THE FIRST AMERICANS
It has been said that civilization is but a layer-cake of eras—a
building up of strata, with the brute state at the bottom. Layer upon
layer, each succeeding generation adds its small bit of culture or
knowledge, until a golden age is finally reached. And, sadly enough,
from that age of enlightenment, the hope of the world, there has always
been a rapid decline, until centuries later, perhaps, again begins the
tedious gradual uplift.
And the story of man’s rise and fall, in the passing of the ages,
usually is buried in the earth, to be laid bare to our eyes if we have
but the patience to find and the ability to understand. Just as a good
woodsman can read from a scratch on a tree or a faint footprint on the
ground things not obvious to the untrained observer, our men of science
have developed remarkable expertness in divining the history of bygone
eras from the scanty traces that remain. From a skull, centuries buried
in a cave, they reconstruct the Neanderthal man. The fragments of an
earthen pot tell them the degree of culture and the period of him who
once supped from the vessel.
Wherever there are caves there is the likelihood of uncovering vestiges
of aboriginal life, for primitive men everywhere used caverns, either
as temporary shelters or as permanent abodes. Beneath the cave floor
may be the evidence of many generations of men—the relics buried in
layers one upon another as the discarded and broken implements of one
generation were trampled underfoot and submerged under the charred
embers and rubbish of the succeeding one.
The written record of the Mayas gives but little clue to their
origin and no indication at all of their descent from more barbarous
ancestors. Did these people, already of a high state of culture,
immigrate from some other land? If so, were they the first comers or
did they find the country even then inhabited? Or were their ancestors
natives of this region for hundreds of centuries before them?
Yucatan is a land of caverns, veritably a honeycomb of caves, and
eagerly the paleontologist rolled up his sleeves, shouldered his
shovel, and set out to find the answer to these vexing questions.
The answer was found and is conclusive but disappointing. Beyond the
question of a doubt, the Mayas brought with them their culture, and
they were the first inhabitants of this country. Whence they came, or
how, or why; from what race they sprang, we know not and probably never
shall know. A few conflicting legends of their arrival as recorded in
some old Maya writings constitute the sum total of our knowledge on
this point.
Many intricately derived meanings of the name _Maya_ have been offered.
The most obvious, however, is the direct translation. _Ma_ means
“not” and _ya_ means “emotion,” “grief,” “tiresome,” or “difficult.”
The combination means, “not arduous,” “not severe.” We know that the
Mayas frequently alluded to their country as the Land of the Deer and
the Land of the Wild Turkey— _U-Lumil-Ceh_, _U-Lumil-Cutz_. “Maya,”
therefore, may quite likely have been descriptive of the region as a
pleasant, comfortable place of residence. Juan Martinez, who knows the
Indian and the language, present and past, as no one else, once said to
me: “Work and grief are synonymous to the native mind. Work is grief to
the Indian; therefore a land of no grief and no sorrow may well mean
a land of no work.” However, any explanation of the derivation of so
ancient a name is little more than surmise.
According to one myth, the Mayas came over the sea from the east, under
the leadership of a hero-deity, Itzamna; hence the name “Itzas” as
applied to a part, at least, of the Mayas. In the Maya books Itzamna is
represented as an old man with one tooth and a sunken jaw. His glyph or
sign is his pictured profile, together with a sign of night, the sign
of food, and two or three feathers.
The more credible legend refers to an immigration from the west or
north, under a chieftain named Kukul Can. There are reasons for
believing that this legend may be founded upon fact. It is mentioned
in several of the most ancient of the surviving Maya records and in
the testimony of a number of well-versed natives at the time of the
Conquest. Farther up the coast, north of Vera Cruz, is another branch
of the Maya family called the Huastecs, while in Central America,
through Honduras, Guatemala, and even in Costa Rica, are present-day
Maya tribes and ruins of ancient Maya civilization. Also, there is a
close similarity between the Kukul Can legend and the Aztec annals,
indicating a common origin. Everything points to the probability of a
remote great migration of their common ancestors from the north.
The Aztec tradition is particularly interesting and describes the
arrival by boat of several different tribes at the mouth of the Panuco
River, which spot the Aztecs called Panatolan, meaning “where one
arrives by sea.” The expedition was headed by the supreme leader,
Mexitl, chief of the Mexicans, with whom were other chieftains and
their followers. They traveled on down the coast as far as Guatemala,
and some turned back and settled at various places along the shore.
