Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/102

92 numbered in regular succession, would have been a far better arrangement. It may perhaps have been introduced for some astrological purpose.

The historical picture-writings of the Mexicans seem for the most part very bare and dull to us, who know and care so little about their history. They consist of records of wars, famines, migrations, sacrifices, and so forth, names of persons and places being indicated by symbolic pictures attached to them, as King Itzcoatl, or "knife-snake," by a serpent with stone knives on its back; Tzompanco, or "the place of a skull," now Zumpango, by a picture of a skull skewered on a bar between two upright posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up; Chapultepec, or "grasshopper hill," by a hill and a grasshopper, and so on, or by more properly phonetic characters, such as will be presently described. The positions of footprints, arrows, etc., serve as guides to the direction of marches and attacks, in very much the same way as may be seen in Catlin's drawing of the pictured robe of Ma-to-toh-pa, or "Four Bears." The mystical paintings which relate to religion and astrology are seldom capable of any independent interpretation, for the same reasons which make it impossible to read the pictured records of songs and charms used further north, namely, that they do not tell their stories in full, but only recall them to the minds of those who are already acquainted with them. The paintings which represent the methodically arranged life of the Aztecs from childhood to old age, have more human interest about them than all the rest put together. In judging the Mexican picture-writings as a means of record, it should be borne in mind that though we can understand them to a considerable extent, we should have made very little progress in deciphering them, were it not that there are a number of interpretations, made in writing from the explanations given by Indians, so that the traditions of the art have never been wholly lost. Some few of the Mexican pictures now in existence may perhaps be original documents made before the arrival of the Spaniards, and great part of those drawn since are certainly copied, wholly or in part, from such original pictures.

It is to M. Aubin, of Paris, a most zealous student of Mexican antiquities, that we owe our first clear knowledge of a