous buildings which we have described in the

preceding pages are not monuments of a vanished people. The Mayan toiler

to-day in the milpas or the henequen fields is, we are convinced, the

lineal descendant of the Mayan architect who was capable of creating a

Chichen or a Sayil.

The history of Yucatan is the history of Egypt save for one fact. When

Europe first interested itself in the architectural wonders of the Land

of the Pharaohs centuries of darkness had overwhelmed the Copts and the

Fellaheen and the arts of their ancestors were entirely lost to them.

But when the white man first set foot in Yucatan the civilisation of her

people was an actual living civilisation, though the key to the origin

of it has yet to be discovered. The half-century which elapsed between

the first discovery of the Peninsula and the establishment of Spanish

authority sufficed to render desolate the mighty cities which covered

its surface, to scatter and decimate its vast populations, to extirpate

and suppress the native religion, and by the substitution of a new

creed, a new polity, and a new social organisation so completely to ring

down the curtain upon the Mayan past that the Indian victims of Spanish

brutality and bigotry seemed separated from their ancestors by a gulf

which even the most remarkable archæological acumen would find it hard

to bridge. But though much archæological acumen has been exercised and

many writers have laboured to aggrandise the Ancient Mayans at the

expense of their descendants, it has really been labour lost. The life

which the Mayans were found by the Spaniards to be living was probably

in its minutest detail the life which they had led for centuries before.

And thus in presenting here a short account of their civilisation,

pieced together from the haphazard writings of those Spaniards who were

not entirely absorbed in the congenial task of massacring and

destroying, we are safe in assuming that we are giving the reader a very

fair and accurate idea of how the builders of even the oldest ruins

lived and loved and died.

Politically Yucatan was divided into a number of provinces, each ruled

by a cacique. These provinces at the time of the Spanish invasion appear

to have numbered nineteen. The power of these caciques within their own

territory was so absolute as to amount to a virtual monarchy; though

kingship in its true constitutional sense would appear to have never

existed in Yucatan. The caciqueship was hereditary, and passed from

father to son. Females appear to have been excluded from succession. If

a cacique died leaving a son who was a minor, his eldest or most capable

brother succeeded as cacique, and actually held the position after the

heir had reached full age; the nephew being obliged to wait until his

uncle's death before he attempted to claim his heritage. If the cacique

left no brother, the priests and chief elders elected a successor who

held the government for his life, the rightful heir only acceding at his

death.

Each cacique maintained a small bodyguard; but the army for the defence

of the State was the whole body of citizens capable of bearing arms. The

cacique himself does not appear to have been commander-in-chief, but

delegated this post to two subjects, one of whom held his military

leadership by inheritance, transmitting it to his son, and the other

being elective every three years. This latter official combined with his

military duties certain sacerdotal functions, presiding at the feast of

the War God, and during his term of office leading a hermit's life,

maintaining complete chastity and abstaining from intoxicating liquor.

The weapons of the soldiers were bows and arrows pointed with stone or

fishbone, stone axes, and lances, swords and daggers of wood hardened by

fire. They carried shields of plaited cane covered with deer-skin, and

wore an armour of thickly woven cotton. Having no horses and no draught

animals of any kind, each soldier had to be commissariat waggon for

himself, and this difficulty of providing food for a long campaign made

the wars short and sharp. Ordinary captives were usually reduced to the

condition of slavery, but the general or cacique who was made prisoner

was sacrificed to the War God as a thank-offering.

The centre of each town or village was occupied by the chief temple,

around which were built the houses of the priests, the palace of the

cacique and those of the chief men. Outside this sacred pale lived the

poorer people in huts of the same type as those inhabited by the Mayans

of to-day. Close to the temple was ordinarily the market-square, where

stood the town hall in which all public business and reunions of the

tribe took place, and justice was administered. Here presided a special

functionary who ordered public festivals and ceremonies, and took the

chair, so to speak, at general meetings of the people. As a matter of

fact he appears to have rejoiced in the name of _Holpop_, which

according to D. G. Brinton means literally "head of the mat," because at

the tribal meetings when the elders squatted round on the mats, the

_Holpop_ sat at the end. He appears also to have been Master of the

Music, and to have had in his keeping the musical instruments of the

tribe--namely the _tunkul_, which seems to have been a small drum of

wood, trumpets of conch-shell and flutes of cane. The _tunkul_, which

produced a melancholy note, was used to summon the people to worship, to

give notice of dances and festive meetings, to call together the

warriors, and as an alarm signal in case of sudden attack. Thus the

_tunkul_ was in a special sense the sacred national instrument of the

Mayans.

Justice was administered in a summary manner by the cacique, who

personally heard plaints and disputes and gave such judgment as he

thought fit. In the matter of damage to property the guilty party was

made to compensate the injured by payment of his own goods. If he had no

property, his relatives had to pay for him. This penalty of fining was

the usual punishment for accidental homicide and unintentional arson and

in the case of conjugal quarrels. Adultery was regarded as a grave

offence when committed with a married woman. Accusation of adultery

having been notified, the cacique, accompanied by the tribal elders,

held a court, when with the greatest solemnity, and in the presence of

the injured husband, the adulterer was tied hand and foot to a post of

infamy. He was then at the disposal of the injured man. The latter could

pardon him if he wished, or could take his life there and then by

smashing in his head with a stone. The woman in fault suffered no bodily

punishment, but was branded with infamy and usually repudiated by her

husband. It is obvious that much respect was shown to women, for the

penalty of death was meted out to any man who was guilty of outrage or

rape, technical or actual. The cacique always condemned the offender to

be stoned, and the penalty was inflicted by the whole village. Nobody,

not even the highest noble, appears to have been able to escape the

rigour of this law.

For murder the penalty was death, either by order of the cacique; or, if

the criminal escaped, he could be pursued by the family of his victim

and killed wherever they found him, his crime thus making him an outlaw.

In the case of murder by a minor, the penalty of death was not inflicted

nor could the injured family pursue him. But he became their slave for

the rest of his life. Unintentional homicide was less rigorously

punished. A fine either in goods or a slave was usually the penalty

imposed. Other accidental injuries, such as the unmalicious firing of

houses or crops, were made good by fining. In the case of intentional

arson, however, the culprit was put to death; and the supreme penalty of

the law was also inflicted on traitors.

Enslavement was the punishment of all robbers, who could only regain

their liberty by restoring the stolen goods and making good the damage.

So severe were the laws as to robbery that no excuse was found in

circumstances of extreme want. The man who stole because he was starving

was reduced to the condition of a slave just the same as the wanton or

violent robber. Robbery and war were the chief sources of recruiting the

ranks of the slaves. But if a theft was committed by a cacique, priest,

noble or official, an exception was made in their favour. They did not

become slaves, but were obliged to submit to a public degradation. The

popular assembly was summoned, and there, before the eyes of all the

people, the culprit was branded on both cheeks, from chin to forehead,

with figures symbolical of his crime, tatooed on in paints with

fishbones.

There were no regular prisons or houses of detention. Indeed they were

not needed, as justice was in all cases summary. Where possible the

offender was brought before the cacique forthwith. If, however, the

arrest took place during the night, or the carrying out of the sentence

had to be delayed for some hours, the criminal was imprisoned in an

enclosure of stakes. If the penalty was death it was executed

immediately, except in those cases where the criminal was reserved for

sacrifice, and then he was kept caged up until such day as the priests

had ordained. A murderer condemned to slavery became the property of one

of the chief men, if there was no kinsman of his victim to whom he could

become servant.

