Page:Stone of the Sun.djvu/74

 A pictograph of Quich’e or Maya origin confirms the preceding, proving incidentally also the identity of the conceptions regarding the calendar between the Nahuas and the peoples of Chiapas and Yucatan. We refer to the famous "page of the Bacabs," second page in the Codex Cortesianus, published by M. León de Rosny. This painting indicates in essence the same great period; but it is expressed in Venus years. Within a peripheral zone which contains a total of 260 dots, there is noted a central square, in the sides of which, distributed in four groups, appear the twenty day characters of the month. These symbols do not present the normal order of their series: they alternate in a form apparently irregular, but which is in résumé the same as the initials of the Venus year, supposing that the twenty characters are applied to the measure of the movement of the planet, or be it that they run by successive periods of 584 days.

Here is the order which they manifest:

Replaced by the corresponding characters of the Nahua calendar, with insignificant variations, we shall have the four groups of the Venus calendar that appear on the pages already mentioned of the Borgian and Vatican B codices, and an the initial page of the Fejervary-Mayer. The conclusion is clear: Mayes and Mexicans computed simultaneously, by means of the tonalámatl, the movements of the sun and Venus, forming with this combination their chronological system: from which were born the cycles of 416 years.

o) Immediately connected with the pentagons, 14 wheels or circles are found. We do not attempt to decipher them, except to say that they designate the complete number of periods of 416 years which have passed from the creation of the world (in the native traditions) until the time of the construction of the monument; this would strengthen the idea that the Aztecs made it. Being 14 the cycles, they give the year 5804 of the Indian chronology, and in the year 1479 of our era the subjects of Axayácatl were in that of 5875. They were scarcely beginning the fifteenth period; they could not then mark it upon the relief. The conjecture is somewhat arbitrary, though not absurd.