Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/583

 THE RUINS OF COPAN. 547 square miles, now included in the modern states of Honduras, Guatemala, and Salvador, and possessing several populous and thriving towns and villages. The aborigines of this kingdom still use the Chorti language, being a mixture of the Tufteco, with some dialect still more ancient in these parts. The city of Copan was built on the right or northern bank of the stream of the same name, a tributary to the large and navigable river Motagua, which falls into the bottom of the Bay of Honduras. Following upwards the navigation of this river, from the sea to the junction of the Copan, is a distance of sixty-five leagues, and from thence to this spot it is twenty leagues more ; the Copan below here is partly navigable for canoes, during the winter or rainy season, though rapids im- pede its course before it joins the Motagua. The city of Copan extended along the bank of its river a length of two miles, as evidenced by the remains of its fallen edifices. The principal of these was the temple, standing at the eastern extremity of the city, and built perpendicularly from the bank of the river, to a height, as it at present exists, of more than forty yards. The temple is two hundred and fifty yards long from north to south, and two hundred yards broad from east to west ; stone steps, which in some parts are in a state of ruin, lead from the land sides to the elevations above, and again descend to a square in the centre of the edifice, twenty yards above the level of the river ; through a gallery, scarcely four feet high and two and a half broad, one can crawl from this square through a more elevated part of the temple overhanging the river, and have from the face of the precipice an interesting view. Among many excavations, I have made one at the point where this gallery comes out into the square. I first opened into the entrance of the gallery itself, and digging lower down I broke into a sepulchral vault, the floor of which is twelve feet below the level of the square. Tt is more than six feet high, ten feet long, and five and a half broad, and lies due north and south, according to the compass, which here varies nine degrees east ; it has two niches on each side, and both these and the floor of the vault, were full of red earthenware dishes and pots. I found more than fifty, many of them full of human bones packed with lime ; also several sharp-edged and pointed knives of chaya (a brittle stone called itzli by the Mexicans) : a small head, apparently representing death, its eyes being