There was a very marked differentiation of classes among the Mayans.

There were the nobles, the priests, the people, and the slaves. The

children of these latter inherited their parents' status and _ipso

facto_ became slaves. A free man who married a slave woman lost his

freedom. Thus were class distinctions sternly maintained. Even sexual

intercourse between a free man and a slave woman was severely punished

on the first offence, and, if repeated, the man lost his liberty and

became a slave to the owner of the girl. There appears to have been a

regular slave-market in each large Mayan city. The Spanish chroniclers

endeavour to denigrate this system of servitude, declaring it to be a

cruel debasement of human beings to the position of beasts of burden.

But though all slavery is detestable, there seems to have been little or

no cruelty in the system in vogue among the Mayans, and it is quite

obvious that it was untainted by that basest of all advantages which are

taken of a slave class--namely, the using of them for immoral purposes.

Spanish writers should recollect, in view of this very black page of

their own history, a homely little proverb which begins "those who live

in glass houses."

As has been said, the Mayan city had as its centre an open space where

stood the temple and the chief houses. Thence branched off paths (they

were not roads) connecting this central plaza with the houses of the

nobles and middle class, the outlying suburbs of the city being occupied

by the poor and the slaves. The richer people lived in stone houses, but

those able to afford these were always few, and the average Mayan city

consisted of huts built just as they are to-day by the modern Mayans;

palm-thatched, oval-shaped enclosures of stakes bound together by lianas

and sometimes plastered over with earth. The huts were of various sizes

and shapes. The majority were oval, some were nearly round with a

diameter of twenty-five feet, while a very few were rectangular. They

were often divided into two apartments, a sleeping and a living room.

There was no attempt at or need for foundation, the natural earth

forming the flooring, as it does in the huts to-day. Each hut stood in

its own garden, in which were cultivated plum-trees, the _mamey_ and the

_sapota_ for their fruits, and other trees and shrubs, possibly a little

cotton and henequen, and such flowering plants and sweet-scented herbs

as wormwood, sweet basil, white and violet irises, and a small white

flower, much like the English jasmine and strongly perfumed, which one

sees growing everywhere in the woods of Yucatan to-day. Outside each

city were the clearings devoted to agriculture, the chief products being

maize, frijoles or black beans, a kind of pumpkin, sweet potatoes,

cotton, and maize of different kinds. When the harvest was abundant it

was stored in granaries as a reserve for bad years.

The Mayans had few domestic animals. They kept turkeys, which were

indigenous to Central America, and they probably early domesticated the

wild pig or peccary. They had a type of dog which one chronicler

declares was incapable of barking, though an excellent hunter. These

dogs were often fattened to form a dish at the feasts, being regarded as

a great delicacy. The women and children appear to have made pets of the

small Yucatecan racoon, the _coati_ or _pisotl_, as the Indians call it,

and birds were tamed and kept.

The Mayan family, irrespective of sex and age, all slept in that portion

of the hut that was set aside as a sleeping apartment. They slept on

beds of rushes loosely strewn or woven into mats. The hammock was

unknown in Yucatan until the arrival of the Spaniards. It is a very

common mistake to believe that the hammock was indigenous to Yucatan.

Columbus is the first to mention the hammock, and he found it among the

West Indians. It is said to have originated in San Domingo; but whether

this is so or not, it is quite certain that the Mayans did not sleep in

hammocks until the Spaniards introduced the custom. These Mayan rush

beds were sometimes raised from the ground on a sort of rough table made

of sticks bound together and supported on four legs. In the poorer huts

this is quite a common form of bedstead to-day. As bed-clothes they had

cloaks of cotton of varying degrees of thickness according to the wealth

of the family.

The farm lands belonging to the city were cultivated by the people in

common. A special portion of these public lands was set apart each year

for the support of the cacique and his family, and it was his subjects'

duty to cultivate and reap his crops and carry the harvest to his

granaries. A like apportionment of land was made to the highest nobles

and functionaries of the State. Hunting grounds were also allotted to

the cacique and his chief nobles, and anybody trespassing on these was

punished. The Mayans were great hunters, going out in large parties into

the woods after attending at the temple and praying for good sport from

the gods of the woodland. The quarry were the several birds of the

pheasant family which haunt the Yucatecan woods, the marvellously

beautiful ocellated turkey and other members of the gallinaceous family,

deer, rabbits, the wild pig and, last but not least, the jaguar. A tithe

of the "bag" was presented to the caciques. Of fisheries, where

available, the cacique and his nobles also got the pick. Fish were

abundant, as they are to-day, along the whole coast of the Peninsula,

and the Mayans caught them with nets or, when the water was low, by

shooting them with arrows. The fish were dried in the sun, and thus kept

for many days, and carried twenty or thirty leagues into the interior.

The Mayans also hunted the shark, manatee, and the turtle. The manatee

they hunted with harpoons, wading out into the estuaries and following

it when wounded in their canoes. It was valued for the sake of its fat

as well as its flesh. Before starting out to fish they made supplication

for good luck in one of the temples which it was the custom to build for

this purpose on the beach. Those caciques who held territories on the

coast obtained salt from the saline lagoons, which are found in many

places on the coast of Yucatan. At the end of the dry season, when these

marshes were nearly waterless and it was possible to cross them on foot,

expeditions were made for the collection of the salt which formed a

crystal crust on the mud.

Thus it is obvious the condition of the ancient Mayans was far from

being an unhappy one. They had plenty to eat and they had not to labour

much to obtain that plenty. The race was what it is to-day, healthy and

strong and free of disease. The men were fine examples of muscular

development, and the women were often quite beautiful, even according to

a European standard, and were certainly in youth objects of grace and

sweetness. But the Mayans did not leave well alone, and were in many

ways the victims of cruel fashion or foolish superstition. Thus it was

regarded as a mark of the highest rank for girls to be cross-eyed, and

Mayan mothers cut their daughters' hair on their foreheads so as to hang

down over the eyes and make them squint. The heads of children of high

rank were often flattened, and huge earrings of stone were worn; while

the septum of the nose was pierced and adorned with a spindle of stone

or a feather. The habit, too, which the Mayan woman still has of

carrying her youngster astride her hip tended to create bow-leggedness.

The Mayans wore no hair on the face at all. They daubed their cheeks

with a red earth on occasions of ceremony and when going into battle; at

which time their only ordinary garment the wide loin-cloth (Mayan _Uit_)

was supplemented, at any rate in the case of caciques and nobles, by

long square-cut cotton mantles fastened on the shoulders. Mr. E.

Thompson has given a good picture of a chief dressed for festival or

war. He writes: "A penanche or frontlet encircled his forehead, above it

waved plumes, while from beneath it on each side the long black hair

fell until nearly touching his shoulders. Perforating the lobes of his

ears were huge round ear ornaments, generally of the precious green-jade

stone. His arms were bare save for armlets and bracelets. A richly

worked loin-cloth protected his loins, while his legs were covered with

leggings of quilted cotton elaborately worked and coloured, fastened in

front by a series of rosette-like ornaments. Two-thonged sandals

protected his feet, while the mace of authority, the _acatl_ or dart

sling, and the terrible two-handed serrated sword of obsidian or flint

were his weapons. His large round shield was painted with his heraldic

devices." The dress of the priests was still more elaborate, and in

their case at least was substituted for the cotton robe a deer or jaguar

skin. This is clearly seen in the plates reproduced from Stephens on

pages 220 and 221.

