Page:A Study of the Manuscript Troano.djvu/263

Rh with the founding of Chichen Itza, which, according to my calculation, would be about 583-606 (the 13th Ahau). It is a little remarkable that the first mention of this city occurs in the close of the third paragraph, exactly where the 13th Ahau must be inserted to fill a hiatus.

The number of years given and periods mentioned in the first three paragraphs cannot by any possible explanation be made to agree with each other. This part of the history of the Tutul-Xiu race is doubtless made up from a dim tradition in reference to which no chronological statement could be made. As any attempt to determine the length of time they were wandering, from the date of their departure from Tulapan until they settled at Chichen-Itza, would be wholly conjectural, we will, perhaps, be as near right as any other guess, if we assume that the 8th Ahau of the second paragraph is the same as the 8th of the first, in other words, that the numbers in the second are but a recapitulation of those in the first, and that the 13th in the latter is the one which precedes the 11th in the fourth paragraph. Supposing they started on their travels in the 8th Ahau, this would bring this event between the years 486-510.

As the author of this manuscript counted twenty years to an Ahau and I count twenty-four, our lists cannot possibly agree. If there are any numbers given, connected with particular and noted events, which numbers were given in the author's data, with these my enumeration, if correct, might coincide. The fall of Mayapan in the 8th Ahau, the appearance of the Spaniards on the coast in the 2d, and the death of Ajpula in the 13th, I think may be relied upon as events correctly dated.

If we count the years enumerated from the 2d Ahau in the seventh paragraph, where Mayapan is first mentioned, to the 8th, in the eleventh paragraph, when the second destruction of this city occurred, we find the number to be 367; adding in the missing epochs at twenty years each, we have 527, which agrees very well with Herrera's statement. But this gives us something over twenty-six of these periods, whereas the correct number would be twenty-two. The exact numbers (of years) given in the ninth and tenth paragraphs render it possible that these were obtained from the author's data.