On this journey an intoxicating drink was originated by one Mayanel,
whose name means “clever woman.”[1] There is a possibility that “Maya”
is derived from her name. At any rate, one tribal chief, Huastecatl,
imbibed too freely and cast aside his garments while intoxicated. His
shame was so great when he realized what he had done that he gathered
his tribe, the Huastecas, and returned with them to Panatolan and
settled there.
Landa says in his book that some old men of Yucatan related to him
the story, handed down for many generations, that the first settlers
had come from the east by water. These voyagers were ones “whom God
had freed, opening for them twelve roads to the sea.” If there is any
truth in this tradition, these progenitors may have been one of the
lost tribes of Israel. An interesting side light on this hypothesis
is the distinctly Semitic cast of countenance of some of the ancient
sculptures and murals found at Chi-chen Itza and in other old Maya
cities. The dignity of face and serene poise of these carved or painted
likenesses is strikingly Hebraic.[2]
While we are in the field of conjecture, we may as well consider the
old Greek myth of the lost continent of Atlantis. From the geological
point of view, it is not impossible. The whole of Yucatan is low and
was once the bottom of the sea, as is indicated by its surface rock
and sand. Furthermore, the stretching out of the Antilles as though to
form a bridge with the Azores, and the shallowness of the intervening
Atlantic Ocean, lends plausibility to the idea that there may have been
a cataclysmic upheaval of the ocean-bed during some past era, and not
long ago, geologically speaking—an upheaval which created the land of
Yucatan and caused what was land to the eastward to sink beneath the
level of the Atlantic. What is more natural to suppose than that in
some prehistoric period the lost continent of Atlantis did exist and
proved an easy means of passage between Europe and America?
The mist-enshrouded history of the migrations of ancient people, the
crossing and recrossing of their pilgrimages and of their blood, is a
fascinating study, but one which tells us comparatively little that may
be crystallized into fact. And so, in these various speculations as to
the origin of the Mayas, no theory contains enough weight of evidence
to warrant the assumption that it is the right one. It is, however,
pretty clearly established from the ancient Maya writings and legends
that there were two main immigrations, the greater one coming from the
west or north and the lesser one from the east.
Emerging at last from the purely legendary, we reach the middle ground
where the history of the Mayas is still unrecorded but where the word
of mouth, as handed down from father to son, is more precise and
has some relation to definite dates. Then we suddenly step over the
threshold into the historical era.
The first recorded date, which corresponds to 113 B.C., is
on a statuette from the ancient city of Tuxtla, and there is some
doubt as to whether our reading of this date is correct. The next
inscription corresponds to 47 A.D., and here we are on sure
ground. A monument in northern Guatemala contains a date prior to
160 A.D., at which point the ancient Maya Codices take up
the history of the race and carry it on to the time of the Conquest.
And even at this early time, the Mayas had hieroglyphic writings
and were skilled in stone-carving and the erection of massive works
of architecture. With the written Chronicles, the many hieroglyphed
stones,—“precious stones,” I like to call them,—and the history of
progress as indicated by the different periods of architecture and
sculpture, we are able to verify and correlate most of the subsequent
dates.
The written Maya records, without which our task of piecing together
anything of their history would be almost impossible, are among the
most interesting and valuable remains of this bygone civilization. The
records are of two kinds. The first, the Codices, are the original
texts, written in hieroglyphics. The second, the Chilan Balam, are
written in the Maya language but with Spanish characters, and are
chiefly transcripts from the more ancient records.
Only three hieroglyphic Codices have survived, and they are known
respectively as the Dresden Codex, the Perez Codex, and the
Tro-Cortesianus. All are in European museums and many facsimile
reproductions have been made of them for use in other museums and
libraries. These manuscripts are painstakingly illuminated by hand,
in colors, and were done with some sort of brush, possibly of hair
or feathers. They are done on paper or, rather, a sort of cardboard
which has been given a smooth white surface through the application
of a coating of fine lime. The body of the paper is made of the fiber
of the maguey plant. The manuscript is folded like a Japanese screen
or a railway time-table. According to early accounts, some of these
records were also made on tanned or otherwise prepared deerskin and
upon bark. None of the hide or bark records has ever been found by
present-day explorations. It is known that the Mayas had many records
concerning religious history, religious rites and ceremonies, medicine,
and astronomy. The Spanish priests caused all of the Maya writings they
could find to be gathered together and burned, in the fanatical belief
that they were serving the church by so doing.