The women wore the chemise-like garment which all Mayan women wear

to-day, with the headcloth we have previously described. They smeared

and scented their bodies with an unguent made of a favourite resin, and

their long hair, parted in the middle, was worn either in a thick plait

or loose over the shoulders. The Mayan woman was as much the head of the

domestic household as members of her sex are in civilised countries. The

chief food of the Mayans was always maize, with which the housewife made

_atole_, a thick porridge mixed with honey, still a favourite dish of

the Indians to-day. This and the tortillas formed the morning meal.

Sometimes a mess of ground black beans was added. There were two meals a

day, the chief one being the evening meal, when venison, birds, and

fresh or salted fish figured in the menu of the richer people. The

family did not eat together: the men having their meal separately from

the women. The Mayan drinks consisted of a maize-water called _keyem_

and fermented liquors made of honey, fruits, and pepper.

Marriage was an important matter among the Mayans, and the arrangements

were left in the hands of the parents; sometimes in the hands of a

professional matchmaker. A union having been arranged, the day of the

ceremony was made the occasion for a great feast. There seems to have

been a great deal of poetry about the Mayan nature, for flowers figured

largely in the decorations and the Mayan word for marriage is poetical

and allegorical in the extreme: _Kamnicte_--literally, "the reception of

the flower of May." The actual ceremony appears to have been nothing

more than the formal handing over of the bride to the groom by the

priest, after he had satisfied himself that they knew their own minds.

Thereafter there were feasting and dancing, lasting well into the

evening, generally ending in the fermented drink being far too much for

the men of the party, who had to be helped home to their huts by their

wives and daughters.

After the wedding the bridegroom lived with his father-in-law for five

or six years, working for him. This appears to have been a custom very

strictly enforced, the son-in-law thus repaying with his personal

service the honour granted him by being admitted to the family. If the

young husband refused this personal service, he was ignominiously

expelled from the house and the marriage was dissolved. The marriages of

widows and widowers were very simple affairs. There was no feast,

comparatively no religious ceremony, and no gathering of relatives. A

widow had merely to receive a widower in her house and give him food,

for a legal marriage to be constituted. The visiting lists of old and

undesirable widows must have been very limited indeed. One wonders

whether the elder Mr. Weller could have found language to express his

views at this terrible facility. No doubt the Mayan "mere man" learnt,

as did the old coach-driver, to "beware of widows." But every cloud has

its silver lining, and if the Mayan became the property of a

neighbouring widow by simply taking a cup of afternoon tea with her, he

had really only himself to blame if he found his fetters irksome. For

it appears that he had only got to walk off in order to dissolve a union

of which he had wearied.

Little or no trouble was taken over the education of children, who,

girls and boys, ran wild and naked till about their fifth year. At

puberty the sexes were strictly separated; the girls being confined to

their parents' huts, and the boys going to live in a large house where

all the unmarried youths dwelt in common like soldiers in a barracks.

Here they lived a life of their own, having little or nothing to do with

the older men. As soon as a youth married, he took equal rank with the

fathers of families; but it was only nominally equal, for a

characteristic of the Mayans was the great respect shown to age, and the

younger men were expected to defer to their elders in all matters. The

youths living in the communal house were distinguished by their

face-paintings of black, in contrast with the red used by the grown men.

Men bore their parents' name; but the maids appear to have been, until

married, practically nameless. For they were not entitled to bear their

fathers' names. In the matter of inheritance, too, they were passed

over, the property of their father, in default of his leaving sons,

passing to their uncles or nearest male relatives.

Indeed no relationship was traced through the female line; and while

marriage was prohibited with any relative who bore the paternal name,

there were no restrictions as to unions with those on the mother's side.

Marriage was forbidden between a man and his sister-in-law, the widow of

his brother, his step-mother, and the sisters-in-law, aunts, and sisters

of his mother. Though polygamy was apparently never approved by the

Mayans, they repudiated their wives on the most frivolous pretexts,

forming a series of new unions. This fickleness seems to have developed

a shrewishness among Mayan women, who, usually docile and obedient,

avenged themselves upon their husbands for the least infidelity by

personal violence, scratching their faces and tearing out their hair.

After all, women are much of a muchness all over the world; but, apart

from these very natural outbursts of passion, the Mayan women really

appear to have been model wives and mothers and to have devoted

considerably more attention to the education of the girls than the

fathers did to that of the boys.

Mayan women do not appear to have taken part in the sacrifices at the

temples, whether of human victims or otherwise. The ceremonial dances,

too, which appear to have often been of an indecent character, were

never attended by them. Indeed it appears that the sexes rarely if ever

danced together. The Mayans were passionately fond of dancing, which was

of two kinds: the sacred dances at the temples and the public dances on

occasions of festival or ceremony. One dance only, called _Naual_, there

was which was danced by men and women together. Otherwise the women

danced separately from the men, as they ate separately from them. The

Mayan women indeed seem to have borne themselves modestly in every way,

and drunkenness, the greatest vice of the men, was almost unknown among

them.

The Mayans appear to have been, at any rate in later times, great

traders. Cortes encountered them trading round the coasts of the West

Indian Islands, and they certainly trafficked with the tribes of Mexico

and Honduras. Trade was carried on principally by means of barter. Their

exports were salt, cotton cloth, dried fish, and resins; their imports,

the cocoa bean, stone beads, nephrite stone from the highlands of

Mexico, mineral paints and obsidian, of which they made knives or

lance-heads. From Guatemala, too, they got jade. There may have been

also a traffic in slaves. There was no standard coinage, for metals were

almost unknown; but more as counters than as money were used the cocoa

bean, tiny bells, and rattles of copper and stone beads. Sales do not

appear to have been evidenced by writings. One chronicler states that a

bargain, especially in the sale of slaves, was clinched by the two

contracting parties drinking together before two witnesses. The Mayans

had many industries, chief among them being those of the potters and the

carpenters. The men who carved the wooden, or moulded the pottery idols,

lived under severe rules, passing a hermit's life in a hut on the

outskirts of the city, dividing their time between work and fasting. To

them once a day food was taken by a member of their family, but it was a

strictly vegetable diet, as all flesh was forbidden them. A continuous

vigil was enjoined upon them until each special task was complete.

The Mayan doctors and medicine men treated their patients with herbs and

enchantments. They were in much request at confinements and in cases of

snake-bite. They were also employed to divine the future and to

pronounce a benediction on new houses.

As we have said, land was held to be common property. There was no

strictly proprietary right. Its products belonged in each case to the

first occupier; but occupation itself gave but a precarious right which

lasted only for the full term of one agricultural season. After harvest

the land reverted to public use. This community of land was traditional

among the Mayans, and was doubtless largely due to the character of the

soil, which did not permit of its being cultivated more than two years

running. After two harvests it was exhausted, and had to be allowed to

lie fallow. The lands of the caciques and nobles were cultivated by

slaves; but the common people helped each other in their sowings and

harvestings.

