Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/809

Rh YUCATAN 759 rangle, with one front 2SO feet long and enclosing a court 258 by 214 feet. Hero Dr Le Plongeon discovered in 1881 a surprisingly beautiful statue, surpassing anything of the kind ever -found iu Central America. But this object he again carefully hid away to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Mexican authorities, who had seixed another remarkable statue previously brought to light by this industrious explorer (Ober). k. Conspicuous amongst the crumbling monuments of Ake, which , lies ten leagues east of Merida, is a huge pyramid, with an immense flight of steps, presenting some extraordinary features different from anything elsewhere discovered in Yucatan. This strange monument is surmounted by thirty-six pillars (twenty-nine still standing), each 4 feet square ami from 14 to 16 feet high, disposed in three parallel , rows 10 feet apart, the whole supported by a platform 212 feet by 46 and approached by steps from 4^ to 6^ feet long and from 1 to 1 zamal. feet high. At Izamal, a few miles east of Ake, stands another great pyramid, with a base of nearly 650 feet, besides three others, and a colossal head 13 feet high, not, however, a monolith, but built up of rough stones coated with mortar. But the gigantic face described and reproduced by Stephens had disappeared at the time of Char- nay s visit to Izamal. flrichen- To this explorer we are indebted for the first detailed account of tza. the wonderful remains of Chichen - Itza, which include another nunnery, a tennis-court, several temples, and other buildings pro- fusel} 7 embellished with rich friezes, statues, pillars, reliefs, and the like, the whole grouped round a central pyramid of great size, known as the Castillo, from the beautiful structure still standing on its summit. Chichen-Itza, which was certainly inhabited at the time of the conque.-t, was the capital of the Itzaes, one of the most powerful Maya nations, who appear to have afterwards migrated southwards to the neighbourhood of Lake Peten, where tribes of this name are still found. They constituted one of the eighteen semi-independent Maya states, whose incessant internecine wars at last brought about the dismemberment of the once potent theo cratic empire of Xibalba (Palenque ?) and the destruction of the Maya civilization. vabah. Scarcely less important than those of Chichen-Itza are the monu ments of Kabah, which lies about 12 miles south of Uxmal. The two places were formerly connected by a plastered causeway, traces of which arc still visible, and Kabah must have been a very large cily, for its ruins are scattered over a considerable area. Amongst them are comprised lofty pyramids, vast terraces, and sumptuous palaces or temples, with elaborate ornamentation, sometimes almost completely disguising the architectural features of the edifices. 1 Charnay mentions &quot; triumphal arches,&quot; but adds that he sought in vain for the unique specimen of this kind of monument in America which is mentioned and figured by Stephens, and which bears such a striking resemblance to the triumphal arches of the lioman type. Many other remains have either disappeared or crumbled away almost beyond recognition since they were first sketched by Gather- wood. 2 But, on the other bund, numerous buried cities and monu ments probably still remain concealed amid the rank tropical vege tation, especially in the almost unknown territory of the unreduced Lacandons and Itzaes towards the Guatemala frontier. But enough lias already been surveyed fully to justify Maudslay s general re mark, that Yucatan is thickly covered with the ruins of great build ings even superior in some respects to those found in other parts of Central America.&quot; nscrip- Like those of Palenque, Lorillard Town, Tikul, and Copan, many ons. of these buildings are covered with inscriptions, the key to the deciphering of which has not yet been discovered. Notwithstand ing certain divergences, seen especially at Lorillard, all belong ob viously to the same writing system. But whether that system is purely ideographic, phonetic, or intermediate cannot be asserted with any certainty, although Ilolden, who has attacked the problem from a fresh standpoint, declares emphatically that they are not phonetic, &quot; except in so far as their rebus character may make them in a sense phonetic.&quot; He claims by his system to have fixed the order in which the inscriptions are to be read (in lines left to right, in columns vertically downwards), and fancies he has determined the meaning of three characters representing Maya divinities. But Holden is ignorant of the Maya-Quiche language, of which a few manuscripts have been rescued from the fury of the early Spanish iconoclasts. One of these documents, the Popol- Vuli, written or copied about 1558 from an older Quiche book, has been edited and even translated by Brassenr do Bourbourg. This uncritical writer 1 On one of the palaces &quot;two salient cornices form a frame to immense friezes which in their details would compare favourably with our proudest monuments&quot; (Charnay). On others are sculptured some remarkable bas- reliefs, which represent Maya warriors receiving the swords of kneeling Aztec captives, the nationalities of the figures being clearly identified by their respect ive costumes. The significance of records of this sort has either been altogether overlooked or else strangely misinterpreted by most writers on Central-Ameri can antiquities. a In 1841 Stephens was assured by the cnra of Panta Cruz del Quiche that the palaces of that place, then in ,1 dilapidated state, were quite perfect thirty years before, and that the now deserted city of Utat.lan in the province of VeM 1 az was then