If only their bigotry had vented itself in some other way, how much
these old manuscripts might have told us! Apropos of the burning of
the priceless documents Landa says, “We collected all the native books
we could find and burned them, much to the sorrow of the people, and
caused them pain.”
[Illustration: A PAGE FROM THE PEREZ CODEX, DESCRIBING AN ECLIPSE OF
THE SUN. THIS ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT ILLUMINATED IN COLOR IS NOW IN THE
LIBRARY OF PARIS]
The group of books called the Chilan Balam, which are chiefly
ideographic transcripts of the more ancient works, written in the Maya
tongue but in Spanish characters, probably were made surreptitiously
by some of the educated natives soon after the Conquest. There are
sixteen of these books still extant. The meaning of this Maya name,
_Chilan Balam_, is interesting. _Chi_ means “mouth”; _lan_ indicates
action. Therefore _Chilan_ is “mouth action,” or “speech.” _Balam_
is synonymous for either “tiger” or “ferocity.” But the tiger was
worshiped as a deity and the combination of the words, _Chilan Balam_,
means “Speech of the Gods.” The Maya priests were sometimes called by
the name, indicating that they were the mouthpieces of the gods, and
doubtless these records took their name from the priestly appellation.
The individual books of the Chilan Balam are known by the names of
the villages in which they were found, and in a few cases the name of
the village may have been derived from the presence of the book. The
most important of these books are Nabula, Chun-may-el (which means
“something of the first” or “original”), Kua, Man, X-kutz-cab, Ixil,
Tihosuco, and Tixcocob.
Just when these books were written is not known, but there is evidence
that the book of Mani was written prior to 1595 and the book of Nabula
tells of an epidemic which occurred in 1663. While teaching the
natives to write the Maya language in Spanish characters, Bishop Landa
employed a rather original method, which is our only key to reading
these writings and which serves as our only clue to the more ancient
hieroglyphs. The ancient Maya writings were purely picture writings,
but to some extent the hieroglyphs had lost their original picture
significance and had come to have a somewhat symbolic meaning.
In arranging the so-called Maya alphabet (which was first used by the
priests in writing out the prayers for the Mayas), Landa employed a
very ingenious method and one that was practical at the time. He took
the Spanish alphabet and beginning with “A” he asked the educated
Indian to draw the character for him in which the sound of “A” was
predominant. Naturally, after many attempts by the Indian to furnish
such a character he finally selected the hieroglyph _ac_, which is a
picture of a turtle’s head and which in Maya means “turtle” or “dwarf”
or something having a slow movement. Next he took the letter “B” and
eventually chose the character _be_, which means “road,” “walk,” “run,”
and consists of the picture of a footprint. Therefore—not to go into a
lengthy description of the system—he had “A” from _ac_, “B” from _be_,
etc. With this extemporized alphabet the priests were able to write out
the Catholic prayers in such a way that the Indian could repeat them in
Spanish by using the sound of the first part of his hieroglyph for the
sound of each Spanish letter.
It may be seen from the foregoing that Landa’s alphabet cannot be used
for translating Maya, for when the hieroglyphs are made to represent
the sounds of the Spanish alphabet the result does not indicate the
original connection of a Maya word with its glyph. This fact was a
great disappointment among archæologists, who at first expected to
translate the Maya Codices by the use of the Landa alphabet. Their
hopes, however, were short-lived and they even pronounced Landa an
impostor. On the contrary, he has unintentionally given us what is
almost a Rosetta Stone.
The Codices, I fear, will never yield a connected story, as they are
written in a stenographic or shorthand style consisting of disconnected
sentences.
Many of the stones, or _stelæ_, may contain history, and as soon as
we know the meanings of, possibly, a thousand glyphs we shall be able
to make a decided advance in the art of reading the books. Landa in
his book explains not the Maya glyphs but the way the priests used
these Maya characters for religious purposes. For example, he says
_Ma-in-kati_ means “I do not want,” represented in the ancient Maya by
three simple glyphs. Written as the priests had arranged, with a glyph
for each sound of a Spanish letter, the result is a combination of five
glyphs, which, if given their original Maya pictured meanings, leads to
the rather surprising knowledge that “no dead animal was seen at this
place,” or, literally, “not see tail [animal] death place.”