The Mayans were always--they are to-day--a laughter-loving race. It is

the easiest thing in the world to make one of them laugh, and their

merriment is from the heart, an ingenuous joy in life, a child's glee.

And thus every important event in their lives, public or private, was

taken advantage of as a fitting occasion for a dance or a feast. Public

feasts were given by the caciques or in their honour. At these banquets

much ceremony was observed, and, when departing, each guest was

presented with a beautifully woven cotton mantle, a carved wooden stool,

and a painted drinking-gourd. These guest-gifts were as much an

essential part of the entertainment as they are in Japan, where indeed

they take an even more practical and rather embarrassing form: for the

happy diner on getting into his rickshaw may as likely as not find a raw

fish wrapped in tissue paper or a dainty Satsuma bowl filled with lily

bulbs packed away there for his delectation during his journey homeward.

At the Mayan feasts rude mummeries were often presented to amuse the

banqueters. These as often as not took the form of crude mystery plays,

and were of course supplemented by the music of the _tunkul_ and reed

flutes. Dancing was what the Mayans liked best; even to-day they will

dance from sunrise to sundown if they get the chance. There were set

dances assigned for every ceremony, public or private, in the Mayan

city. The two chief dances were the dance of _canes_ (Mayan _lomche_)

and the dance of flags. The first was a dance by four youths painted

black from head to foot, and adorned with feathers and garlands. It

lasted all day, with short intervals for drinking and eating. In the

dance of banners several hundreds took part.

The Mayans had no cemeteries. They buried their dead or burned them; but

they had no common burial grounds. Corpses were usually buried inside

the huts, which were thereafter taboo and abandoned. This was the

custom for the ordinary citizen; the chiefs and the priests were buried

in sepulchral mounds such as we have before described. In cases of

cremation the ashes were collected, placed in urns of clay or wood,

buried, and small mounds erected over them. Sometimes, in the case of

the very great, the urn formed the nucleus for a temple which was built

over it. Sometimes, instead of urns pottery figures were made and the

ashes deposited in these, which were then placed in the temples.

Sometimes, before burning, the scalp of the defunct was stripped off;

part of the body was burnt and part buried, the ashes being put in an

image of wood through the top of the head, which had been left open for

the purpose, the image being then completed by the placing of the scalp

on it as a cover.

The Mayans appear to have believed death to be caused by evil spirits,

and if the medicine men with their herbs and their charms could do

nothing, the afflicted relatives showed their grief by sitting round in

silence awaiting the fatal moment, convinced that the sick man was about

to be taken possession of by a devil. Mourning lasted for many days and

nights and took the form of wailings and groanings. The hut was usually

abandoned, the ground around being left uncultivated for many years as a

sign of mourning. In cases of burial the corpse was shrouded and the

mouth was filled with ground maize, and with it in a vessel were placed,

as a provision for the needs of the dead in the next life, a supply of

the small stones or beans which served as money. There were usually

added some objects indicative of the rank or occupation of the deceased:

with the priests sacred books, with the medicine man his stone charms,

and so on.

The Mayans believed in the immortality of the soul, and in future

punishment and reward. Their heaven was a happy hunting ground where

life was a continual round of pleasure. The chief characteristics of

their hell were perpetual hunger and cold. Over this lower world they

imagined a sovereign-devil ruled, whom they called _Hun Ahau_. The

Mayans were essentially polytheistic, and they worshipped many gods and

goddesses, each with different attributes, the idols of which, made of

stone, wood or pottery, were adored in the temples. There were also

family gods which had their place in the houses, and which were

bequeathed as heirlooms by the fathers to their sons.

Despite these many deities, the Mayans seem to have retained a belief

in an abstract Supreme Being whom they called _Hunab Ku_, "The One

Divine." He was regarded as omnipotent and was represented by no idol.

To him was attributed the creation of the world and of all living

things; and he had a son, _Hun Itzamna_, "Dew of the morning," a Solar

deity, dwelling in the Eastern sky. He was alleged to be the inventor of

the Mayan alphabet. A lesser god, _Cum Ahau_, thought by some writers to

have been the tapir deity, appears to have been much confused, if not

actually identified, with Itzamna. Waldeck, in his _Voyage pittoresque

dans l'Yucatan_ (1838), says he recognised the tapir snout on various

masks and statues at Palenque, and adds that he found the animal still

venerated by the Indians. Landa says the tapir was only found on the

western shore of Yucatan near the Bay of Campeachy. The myth of the

tapir would thus seem to have been imported from Tzental territory,

Chiapas and Tabasco. D. G. Brinton believes the tapir came to be a

symbol of the Solar deity Itzamna, despite its dull swamp-loving ways,

through an ikonomatic method of writing. The Maya for tapir is _tzimin_,

and thus, due to a similarity of sound with i-tzamna, the animal was

selected as the god's symbol. It looks as if Dr. Brinton were confusing

cause and effect here.

The principal minor deities were the gods of War, Poetry, Music, and

Trade; the goddesses of Painting, Medicine, Virginity, and Weaving. The

Mayans believed that the earth was held in position by four great forces

whose homes were situated in the four points of the compass. These

forces were worshipped as controllers of the winds and as storm gods.

There was also a god of Agriculture, _Chac_. He was believed to have

lived on the earth as a giant. Mayan mythology was much affected, too,

by ancestor worship, the chief legendary hero being _Cuculcan_ (Cocol

Chan), "feathered serpent," who, it is possible, may be identified with

the Mexican _Quetzalcoatl_. In addition to these many gods in common,

the tribes had gods peculiar to themselves. Thus at Campeachy a god of

Vengeance, _Kinch Ahau Haban_, was worshipped with human sacrifice; and

at Cozumel _Tel Cuzaan_, whose idol had the figure of a man, the legs

representing the wings of a swallow, and _Hulneb_, who was represented

with an arrow in his hand, were deities peculiar to that island.

The Mayan priests were greatly feared. Their influence was profound, as

is not surprising when one recollects that they monopolised all

learning in a race which was practically illiterate. The most popular

and the most venerated of these priests were the _Chilans_, exorcisers

of spirits and diviners of the future. With them were associated lower

orders known as _Chaques_ and _Nacomes_. The former were four old men

annually elected to an office which was equivalent to the Christian

sacristan. The latter acted as the assistants at the sacrifice. The gods

were worshipped by fastings, by vigils, by continence, by the burning of

copal and the offerings of flowers and scented herbs, and, of course, by

sacrifice. Sacrifices were generally of animals. Self-mutilation, the

piercing of ears and lips, the lacerating of tongues and other

self-inflicted tortures, formed part of the ritual. During sacrifices

women and girls were excluded from the temples. In each temple were two

stones of sacrifice, one in the holy of holies and one in the vestibule.

The solemnities surrounding human sacrifice were extraordinarily

elaborate.

The year of the Mayans began on the 16th of July, when the principal

feast, that of the New Year, was celebrated, preceded by a period of

fasting which varied in length in different localities. The whole

population took part in this festival, which was in the nature of a

public holiday. On the 22nd of August were celebrated the feasts of the

priests. In every Mayan festival a functionary was elected who presided

over the ceremonies other than those of the temples, and who provided

the banquets. This official was elected annually. Following immediately

after the feasts of the priests was kept the feast of the medicine men.

