Man, Past and Present by Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (free reads .TXT) 📕

The Aztec writing may be best described as pictographic, the pictures being symbolical or, in the case of names, combined into a rebus. No doubt much diversity of opinion prevails as to whether the Maya symbols are phonetic or ideographic, and it is a fact that no single text, however short, has yet been satisfactorily deciphered. It seems that many of the symbols possessed true phonetic value and were used to express sounds and syllables, though it cannot be claimed that the Maya scribes had reached that advanced stage where they could indicate each letter sound by a glyph or symbol[882]. According to Cyrus Thomas, a symbol was selected because the name or word it represented had as its chief phonetic element a certain consonant sound or syllable. If this were b the symbol would be used where b was the prominent element of the word to be indicated, no reference, however, to its original signification being necessarily retained. Thus the symbol for cab, 'earth,' might be used in writing Caban, a day name, or cabil, 'honey,' because cab is their chief phonetic element.... One reason why attempts at decipherment have failed is a misconception of the peculiar character of the writing, which is in a transition stage from the purely ideographic to the phonetic[883]. From the example here given, the Maya script would appear to have in part reached the rebus stage, which also plays so large a part in the Egyptian hieroglyphic system. Cab is obviously a rebus, and the transition from the rebus to true syllabic and alphabetic systems has already been explained[884]. The German Americanists on the other hand have always regarded Maya writing as more ideographic, and H. Beuchat adopts this view, for "no symbol has ever been read phonetically with a different meaning from that which it possesses as an ideogram[885]."

But not only were the Maya day characters phonetic; the Maya calendar itself, afterwards borrowed by the Aztecs, has been described as even more accurate than the Julian itself. "Among the Plains Indians the calendars are simple, consisting commonly of a record of winters ('winter counts'), and of notable events occurring either during the winter or during some other season; while the shorter time divisions are reckoned by 'nights' (days), 'dead moons' (lunations), and seasons of leafing, flowering, or fruiting of plants, migrating of animals, etc., and there is no definite system of reducing days to lunations or lunations to years. Among the Pueblo Indians calendric records are inconspicuous or absent, though there is a much more definite calendric system which is fixed and perpetuated by religious ceremonies; while among some of the Mexican tribes there are elaborate calendric systems combined with complete calendric records. The perfection of the calendar among the Maya and Nahua Indians is indicated by the fact that not only were 365 days reckoned as a year, but the bissextile was recognized[886]."

In another important respect the superiority of the Maya-Quiche peoples over the northern Nahuans is incontestable. When their religious systems are compared, it is at once seen that at the time of the discovery the Mexican Aztecs were little better than ruthless barbarians newly clothed in the borrowed robes of an advanced culture, to which they had not had time to adapt themselves properly, and in which they could but masquerade after their own savage fashion.

It has to be remembered that the Aztecs were but one branch of the Nahuatlan family, whose affinities Buschmann[887] has traced northwards to the rude Shoshonian aborigines who roamed from the present States of Montana, Idaho, and Oregon down into Utah, Texas, and California[888]. To this Nahuatlan stock belonged the barbaric hordes who overthrew the civilisation which flourished on the Anahuac (Mexican) table-land about the sixth century A.D. and is associated with the ruins of Tula and Cholula. It now seems clear that the so-called "Toltecs," the "Pyramid-builders," were not Nahuatlans but Huaxtecans, who were absorbed by the immigrants or driven southwards.

To north and north-west of the settled peoples of the valley lived nomadic hunting tribes called Chichimec[889], merged in a loose political system which was dignified in the local traditions by the name of the "Chichimec Empire." The chief part was played by tribes of Nahuan origin[890], whose ascendancy lasted from about the eleventh to the fifteenth century, when they were in their turn overthrown and absorbed by the historical Nahuan confederacy of the Aztecs[891] whose capital was Tenochtitlan (the present city of Mexico), the Acolhuas (capital Tezcuco), and the Tepanecs (capital Tlacopan).

Thus the Aztec Empire reduced by the Conquistadores in 1520 had but a brief record, although the Aztecs themselves as well as many other tribes of Nahuatl speech, must have been in contact with the more civilised Huaxtecan peoples for centuries before the appearance of the Spaniards on the scene. It was during these ages that the Nahuas "borrowed much from the Mayas," as Foerstemann puts it, without greatly benefiting by the process. Thus the Maya gods, for the most part of a relatively mild type like the Maya themselves, become in the hideous Aztec pantheon ferocious demons with an insatiable thirst for blood, so that the teocalli, "god's houses," were transformed to human shambles, where on solemn occasions the victims were said to have numbered tens of thousands[892].