Besides the Codices and the Chilan Balam, which together are frequently
alluded to as the Maya Chronicles, there are some other documents such
as titles to land, records of surveys, etc. There is a unique history
of the Conquest, written by a contemporary native chief called Na Kuk
Pech, whose name means “house of the feathered wood-tick.” The story
was written in the native language, by means of Spanish characters, and
has been translated recently by Señor Juan Martinez, whose profound
knowledge of the Maya language has eminently fitted him for this task.
The history of Chi-chen Itza is of especial interest because this was
the Holy City, the Mecca of all the ancient Maya people. According
to the Maya Chronicles, one or several tribes set out from a place
called Nonual, in 160 A.D., and apparently spent many years
in aimless wandering, arriving finally, in 241 A.D., at a
place they named Chac Nouitan. Then follows a gap in our knowledge and
the next we learn of these people is that in 445 A.D., while
they were residing at a place called Bak-Halal, they heard of Chi-chen
Itza. It is clear that Chi-chen Itza was already an inhabited city at
that time. Soon after this, these tribes moved to Chi-chen Itza, where
they lived until about 600 A.D., when, for some unaccountable
reason, they abandoned it utterly and migrated to the land of Chan Kan
Putun. And this residence was in turn abandoned two hundred and sixty
years later, because of some calamity; one Chronicle speaks of a great
fire.
For nearly a hundred years, to quote from the Chronicles, “the Itzas
lived in exile and great distress under the trees and under the
branches.” Then, some of them reëstablished Chi-chen Itza in 950
A.D., while others founded the city of Uxmal or went to
Mayapan. The second residence lasted for some two hundred years. About
1200 A.D., the Itzas, under the ruler Ulumil, invaded the city
of Mayapan and at about this same time Chi-chen Itza was attacked and
depopulated by foreigners—in all probability the Nahuas (Mexicans),
who came down from the north. The last event alluded to in the
Chronicles is the coming of the Spaniards under Montejo, who found the
Mayas already decadent and their cities long ruined and abandoned.
We have no authentic description of the actual condition of Chi-chen
Itza when the Spaniards came, but it is known with certainty that Tiho
(place of the five temples), one of the ancient cities, the site of the
modern city of Mérida, was in ruins. The temples were dilapidated and
overgrown with vegetation and great trees were rooted in the walls. The
few inhabitants living around these ruins knew virtually nothing of the
founders of the city, nor of those who had lived there when it was in
its prime.
At the coming of the Spaniards to Chi-chen Itza, about 1541, the city
was inhabited by a few people who were, I think, nothing more than
campers—inferior people using as shelters the buildings which they had
found there and of whose history they were quite ignorant.
While it has no place in this book, the last known migration of some of
the Mayas is interesting and it is certain that a considerable number
emigrated between the years 1450 and 1451 southward to Lake Peten,[3]
where they built a city on an island and there they survived, together
with their ancient culture, until conquered in 1697 by the Spaniards,
who destroyed all their temples and books and perforce made either good
Christians or “good Indians” of all the inhabitants.
Landa says, under the heading, “Various Misfortunes Experienced in
Yucatan in the Century before the Conquest”:
These people had over twenty years of abundance and health
and multiplied greatly. All of the land looked like one town
and they built many temples which can be seen to-day in all
parts; and crossing the mountains, one can see through the
leaves of the trees sides of houses and buildings wonderfully
constructed. After all this happiness, one evening in the
winter a wind arose about six o’clock and increased until it
became a hurricane of the Four Winds.[4] This wind tore out the
large trees, made a great slaughter of all kinds of game, tore
down all the high houses, which, as they were thatched with
straw and had fire inside against the cold, caught fire. Great
numbers of people were burned and those that escaped were torn
to pieces by falling trees.
This hurricane lasted until noon of the next day. Some who
lived in small houses escaped—the young people who were just
married, who were accustomed to build small houses in front of
those of their parents or parents-in-law, where they lived the
first years.
Thus this land then lost its name, which was U-Lumil-Ceh,
U-Lumil-Cutz, Land of the Deer, Land of the Wild Turkey, and
was without trees. The trees now seen all appear to have been
planted at the same time, as they are all of the same height,
and, looking at this land from some spot, it seems as though it
had been trimmed off with shears.
Those who escaped felt encouraged to rebuild and cultivate the
land and they again multiplied greatly, having fifteen years of
health and good weather and the last year was the most fruitful
of all. At the time of harvest, there came upon the land some
contagious fevers which lasted twenty-four hours. After the
fever the victim would swell up and burst open, being full of
worms, and of this pestilence many people died leaving the
fruit ungathered.