On the 1st of September the feast of hunters occurred, and on the 12th

that of fishers. On the 4th of October was the feast of bees, with which

was associated no kind of sacrifice; the occasion being evidently one of

Mayan "sweetness and light." The 1st of November and the following five

days were dedicated to the festival of Cuculcan and the memorialising of

the legendary origin of the Mayan race. This festival appears to have

been only local.

[Illustration: CARVING OF JAGUAR, CHICHEN.]

[Illustration: HEAD OF COLOSSAL FIGURE, CANCUN.]

In December there were three feasts--one in honour of all the

goddesses, a sort of All Saints' Day; one a flower festival; and one a

dedication of idols. At the first the custom was for everything to be

painted green, from the service-book of the priest to the housewife's

distaff and the agricultural implements of the men. The lads and lasses

took a special part in the ceremonies of the day, being collected in the

temple, when the priest gave each child nine playful blows on each

joint, praying that the goddesses might grant them dexterity and success

in all they undertook in after-life. During January the _Chaques_ or

priests' assistants had their special day, which was also the occasion

for the medicine men to give their chief prognostications, for the

repair of the temples, and for the writing of the mural inscriptions

recounting the chief events of the past year. In February the hunters

had another celebration, but this time a fast, not a feast, when

offerings were made by them of the beasts and birds that they had

hunted. Festivals of agriculture were celebrated in April and May, the

chief features of these harvest thanksgivings being the offerings of the

first-fruits of the crops. The last feast of the Mayan year was that of

the War-God, _Pacumchac_, which was kept in the month of May or June.

This was celebrated always in the capital city of a caciqueship. There

were five days and five nights of preparation; and then sacrifices to

the God, followed by orgies of eating and drinking which were continued

without much cessation until the New Year, a period of nearly two

months. Thus it is not surprising to learn that none but the richest men

in a province could afford to be elected to the very onerous post of

"patron of the ceremonies," who had to foot the bills for these

gargantuan feeds.

CHAPTER XV

WHO WERE THE MAYANS?

At the beginning of the last chapter we stated it as our conviction that

the marvellous buildings which we have described are not monuments of a

vanished race. The Mayans who to-day inhabit Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco,

Guatemala, the Hondurases, and sporadically Southern Mexico, are

undoubtedly the lineal descendants of the building Mayans.

Who, then, were these Mayans?

Either they were totally unrelated to the peoples on each side of them

inhabiting North and South America (from whom they were so strangely

differentiated by their astonishing skill as architects) and invaded

Central America, bringing with them from their cradle-land a knowledge

of building; or they were akin to all the other tribes of American

aborigines, and derived their building capacities from outside sources.

We believe that the latter is the truth; and in this chapter we shall

endeavour to show what their affinities with the other peoples of

America were, following this up by an inquiry into the question of the

origin of their architecture.

In the comparison we drew in the last chapter between Egypt and Yucatan,

we dwelt on the fact that, while in the former the students of history

and archæology found a land which for centuries had been overwhelmed

with an intellectual darkness so complete that the people had forgotten

they had ever had a civilisation, in Yucatan an actual living

civilisation was found by the Spaniards. But the impenetrable darkness

which shrouded Egypt's past proved really a blessing to those who set to

work to piece together the ancient national life. Once the key to the

mystery was discovered in the Rosetta Stone, students could go steadily

ahead, undistracted by the will-o'-the-wisps of legend and tradition.

Not so in Central America, where every earnest inquirer, whether he

would or not, has found himself befogged by a myriad historical fairy

tales.

The majority of those who have striven to throw light on the Mayan

problem have been about as successful as the boy who tried to find the

end of the rainbow by walking towards where it seemed to rest on the

hillside. It was a long journey they had before them, and they did not

bother to think, but rushed into Dame History's stable and vaulted on to

the back of the horse Tradition. He is certainly a most attractive

mount: a superb animal, yet quiet to ride and drive. Just, in fact, the

easy-going, well-fed, showy park hack, from the well-worn saddle of

which the most inexpert rider need fear no falls. There is a raw,

nasty-tempered creature in the next stall, but nearly every one has

fought shy of him. This is the horse Facts, as hard as his name, with a

mouth like iron, and the very devil in his rolling eye.

Just like the park hack he is, Tradition has ambled with its riders up

the row and down the row, and carried them nowhere. We will try to

saddle Facts and see where he will take us.

The horse Tradition has been taught one trick. He takes the low Toltec

fence like a practised hunter; and his delighted riders put him at it

again and again, never tiring of taking their turn at clearing it on the

back of their noble mount.

"Toltec" has become the password, the shibboleth which admits one to the

freemasonry of Mayan archæology. Without it you are a lost soul, a

heretic fit only for the rack and stake of the archæological

Inquisitors. Among the good people who worry round the Mayan problem,

this Toltec rubbish has become a veritable bogy. We are now going to do

our best to "lay" this spook once and for all.

But first, what is the Toltec theory, to which whosoever will attain

archæological Nirvana must subscribe his "Credo"?

The Toltecs are a people who dropped from the clouds into Mexico at or

about the seventh century of our era, bringing with them building

specifications, and, being mysteriously possessed of a high

civilisation, dotted Mexico and the nearer parts of Central America with

marvellous palaces and temples. Tradition has it that they came to

Mexico (no one bothers to say whence) in 648 and founded the city of

Tula, supposed to be identical (in site at least) with the present town

of that name, about forty miles to the north of Mexico City. They

flourished for many centuries, increasing and spreading over the whole

of Mexico, numbering at the height of their prosperity some four or five

millions. Through famine, pestilences, and wars waged on them by other

nations of the north they gradually diminished and were finally driven

down into Chiapas, Guatemala, and Yucatan. During this enforced

emigration they are supposed to have built the city of Palenque and

those on the Usumacinta in Tabasco; the many buildings found in Western

Guatemala and Southern Yucatan. Finally they reached Chichen Itza,

whence they later migrated down the eastern coast of Yucatan to Copan

and Quirigua in Eastern Guatemala.

A minor controversy has raged around the question of the site of their

cradle city, Tula. Some theorists have held that it was somewhere on the

coast: they generously give you the whole eastern seaboard of Mexico

from which to choose. One of the enthusiastic Tulaites, deeming it well

to hedge, suggests three possible sites, one on the Pacific coast,

another on the Gulf of Mexico, and a third on the Atlantic coast of

Guatemala, south of Honduras. Toltec bogy or not, this egregious

theoriser has at least the satisfaction of knowing that with three sites

so far apart he cannot very well help being on the right coast.

The plain truth is, as we wrote earlier, that this Toltec theory

represents a myth bred of a confusion of historical facts which, if

critically examined, flatly contradict it. In his _Myths of the New

World_ (1868), the late D. G. Brinton, than whom no one has given a more

wholehearted and enlightened attention to the problem, writes: "The

story of Tula and its inhabitants the Toltecs, so currently related in

ancient Mexican history, is a myth and not history." In a paper entitled

"_Were the Toltecs an Historical Nationality?_" read before the

Philosophical Society of America on the 2nd of September, 1887, provoked

by a monograph written by M. Déesiré Charnay to defend the theory, he

wrote: "As a translation of this work has been recently published in

this country, it appears to me the more needful that the baseless

character of the Toltec legend be distinctly stated.... What Troy was to

the Grecian poets the fall of Tula (the Toltec capital) was to the

singers and story-tellers of the Anahuac, an inexhaustible field of

imagination for glorification and lamentation.... Let it be understood

hereafter that whoever uses these names in an historic sense betrays an

ignorance of the subject he handles, which, were it in the better-known

field of Aryan or Egyptian lore, would convict him of not meriting the

name of a scholar."[8]

The shortest way of dealing with this farrago of myth is to take the war

at once into the enemy's camp. Let us take the point upon which all the

Toltec enthusiasts agree, namely that the Toltecs came "from the north."

