Page:Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx.djvu/376

162 Mr. Samuel Birch, in a note in the work of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, "Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians," says "that the Sphinx was called Ha or Akar." These words mean respectively, in the Maya language, "wafer," and "pond" or "swamp." In these names may we not see a hint that the king represented by the huge statue dwelt in countries surrounded by water? Its position, again, with the head turned toward the east, its back to the west, may not be without significance. Might it not mean that the people who sculptured it travelled from the West toward the East? from the Western Continent where Isis was queen, when she abandoned the land of her birth and sallied forth, with her followers, in search of a new home?

May not that lion or leopard with a human head be the totem of some famous personage in the mother country, closely related to Queen Móo, highly venerated by her and her people, whose memory she wished to perpetuate in the land of her adoption and among coming generations?

Was it the totem of Prince Coh?

We have seen in Mayach, on the entablature of the Memorial Hall, and in the sculptures that adorned his mausoleum at Chichen, that he was represented as a leopard. But in Egypt, Osiris, as king of the Amenti, king of the West, was likewise portrayed as a leopard,. His priests always wore