After this pestilence there was another sixteen good years
in which they renewed their passions and ravagings. In this
way one hundred and fifty thousand men died in battle. After
this massacre they were more calm and made peace and rested
for twenty years. Then came another pestilence. Large pimples
formed and they rotted the body and emitted offensive odors in
a way that the members fell off by pieces within four or five
days.
This plague has passed more than fifty years ago, the massacres
of the wars twenty years before that; the pestilence of the
swelling and worms sixteen years before the wars; and the
hurricane another sixteen years before that and twenty-two
years after the destruction of Mayapan, which, according to
this record, makes one hundred twenty-five years since the
destruction. Thus by the wars and other punishments which
God sent, it is a wonder there are as many people as are now
living, although there are not many.
This quaint account by Landa sheds some light upon the condition of the
Mayas during the century preceding the Spanish invasion and indicates
that the golden age of the race had occurred not many centuries before.
The legendary history of the coming of the Mayas to Chi-chen Itza is
alluded to by Landa in several passages. He states:
It is the opinion among the Indians that with the Itzas who
populated Chi-chen Itza, there reigned a great man called Kukul
Can, and the principal temple of the city is called Kukul Can.
They say he entered from the west, that he was very genteel,
and that he had neither wife nor children. After he left
Chi-chen Itza he was considered in Mexico one of their gods and
called Quetzal Coatl and in Yucatan they also had him for a god.
In another place Landa says:
The ancient Indians say that in Chi-chen Itza reigned three
brothers. This was told to them by their ancestors. The three
brothers came from the west and they reigned for some years in
peace and justice. They honored their god very much and thus
built many buildings and beautiful, especially one. These men,
they say, lived without wives and in great honesty and virtue,
and during this time they were much esteemed and obeyed by
all. After a time one of them failed, who had to die, although
some of the Indians said he went to Bak-halal. The absence of
this one, no matter how he went, was felt so much by those who
reigned after him that they began to be licentious and formed
habits dishonorable and ungovernable, and the people began to
hate them in such a way that they killed them, one after the
other, and destroyed and abandoned the city.
Virtually the same stories are contained in a document found at
Valladolid and dated 1618, which goes on to state that the newer part
of Chi-chen Itza was built about 1200 A.D.
The ancient city consists of two parts, the southern, which is ruined
to such as extent that it contains almost no standing edifices, and the
newer city built to the north, which contains many buildings—some of
them almost perfectly preserved. I believe that much of the older city
was built at least a thousand years prior to most of the buildings in
the newer city, and there is ample evidence to substantiate the belief
that the old city was ruthlessly robbed of its carvings and cut stones
for use in the construction of the new.
The Nahuatl influence is seen in the newer buildings. It is thought
that Chi-chen Itza reached the height of its civil power, though not
its artistic supremacy, after it had been conquered by the Aztec
warriors from the north, and the native inhabitants were reduced to
slavery and driven by their masters to the speedy building of many
temples—an undertaking which they would have gone about in much more
leisurely fashion had there been no compulsion.
Don Pedro Aguilar, one of the earliest historians of Yucatan, states
that six hundred years before the coming of the Spaniards the Mayas
were the vassals of the Aztecs and were forced by them to construct
remarkable edifices such as those found at Chi-chen Itza and Uxmal.
Herbert Spinden, in his admirable little book “Ancient Civilizations of
Mexico,” has most happily drawn an analogy between the traits of the
Mayas and Aztecs and the similar traits of the old Greeks and Romans.
The Mayas were like the Greeks, the creative race, while the Aztecs
were primarily warriors, as were the Romans.
Just what was the impulse which led these people to undertake the
mighty works they accomplished,—whether it was religious fervor or
plain fear,—we do not know. We do know that their age of greatest
progress was within the era of verifiable history. We know that they
built many large cities; and that there was a large population;
Chi-chen Itza was a city of at least two hundred thousand inhabitants,
and some archæologists believe that at one time its population numbered
no less than a million.
During their supreme period they built great pyramids and marvelous
temples. They wrote books and set up intricately carved record-stones.
They brought the whole of Yucatan into a federation of government that
held the people together in a unity which has few parallels in the
history of the human race. They evolved a calendar which is ingenious,
complicated, and amazingly correct. They read the heavens and knew the
planets and their seasons and changes. They displayed in all they did a
genius to invent and an ability to execute which cause us to rate their
culture very high; and this culture is all the more wonderful because
it was purely original and cut off by an ocean on each side from any
contact with the rest of the world.