Now let us look at this vague north, and see whether there exist in that

direction any such traces as we should expect these highly civilised

Toltecs to have left behind them. No; there are none. Scour that north

as vigorously as you will, you find nothing save the ruins in Arizona

and Colorado, which are mere heaps of unmortared stones and of such

crude workmanship as to date themselves (even to the satisfaction of the

most shortsighted inquirer) well into historic and post-Spanish times.

There are no actual building evidences, then. Let us next see whether a

study of the tribes massed from earliest times in that vague north will

help us at all. Let us review the groupings of the barbaric tribes which

inhabited America north of Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest,

and see whether we can find the smallest ethnic loophole for these

Toltecs and their civilisation, almost rivalling that of Egypt, to have

wriggled through. Taking the north-west first, the particular quarter

towards which all good Toltecites gaze with awe as being the direction

from which the Toltecs came, what do we find? From time immemorial this

north-west had been inhabited by the vast Athapascan stock, stretching

from the Canadian Rockies down to Mexico. One of their largest tribes,

the Shoshonees, occupied North-West Mexico. Of these Athapascan peoples

it has been written, "They are nearer the brutes than probably any other

portion of the human race." It is obvious that there is no comfort for

the Toltecites in this direction.

Well, let us take the north-east. Who lived there? The Apalachians lived

there, "a loose confederation," says Brinton, "embracing most of the

nations from the Atlantic coast quite into Texas." The majority of the

tribes forming this family, such as the Creeks, the Choctaws, and the

Seminoles, were nomadic hunting peoples, a few only stationary, and

those with no record of any civilisation. The Apalachians then are as

hopeless as a source of comfort for the theorists as the Athapascans.

Wedged in between the Athapascans and the Apalachians were the

Algonkins, essentially a hunting race of strictly nomad habits. Thus the

three great peoples who formed the impenetrable ethnic frontier of

Mexico at the time of and no doubt long anterior to the Conquest, are

clearly seen to have been uncultured peoples, their only dwellings the

wigwam, their chief occupation the chase, redoubtable fighters but

undistinguished by those "victories of peace" which, as the poet sings,

"are more renowned than war." It is fairly certain, then, that these

much-talked-of Toltecs could not, nay, did not, come overland from the

north. Driven thus from all hope landwards, the unfortunate theorists,

having rashly embarked on the sea of myth, must now launch on a far

rougher sea, namely the Atlantic or Pacific. Their heroes must have come

from the Ocean. Venus-like, they arose perhaps from the foam. Seriously

though, such a proposition is nearly as complete a fairy tale as the

Greek legend of the Goddess of Love. When one sees the maintainers of

the oversea route obliged to say, as Dr. Ph. J. J. Valentini does, that

any one of the points of the compass may have been the direction from

which this remarkable people came, one is face to face with arguments

too vague to be worthy of being called arguments at all. There is no

dealing with such rash generalisations. One must leave their amiable

employers to get what comfort they can from them, with just this

reservation: the Toltec tradition and its dates demand the acceptance of

the postulate that the Toltecs arrived in Mexico in considerable

numbers; for between 648 A.D., the generally accepted date of their

traditionary landing, and the twelfth century, when they were expelled

by the Aztecs, there is not time for a mere handful of immigrants to

have metamorphosed themselves into a nation numbering many millions, as

the Toltec story insists on our believing.[9] They must therefore have

landed in great quantities, and such an exodus as this presupposes,

well within historic times too, must have left, no matter what land

they hailed from, some record behind it. No such record exists in any

quarter of the globe of an exodus of even approximate date.

So far then these Toltecs are veritable spectre people, coming from

nowhere, going nowhere; like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in the

mid-air of Mexico's traditionary history. Let us now pass on to Chapter

2 of the Toltec romance. This is concerned with the arrival in Mexico of

the militant Aztecs. Now who are the Aztecs? D. G. Brinton, Dr.

Richardson, and all students of American ethnology agree in believing

them to have been a branch tribe of the savage and warlike Athapascans.

This view is unassailable on physical and philological grounds. Their

arrival in Mexico is probably fairly accurately given by their

traditions as towards the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the

thirteenth century. Every one is agreed that at the time of their

invasion they were simply barbaric warriors. They brought no building

specifications with them. Nothing, in short, but a thirst for battle and

new lands.

Now whom did they find in Mexico? They found a race whom they at once

nicknamed "Toltecs." Here then, at last, we are getting to grips with

these mysterious folk. "Toltec" is a pure Aztec or Nahuatl word, which

is believed to have had a primary meaning of "those who dwelt at

Tonalan," "place of the Sun" (some authorities, following the _Codex

Ramirez_, derive it from _tolin_, "rush," _i.e._ "the place of the

rushes"); but which in later Nahuatl, according to Dr. Otto Stoll,

undoubtedly had the meaning of "skilled craftsman, artificer or

builder." The Aztecs had never seen a building before, and they just as

naturally christened the race they had conquered by an allusion to their

chief characteristic,--their strange building skill,--as the coalition

of Germanic tribes in the third century gained the name "Franks" from

their chief characteristic, their love of freedom. What could possibly

be clearer? "Toltec" is a local name, having no existence at all till

the arrival of the Aztecs; a mere nickname, we shall hope to prove, for

the Mexican branch of the vast family of affiliated tribes which had

from prehistoric times inhabited Central America, and, a fact most

important of all to grasp, inhabit it to-day. In a word, the Toltecs are

the Mayans.

When you have realised all this, it is surely very easy to see how the

Toltec myth, which has proved the undoing of so many earnest students,

arose. The Aztecs came "out of the north." There is at least no doubt of

that. More, there is every reason to believe that they came from the

north-west, the very quarter so fanatically urged as the direction

whence came the Toltecs. It is doubtful whether they could speak the

language of the race they ousted; in fact it is by no means a bold

assumption to declare they could not. With them they undoubtedly brought

many traditions. When you grasp all this, and realise the further fact

that Tula, the much-talked-of Toltec city, that place which is, it is

suggested, identifiable with the present-day town forty miles north of

Mexico City, became the first Aztec capital in their new land, and

remained so till, under Moctezuma's leadership, they advanced and

founded Tenochtitlan, the present city of Mexico, the blindest and most

obtuse can surely see what the truth is. The whole Toltec imbroglio is

the result of a confusion between the histories of two peoples. The

Aztecs came from the north: the Mayans were architects. Though they were

first and foremost fighters, the conquerors appear to have taken very

kindly to their conquered neighbours' civilisation. Becoming in their

turn architects, nothing would be more natural than that the arrogant

Aztecs should have at last arrived at such an identification of

themselves with the Mayans that the traditions and histories of the two

races became once and for all inextricably mingled till they formed such

an indivisible tangle as to defy the efforts of chroniclers to

unravel.[10]

