Page:Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx.djvu/52

 and barbaric Nahuatls, the books containing the record of the ancient traditions, of the history of past ages, from the settlement of the peninsula by its primitive inhabitants, had been carefully hidden (and have so remained to this day) by the learned philosophers, and the wise priests who had charge of the libraries in the temples and colleges, in order to save the precious volumes from the hands of the barbarous tribes from the west. These, entering the country from the south, came spreading ruin and desolation. They destroyed the principal cities; the images of the heroes, of the great men, of the celebrated women, that adorned the public squares and edifices. This invasion took place in the year 522, or thereabout, of the Christian era, according to the opinion of modern computers. As a natural consequence of the destruction, by the invaders, of Chicħen-Itza, then the seat of learning, the Itzaes, preferring ostracism to submitting to their vandal-like con- querors, abandoned their homes and colleges, and became wanderers in the desert. Then the arts and sciences soon declined; with their degeneracy came that of civilization. Civil war — that inevitable consequence of invasions — political strife, and religious dissension broke out before long, and caused the dismemberment of the kingdom, that culminated in the sack and burning of the city of Mayapan and the extinction of the royal family of the Cocomes in 1420 A.D., two hundred and seventy years after its foundation. In the midst of the social cataclysms that gave the coup de grâce to the Maya