Page:A Study of the Manuscript Troano.djvu/194

128 baldachin or place in which their idols were seated in their temples. Something similar is also found elsewhere in the same work.

Houses, cabins, and other buildings, even temples in which their idols were placed, appear usually to be represented in the Manuscript by such figures as shown in cuts 26, 27, 28, and 29.

These, as will be seen by comparison, are really but slight variations from the Mexican conventional symbol for a house {calli).

The side wall in Fig. 29 appears to be composed of blocks of some  kind placed one upon another, probably of stone, each bearing the Muluc character. Mol, the root from which most of the words commencing with mol and mul are derived, signifies "a group of things united or congregated one upon another," but without reference to the material of which they are composed. It is true that in this house we see the figure of a bee, and might therefore suppose it represents the place where the hives were kept, but the officiating priest in front leads us to believe it denotes a temple of some kind in which the ceremonies of the apiarists' festival were performed. The character at the top of the wall with a cross in it, somewhat resembling that in the symbol for Ezanab, is very common in these figures. This probably marks the end of the beam which was placed on the wall to support the roof. I so conclude because I find that it is wanting in the lighter and temporary dwellings, represented in Fig. 28. The interpretation of the character as here used is doubtful. The curved line running from this to the top portion probably represents the rafter; the slender