The confusion between the story of the two peoples just as naturally

resulted in the Tula portion of the Toltec myth. It was in all

probability the first place at which the Aztecs saw the buildings which

so astonished them, as it certainly would seem to have been the place

which they chose as their early capital. The importance thus attached by

them to it would very naturally in the course of time give it an

importance in the history of the Toltec-Mayans who had been expelled

from it. As the early stories of the two peoples became confused, Tula

would be traditionally believed to be the first city of the Toltecs as

well as that of their conquerors. That it was not the first city built

in Mexico by the Toltec-Mayans we have not the slightest doubt. We do

not go so far as D. G. Brinton: we cannot agree with him that it was

built by the Aztecs or Mexicans. It probably was a town in existence at

the coming of the Aztecs, though quite a small settlement of a race

which had by that time dotted a large part of their present territory

with far greater cities. That it had any greater significance to its

founders there is not a tittle of real evidence. It was simply the first

town to which the Aztecs came, and around it and its past imagination

ran riot. The tendency of semi-civilised peoples to exaggerate some fact

of no importance into a great feat or epoch-making event is exemplified

again and again in history. Thus it is natural enough that Tula should

have attained a traditionary importance out of all proportion to its

real place in Toltec-Mayan history. The only ultimate authorities for

the Toltec theory are the two chroniclers Ixtlilxochitl (a Mexican

native) and Vietia (a Spaniard), both of whom wrote their histories

subsequent to the Conquest. There is no reason to believe them wilfully

misleading. They simply recorded traditions then and always current.

They had at their disposal the whole existing writings and traditions of

their times. They had the picture-writings, and doubtless consulted the

oldest and most intelligent of the Indians.

But what of these sources of knowledge? The picture-writings were simply

the compilations of the Aztecs, and were of no great date.[11] Indeed it

is certain that most of them were not written until the century previous

to the Conquest. As to the Indians, it is obvious that such oral

tradition as they had to communicate could be of very little real

service to the historian. They were one and all enslaved and degraded by

the Spaniards, and traditions, if not got from unmolested, unconquered

natives, are always unreliable, as has been proved again and again by

the missionaries working among subjugated races. Under such

circumstances it is notorious that natives will tell any "fairy tales"

which a fertile imagination, or a desire to ingratiate themselves with

their new masters, dictates.

Such then is the flimsy foundation upon which the whole Toltec structure

has been reared. Now who were the people whom the Aztecs nicknamed

Toltecs? We have already declared them to have been the ancestors of the

present Mayans of Yucatan and the surrounding countries--in a word,

Mayans themselves. Let us see if we can get some way on the road to

proof of our assertion.

That a people were living in Mexico before the Aztec invasion cannot be

doubted; but if, as these Toltec enthusiasts would have us believe, they

were apart from any and all other American peoples, where are they

to-day? From the Land of Ice to the Land of Fire, there was not a spot

that was so thickly populated at the discovery of America that a weaker

tribe need have been wiped out. America was so sparsely inhabited that a

conquered tribe could always find some direction to flee and form a new

settlement. But if we accept the Toltec myth, we have to believe that a

nation numbering some four or five millions in the eleventh century had

at the time of the Conquest, four centuries later, disappeared. It is

just possible, but it is most improbable. But if they did not disappear,

where are we to look for this mislaid nation? Tradition says they went

south. But was the country to the south of Mexico uninhabited then? For

if these Toltecs were not strong enough to withstand the attacks of the

Aztecs in their own strongholds, it is scarcely reasonable to suppose

they would be of sufficient strength or in sufficient numbers to possess

themselves of and conquer the inhabitants of a country along the fertile

plains of one part of which, Guatemala, they would have found, it may be

reasonably supposed, as dense a population as the Spaniards found later.

The Toltec theory presumes that the expelled architects went south and

found vast empty spaces where they continued their building operations.

This is presuming altogether too much. Yucatan, Chiapas, Guatemala, were

all inhabited at that time: what the Spaniards found there proves that

much.

But if you accept our suggestion that the Toltecs were but an outlying

branch of the great Mayan race which possessed all Central America from

Arizona and Texas to the frontier line of Nicaragua, then the miraculous

disappearance of the Toltecs is not miraculous at all. They fled south

among their own people, and became absorbed by a natural process in the

various parts of Mayan territory, where they found buildings as great

and greater than any they had built in their northern Mexican home. Far

from the fugitives from the militant Aztecs being the founders of the

wonderful cities in Yucatan and Guatemala, they were at the time of

their flight probably much less civilised than their cousins at Chichen

or Palenque.

But who were these Mayans, and where did they obtain their knowledge of

building? No race can develop the art of building in stone without

leaving well-marked traces of its slow growth. First, there is the rough

stone building, which would be traceable in heaps of crumbling

rough-hewn stones where they had fallen. Next, would come that stage

when they would learn to mortar the stones together, perhaps adding rude

ornamentation on the exterior walls. Very slowly the roughness would

give place to better-hewn stones; patterns in the ornamentation would be

evolved; and finally you would get the same ornamentation all over the

country, identical as is the decoration of such cities as Kabah,

Chichen, and Uxmal. But there is no crude work in Yucatan. The

unornamented buildings, such as the Akad-Tzib at Chichen, are obviously

of the same date as the ornamented structures. They have the same form,

the same finish of stone; and everything points to the fact that the

plainness of buildings was deliberate and in some way in keeping with

the purpose of the edifice.

We have searched for the early stages of the Mayan building civilisation

in the caves of Yucatan, where traces, if anywhere, of the embryonic

efforts of the architects might be expected, but we searched in vain. Of

those caves that have been inhabited there are but few that have any

signs of building inside, and none with any traces of carvings. A

typical cave of those which had been built in we found in Cozumel

island; but it was almost certain that it had not been used as a

habitation for any long period. Its front, which had stood exposed to

weather and the intrusion of wild beasts, had been built up, with a

doorway in the centre. Its floor of earth was found some four feet

beneath the débris that had blown in and collected since its ancient

occupiers had deserted it; and just under this level was found a small

jar of beads and scattered around were potsherds in a layer of charcoal

where the cave-dweller had done his cooking. It is the opinion of Mr.

Henry C. Mercer (_Hill-Caves of Yucatan_: Philadelphia, 1896), who in

1896 examined most of the caves of the Southern Sierras, that they were

not dwellings but mere halting-places of a wandering people. He could

find in them no trace of an evolution of stone-building. Of those that

had any kind of carving, he says "they are random, sketchy figures, many

of which suggested pictographs of North American Indians. With a few

exceptions there was little of the mannerism of Yucatan about them; and

if they had been inscribed on a cliff-side on the Sasquehana or in Ohio,

few of them would have seemed out of place."

The objects which he found, and the depth at which he found them, only

went further to prove that his conclusions were correct. Bones of

animals which had served as food, charcoal, and potsherds, with earth of

sometimes a foot deep between the layers, went to show that the cave was

inhabited and evacuated, and then left for some years before it was

again occupied. From the fact that horses' teeth were found in many of

them, but always of course in the topmost layers, it may be assumed that

the caves were in use (perhaps only when a rout was taking place) after

the arrival of the Spaniards. But the fact that none of the potsherds

discovered in the caves are like those usually found among the ruins,

and especially the fact that no vases with hieroglyphics on them are

found, go to show that the caves in Yucatan were but little in use, if

at all, among the building Mayans. From all this it would seem safe to

conclude that if these caves were ever permanent habitations, it was at

a period anterior to the great building age of the Mayan race, when

their civilisation was in the crude stage to which many of the North

Americans had attained. This conclusion is certainly supported by the

fact above referred to, that the coarse carvings at Opichen are almost

facsimiles of those of the pictographs of the Northern tribes.