Besides the Aztecs and their allies, the elevated Mexican plateaus were occupied by several other relatively civilised nations, such as the Miztecs and Zapotecs of Oajaca, the Tarasco and neighbouring Matlaltzinca, of Michoacan[893], all of whom spoke independent stock languages, and the Totonacs of Vera Cruz, who were of Huaxtecan speech, and were in touch to the north with the Huaxtecs, a primitive Maya people. The high degree of civilisation attained by some of these nations before their reduction by the Aztecs is attested by the magnificent ruins of Mitla, capital of the Zapotecs, which was captured and destroyed by the Mexicans in 1494[894]. Of the royal palace Viollet-le-Duc speaks in enthusiastic terms, declaring that "the monuments of the golden age of Greece and Rome alone equal the beauty of the masonry of this great building[895]." In general their usages and religious rites resembled those of the Aztecs, although the Zapotecs, besides the civil ruler, had a High Priest who took part in the government. "His feet were never allowed to touch the ground; he was carried on the shoulders of his attendants; and when he appeared all, even the chiefs themselves, had to fall prostrate before him, and none dared to raise their eyes in his presence[896]." The Zapotec language is still spoken by about 260 natives in the State of Oajaca.

Farther north the plains and uplands continued to be inhabited by a multitude of wild tribes speaking an unknown number of stock languages, and thus presenting a chaos of ethnical and linguistic elements comparable to that which prevails along the north-west coast. Of these rude populations one of the most widespread are the Otomi of the central region, noted for the monosyllabic tendencies of their language, which Najera, a native grammarian, has on this ground compared with Chinese, from which, however, it is fundamentally distinct. Still more primitive are the Seri Indians of Tiburon island in the Gulf of California and the adjacent mainland, who were visited in 1895 by W. J. McGee, and found to be probably more isolated and savage than any other tribe remaining on the North American Continent. They hunt, fish, and collect vegetable food, and most of their food is eaten raw, they have no domestic animals save dogs, they are totally without agriculture, and their industrial arts are few and rude. They use the bow and arrow but have no knife. Their houses are flimsy huts. They make pottery and rafts of canes. The Seri are loosely organised in a number of exogamic, matrilineal, totemic clans. Mother-right obtains to a greater extent perhaps than in any other people. At marriage the husband becomes a privileged guest in the wife's mother's household, and it is only in the chase or on the war-path that men take an important place. Polygyny prevails. The most conspicuous ceremony is the girls' puberty feast. The dead are buried in a contracted position. "The strongest tribal characteristic is implacable animosity towards aliens.... In their estimation the brightest virtue is the shedding of alien blood, while the blackest crime in their calendar is alien conjugal union[897]."

It is noteworthy that but few traces of such savagery have yet been discovered in Yucatan. The investigations of Henry Mercer[898] in this region lend strong support to Foerstemann's views regarding the early Huaxtecan migrations and the general southward spread of Maya culture from the Mexican table-land. Nearly thirty caves examined by this explorer failed to yield any remains either of the mastodon, mammoth, and horse, or of early man, elsewhere so often associated with these animals. Hence Mercer infers that the Mayas reached Yucatan already in an advanced state of culture, which remained unchanged till the conquest. In the caves were found great quantities of good pottery, generally well baked and of symmetrical form, the oldest quite as good as the latest where they occur in stratified beds, showing no progress anywhere.

The caves of Loltun (Yucatan) and Copan (Honduras), examined by E. H. Thompson and G. Byron-Gordon, yielded pre-Mayan debris from the deep strata. Perhaps this very ancient population was of the same race as the little known tribes still living in the forests of Honduras and San Salvador[899].

Since the conquest the Aztecs, and other cultured nations of Anahuac, have yielded to European influences to a far greater extent than the Maya-Quiche of Yucatan and Guatemala. In the city of Mexico the Nahuatl tongue has almost died out, and this place has long been a leading centre of Spanish arts and letters[900]; yet the Mexicans yearly celebrate a feast in memory of their great ancestors who died in defence of their country[901]. But Merida, standing on the site of the ancient Ti-hoo, has almost again become a Maya town, where the white settlers themselves have been largely assimilated in speech and usages to the natives. The very streets are still indicated by the carved images of the hawk, flamingo, or other tutelar deities, while the houses of the suburbs continue to be built in the old Maya style, two or three feet above the street level, with a walled porch and stone bench running round the enclosure.

One reason for this remarkable contrast may be that the Nahua culture, as above seen, was to a great extent borrowed in relatively recent times, whereas the Maya civilisation is now shown to date from the epoch of the Tolan and Cholulan pyramid-builders. Hence the former yielded to the first shock, while the latter still persists to some extent in Yucatan. Here about 1000 A.D. the cities of Chichen-Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan formed a confederacy in which each was to share equally in the government of the country. Under the peaceful conditions of the next two centuries followed the second and last great Maya epoch, the Age of Architecture, as it has been termed, as opposed to the first epoch, the Age of Sculpture, from the second to the sixth century A.D. During this earlier epoch flourished the great cities of the south, Palenque, Quirigua, Copan, and others[902]. Despite their more gentle disposition, as expressed in the softer and almost feminine lines of their features, the Mayas held out more valiantly than the Aztecs against the Spaniards, and a section of the nation occupying a strip of territory between Yucatan and British Honduras, still maintains