almost as perfect as when its inhabitants had alian.loned it. lid had himself walked in its silent streets amid its colossal buildings, whuh were as entire as those of Santa Cruz. makes use of a so-called Maya-Quiche alphabet preserved by Diego de Laiula, first bishop of Yucatan, in his Relation or history of the Mayas. But the alphabet in question is admittedly extremely defective and inadequate to interpret the native writings, and rms even been pronounced &quot;a Spanish fabrication&quot; by Dr Yalentini, 3 a view which Holden appears to endorse. The puzzle thus remains still unsolved, and no safe inference can be drawn beyond the fact that the inscriptions and manuscripts are composed in a highly conventional form of writing, and probably in more than one Maya- Quiche dialect. Other difficult questions connected with the origin and antiquity Origin of the Maya culture, and the nature of its relations to that of and an- Mexico, will be found discussed under MEXICO (q.v.). But, since tiquityof that article was written, fresh materials have been collected and Maya published which help to throw some further light on these obscure culture, subjects. Unfortunately M. Charnay, who since the time of Ste phens and Catherwood has undoubtedly contributed most to our knowledge of the Central-American remains, has revived in an ex aggerated form the old views of Morelet, Orozco y Berra, and others regarding the Toltec origin of all these monuments. This observer sees everywhere the clearest evidences, not merely of Toltec, influ ences, which are obvious enough, but of the Toltec institutions themselves, of the Toltec religion, architecture, and civilization, to the exclusion of all others in Central America. He even boldly traces on the map the lines of a twofold Toltec migration, from Tula along the Atlantic and from Toluca along the Pacific side, to their junction at Copan in Honduras, some few centuries before the discovery of the New World. But our faith in the soundness of these views is greatly shaken when we find M. Charnay identifying the Toltecs themselves somewhat wildly with Malays, Indo-Chinese, and other Asiatic races. Some of the present populations of Yucatan are even pronounced to be &quot;a cross between the Malay and the Chinese,&quot; and all the exploded theories are thus revived of an Asiatic origin of the civilized inhabitants of the New World and of their cultures. But, as Ober well remarks, the evidence is cumu lative in favour of the independent evolution of these cultures. Late contact, that is, contact since the remote Stone Age, with the inhabitants of the eastern hemisphere has been either of the most casual nature or else as shadowy as the Atlantis itself, which is seriously referred to in this connexion by otherwise sane writers, but which was obviously as pure an invention of Plato as the Utopia was of Sir Thomas More. An essential condition of the Toltec theory is the assumed recent, or comparatively recent, date of all the Central-American monu ments, and Charnay has certainly dispelled the extravagant ideas at one time prevalent regarding the hoary antiquity of some of these remains. He has shown in particular that no argument in favour of great age can be drawn from the size of the trees by which many of them are overgrown. By actual experiment ho has proved that the concentric circles of these trees correspond, not to so many years, as had been supposed, but rather to so many months, if not even to shorter periods of growth. Thus collapse the extravagant estimates of 2000 years (Waldeck) or 1700 (Lorainzar) assigned to the buildings on this assumption. At the same time some of the cities were already forgotten ruins at the time of the conquest, and many of the structures date evidently back to a period prior to the Toltec migrations southwards. The bas-reliefs of Kabah also clearly show that these Toltecs, probably of Nahua stock and closely related to the Aztecs, already found the land occupied by a civilized people, able to record on stone monuments their triumphs over the northern invaders. Some of these monu ments themselves equal, if not surpass, in artistic taste and work manship anything the Toltec builders are known to have produced on the Anahuac plateau. They also present many distinctive features, especially in their design and decorative parts, while the inscriptions are altogether different from those of the Aztecs as seen in extant manuscripts. The conclusion seems inevitable that the Maya-Quiche culture was an independent growth, brought in later times under Nahua influences, the relations being perhaps somewhat analogous to those existing between the Grreco-fiactrian and Indian or the Moorish and Spanish in the Old World. At the time of the conquest a great part of Central America was Classifl- fonnd to be occupied, as it still is, by peoples related, at least in cation of speech, to the Maya inhabitants of Yucatan. The numerous Maya- branches of this widespread family ranged from Tamaulipas (about Quiclio the Tropic of Cancer) southwards to north Honduras and San Sal- nations. vador (14 N. lat.). But the chief divisions were the Mayas of Yucatan and the Quiches of Guatemala, whence the compound term Maya-Quiche collectively applied to the whole race. Owing partly to the uncertainty of their mutual affinities, but mainly to the confusing and inconsistent nomenclature of the early Spanish and later writers, the classification of the various Maya-Quiche nations presents serious difficulties, some of which have not yet been over come. In the subjoined scheme are embodied the results of the researches of De Bourbourg, Berendt, Stoll, and others in this intricate bnmch of ethnology : 3 In a paper read before the American Antiquarian Society, ^Sth April 1SSO.