Thus everything would seem to point to the conclusion that, whoever

these Mayan builders were, their knowledge of architecture was not

slowly evolved by them, but came to them, a veritable gift of the gods,

already developed, from some foreign source. What that source was we

shall endeavour to show in the next chapter. The point to be dealt with

here is, What were the ethnical affinities of the Mayans themselves? To

what branch of the great American family do they belong? We have

endeavoured to show that the mysterious disappearance of the Toltecs and

the traditionary account of their flight south point very clearly to the

conclusion that the country south of Mexico was at the arrival of the

Aztecs inhabited by the kindred of these so-called Toltecs.

A curious corroboration of this is to be found in the existence of a

tribe known as the Huastecas, who form a colony around the Panuco River

in the east of Mexico, and on the adjoining coast of the Gulf. Every

ethnologist agrees that these people are pure Mayans; but the puzzle has

been to explain their presence in Mexico, where to-day there are no

other pure Mayans. The usual explanation is that they represent a

solitary migration from Yucatan. Is this at all likely? Is it possible

to believe that a mere handful of emigrants could have succeeded in

making a lodgment on the Mexican coast in the face of the certain

opposition they would have met with from the militant Aztecs? It would

have been almost an impossibility; nor does the piece of country held by

the Huastecas possess any of those features which might be expected to

attract immigrants. It seems to us far more likely that these Huastecas

represent a remnant of the original inhabitants of Mexico expelled by

the Aztecs; that while the bulk fled southward, a small band moved

eastward unnoticed, and established themselves on the Panuco River, the

Aztecs being too occupied with their conquests in the south to trouble

much about them. Thus with some years to consolidate their position,

they either remained unmolested or were actually able to hold their own

against the Aztecs till the Conquest. This seems a far more reasonable

explanation of the presence of these undoubted Mayans in the east of

Mexico.

As the Aztecs pushed their way into the north of Mexico, the vast

majority of peaceful Mayans, no match for the warlike strangers, fled

naturally south, save these few Huastecas, who, going eastward, were

either strong enough to repulse their foes or took refuge in lands which

did not attract the Aztecs so much as the rich valleys of Central

Mexico; and thus formed a permanent settlement on the east coast, while

their kinsfolk joined the Mayan populations of Yucatan and Guatemala.

But when you have assumed that the Toltecs were Mayans, you are still

confronted by an ethnological problem. It has proved curiously difficult

to classify the Mayans among the other peoples of America. The Aztecs

are satisfactorily accounted for as Shoshonees, a tribe of the

Athapascans; and some ethnologists have tried to prove that the Mayans

are also of the same stock. These efforts have proved futile. All

available evidence is against such a conclusion. Physically the two

peoples are quite separate, even to-day. The most casual observer,

travelling in the two countries of Mexico and Yucatan, must be struck,

as were we, by the marked distinction in features and general physique

between the two. But a still more cogent proof of their separation is

afforded by a study of the two languages. They are quite different in

structure, vocabulary and everything.

But this very question of language has enabled D. G. Brinton to track

the Mayans to their stock. By a careful comparison of one hundred

Natchez (an Apalachian tribe) words with their equivalents in the Mayan

dialects, he has proved a very remarkable affinity between the two

languages. "Of these hundred," he writes, "five have affinities, more or

less marked, to words peculiar to the Huastecas of the River Panuco;

thirteen to words common to Huastecas and Mayan; and thirty-nine to

words of similar meaning in the latter language." This linguistic

similarity would be remarkable by itself. But when you find that

physically such Apalachian tribes as the Seminoles and Creeks are

strikingly like the Mayan type, and when you realise that this

Apalachian stock was all round the land of the Mayans, it is difficult

to resist the conclusion that the Mayans must be ultimately referred to

this stock. The Apalachians joined Mexico on the north-east; they

stretched down the peninsula of Florida, and probably originally

inhabited Cuba and some of the West Indian islands, before the arrival

there of the powerful Arawak people, who were found in the islands by

the Spanish.

Being thus all round Mexico and Yucatan, it would be curious if some of

the Apalachians were not found in those countries. Ethnological data are

woefully lacking in all questions affecting the vast congeries of

peoples which go to form the aborigines of the two Americas. But it

would certainly seem that philologically, physically, and geographically

we here have such evidence as points very clearly to the Mayans being a

remote offshoot of the Apalachian stock.

But if they are Apalachians, they certainly did not derive their

building skill from their ancestors. Florida and the Eastern States are

devoid of all ancient buildings. The much discussed mounds of the

Mississippi district have not the remotest relationship with the temples

and palaces of Yucatan; but are probably totemic symbols, nothing more

or less.

On this subject Professor Cyrus Thomas, in _Problems of the Ohio Mounds_

(Washington, 1889), writes: "Mexico, Central America and Peru are dotted

with the ruins of stone edifices, but in all the mound-building area of

the United States not the slightest vestige of one attributable to the

people who erected the eastern structures is to be found.... Though

hundreds of groups of mounds marking the sites of ancient villages are

to be seen scattered over the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf States,

yet nowhere can there be found an ancient house."

It is true that the island of Cuba has never been really thoroughly

explored; but enough has been done to show that there are no building

"finds" likely there. Señor Andres Poey in a paper on "Cuban

Antiquities," read before the American Ethnological Society in 1855,

speaks of the great scarcity in the island of relics of stone. Only four

statues, very rude representations of anthropoid ape-like animals, had

been found. As monkeys were not known to have ever existed in Cuba, it

would certainly seem as if these carvings had been brought over from

Yucatan, with the Mayan inhabitants of which country it is certain that

the Cuban Arawaks traded. The stone implements and earthenware vases

found have also, for the most part, been attributed to the same source.

Of stone buildings the Arawaks had none. "The villages consisted," says

D. G. Brinton, writing in _The American Archæologist_ of October, 1898,

"of ten to twelve communal houses, always perishable; none having been

heard of as stone."

If then the Mayans are akin to the Apalachians, there is no trace among

their kindred of such elementary forms of building as would have

certainly been found if the architecture which has made them so famous

had been naturally developed. Thus we are bound to conclude that it was

exotic; that they learnt it from some foreign visitors to their

territory long after they had split off and migrated thither from the

Apalachian centre.

Who those foreign visitors were we will try to prove in the succeeding

chapter. Here let us summarise the foregoing pages as follows:--

1. The Toltec theory is myth, not history.

2. The Toltecs were never an historical nationality.

3. The word "Toltec" was a nickname given by the invading Aztecs to the

race inhabiting Mexico on their arrival.

4. The Toltecs were Mayans, the ancestors, with their kinsmen further

south, of those Mayan peoples to-day, as at the Spanish Conquest,

inhabiting Central America from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Southern

Mexico to the frontier of Nicaragua.

5. The Mayans are of the Apalachian stock, and had long been settled in

Central America before the invasion of the Aztecs.

6. The architectural skill of the Mayans was not developed by them

naturally, but was introduced from a foreign country some centuries

before the Aztecs invaded their northernmost possessions.

FOOTNOTES: