The American Egypt Part 17

Thus far we have the most marked traces of Orientalism. Copan was probably an exact counterpart of the early cities of Cambodia and Ceylon, as Palenque would seem to be a replica of seventh-century Boro Budor. With the practical extinction of the foreign builders the art would take upon itself, in the matter of decoration, a purely native character. Many ornamental ideas would, however, recommend themselves to the caciques, as, for instance, the lion seat, which, changed to represent the Central American jaguar, an animal probably held in veneration, would figure in the carvings. It is easy to imagine how the building art spread from Palenque. There would probably be two lines of advance: one through Chiapas into the Zapotec country and so on to the tableland of Mexico; and one up to Honduras and so to Yucatan. By the ninth century it would have reached Chichen Itza on the one hand and possibly spread as far north as the city of Tula in Mexico.

From the earliest times Chichen must have been one of the most populous centres in Yucatan. The water problem is even to-day the greatest social and economic factor in the Peninsula; and the existence of two huge natural reservoirs such as the cenotes at Chichen must have meant an importance for the spot from the remotest times. When building was introduced into the country the cacique of Chichen probably ranked high among the chiefs, and he would be sure to hear early of the marvellous buildings of stone that were being erected at Copan. Probably he might make a journey thither, while the builders of Copan were still living.

Possibly he might invite some of them to Chichen to instruct his people in the art.

Be this as it may, there would seem to be at least two distinct ages represented in the ruins of Chichen. The buildings still standing belong to a later period than those which crowned the now ruined mounds to the east and the south-east of the Castillo. These latter represent the old Chichen, built probably within a century of the arrival of the builders.

They show signs of having gone to pieces through natural decay rather than having been demolished by man, as in war. On excavation of the mounds, the walls and pillars of these buildings prove to be in fair preservation. With scarcely an exception, it would seem that the fall of the roof has been the real cause of the destruction of each edifice. The roofs in Mayan buildings are always the weakest spot. Buildings which have been destroyed by a conquering people generally bear ample traces of such destruction. In the same way, buildings which have fallen through a natural process of decay demonstrate this fact by the state of their ruin. The buildings that stood on the mounds at Chichen have fallen before the hand of Time. If a conquering tribe had taken Chichen from the Itzas they would not have destroyed their buildings, but would have used them as did the Spaniards under Montejo. It was no case of modern artillery, when the buildings would naturally fall or be damaged in the conflict. The most destructive weapon the Indians had was the spear of hardened wood or tipped with flint, and to attempt to destroy buildings as solid as those of Chichen with such implements would be about as great a task as an attempt to cut a full-sized croquet lawn with a pair of nail scissors. For these reasons we venture to date the oldest buildings at Chichen about the ninth century, and we believe that our estimate would be corroborated by any expert architect.

The later buildings are of far more recent date; but perhaps here it would be well to describe the mode of building and thus explain our reasons for modernising Chichen. To be technical, the first part to examine in a building is its foundations. The ruins of Yucatan appear to lack nothing of solidity in this matter. Usually they are founded on truncated pyramids which when intact would appear to be cut from solid rock. They are however not built, like the pyramids of Egypt, of solid blocks of stone, but are simply faced with stone slabs only a few inches thick. Beneath these the pyramid is formed of loose building rubble and earth. The Chichen Castillo is a good example of Mayan building methods.

The limestone slabs forming the face of the pyramid are less than a foot thick. Beneath them is loose rubble. Thus should one of these facing slabs work out of place, when the wet season came the rain would get in behind the slabs and quickly move the ones below out of their positions.

The earth and rubble would be washed away in the wet season and crumbled away in the hot season, until in a few years there would be a perfect avalanche of these slabs from the top, falling, for lack of support, like a pack of cards. The stairway at the Castillo is formed of blocks of stone let but a short way into the pyramids. The consequence is that not one of the four stairways as built by the Indians could be ascended to-day unless you were an Alpine climber willing to risk broken limbs.

All the other buildings at Chichen ill.u.s.trate the same careless methods of construction.

The Nunnery was built, as we have stated on page 101, at different periods or else the original design was added to. On the north side is a hole that has been made in the structure by a former owner of the Chichen hacienda. This hole shows that the building is of the same material as the Castillo, but built in a different way. Being perpendicular it was impossible to face it, as was the Castillo, after the rubble had been put in position. The walls must have been built first and the inside filled in afterwards. That this was the case is shown by the fact that the wall is separate and not faced on to the rubble in any way. The fallen south-west corner in like manner shows how the addition to the building was made. A wall was built out the desired distance from the main structure and the s.p.a.ce between the two filled up with rubble and earth. It will be obvious to every reader that this mode of building was a weak one. The heavy weight of loose rubble and earth enclosed in a wall between two and three feet thick was not a very substantial foundation for a heavy building. Naturally the tendency would be for the walls to bulge and crack, spelling ruin to the whole building.

But now let us turn from the foundations to the buildings themselves.

Mr. Henry C. Mercer, in his book _Hill Caves of Yucatan_ (Philadelphia, 1896), is very outspoken on this subject. On p. 95 he says, "The more we examined the walls the more we wondered not so much at their antiquity as at the fact that they had not already crumbled to the ground.... A facing of blocks shaped like the letter V pushed mosaic-fas.h.i.+on into a central pudding-like concrete of stone and mortar was a weak form of construction. Neither were the face stones interlocked systematically so as to bind the joints. Everything was slipping out of place. No wonder there were fresh cracks in the walls, that whole facades tumbled, and that overseers (of haciendas) had spoken of structures that had lost their ident.i.ty in twenty years." Mr. Mercer is right. When one considers the hopelessly slipshod manner of their building, one is obliged to admit that the wonder is that all the Mayan palaces and temples have not already crumbled to the ground.

There was only one method of building in Yucatan, and it is difficult to say how this was carried out. The walls average about two feet three inches in thickness and were made up as follows. Ten inches of stone on the outside, about seven to eight on the inside, and the s.p.a.ce intervening between these two surfaces is filled with a mixture of mortar and rubble. The outer surface wall was generally formed of solid square or oblong stones of various sizes. No care was taken to "bind"

them one with the other as in the Egyptian and modern buildings. We often noticed the joins of the stones coming directly one above the other for as many as three or four layers, the result generally being a large gaping crack where the wall had bulged at this weak spot.

Another weak point in these outer walls is the fact that the crevices between the two layers of stone are often filled up with stone chips. As often as not these were wedge-shaped and had been driven into the mortar between the layer and then smoothed off level with the face of the building. As the mortar dried and the building "settled," these chip wedges tended to loosen, and after a series of rainy seasons ended by falling out altogether. Some of the better-placed ones are still in position, though these may have been added only a few years before the coming of the Spaniards, and, as the buildings had then quite "settled,"

have retained their position to the present day. But such a method is obviously a weak spot in building.

Weaker still is the method employed in the building of the inner wall.

Most of the stones are pyramidal or V-shaped, as Mr. Mercer calls them.

They are in fact wedge-shaped pieces of stone as seen in the cut on p.

264, embedded in the mortar and rubble of the interior of the wall, the thick end of the wedge forming a flat surface for the wall. Here again, as the wall subsided after the building was finished, these were pushed out of place or loosened by the weight above them. Once this took place there was no hope for any building. A block that had been pushed out generally meant the loosening of the stones around, and in time the whole facade would fall. But often over the face of the stones was put a thick layer of plaster which is in many cases still in position, speaking well for its durability. This plaster, as often as not two or three inches thick, kept the stone in position. The same slipshod methods are seen in the ornamentation of the building. The small colonnade at Labna is an example in point. The columns were not embedded in the wall at the top or bottom, but, half rounded, were stuck on to this concrete interior without the least solid stone masonry as support.

The common type of roof is flat, the only exceptions being those which have superstructures rising in the centre or front for purely ornamental purpose. The cut on p. 264 gives a section in which the roof is portrayed. The outer wall is carried up with its usual average thickness to the top of the building. The interior is the regular type of arch, also shown in the ill.u.s.tration, formed by blocks of stones placed one above the other in such a way as to appear like about ten inverted steps. To add a better finish to the interior after these were in position, they were trimmed off evenly, making a flat sloping surface which was afterwards plastered and painted. The arch did not come to a point. Instead, across its top a slab was laid, as our ill.u.s.tration shows. Between the outer side of this arch and the inner side of the perpendicular outer wall of the building the s.p.a.ce was filled up with the same concrete rubble as was used between the walls, making a level roof which in some cities we found had been cemented over. The result of this weight of loose stone pressing on the sides of the arch was that as soon as the inner wall of the arch became weak the whole roof fell in and filled up the building. This is what has happened in the ruins of old Chichen. The walls are found amid the debris of fallen roofs. This is what is happening to-day in the other buildings in Chichen and elsewhere in the Peninsula; and this is what will happen until all these ancient structures have become roofless ruins. And that time is not far off. Old Chichen has fallen. The Chichen standing to-day is fast falling to pieces. Uxmal has no great lease of life before it, and the buildings of Labna, Kabah, and Sayil are tottering.

Lastly, we would say something of the building of doorways in these cities. The lintels of the doors are almost invariably formed of the wood of the Central American sapota tree (_Achras sapota_). The wood is very hard, durable, and heavy, and in a dry climate would last practically for ever. But the climate of Yucatan can scarcely be termed dry; for the wet season averages five months. Despite this fact we find those sapota beams at Chichen, which have not been exposed to the weather, in fairly good preservation. The decay of one which was exposed has caused the falling of a room in the Castillo on the north side; and this has also taken place in the room on the west side of the House of Tigers. Possibly this was the cause of the falling of the front of the temple at the north end of the Tennis Court. Chichen stands on high ground compared with Uxmal, where scarcely a lintel can be found in position to-day, though Uxmal is not older than Chichen. At Labna and Kabah again are lintels still in good preservation, owing to those cities being built on the sierras. This question of the condition of the lintels, even in the most favourable situations, is very suggestive in regard to the dates to be a.s.signed to the majority of the ruins. If the thousand odd years ascribed to them by enthusiasts really represented their age, there would not be a single lintel found anywhere.

When to the slipshod methods of building one must add the fact that the climate is a trying one for any style of architecture and that the friability of the limestone used is excessive, one realises that no very great date can be a.s.signed to the ruins still standing. To date even approximately each city is almost impossible. The ruins of many of them point to several dates for each. Some buildings are intact; others are falling; while some are mere crumbling heaps. No doubt none of the larger cities were built all at once. They represented years of labour.

For example the Palace at Sayil might have taken a score of years. In most cities the first building attempted was probably a temple. Possibly a century might have elapsed before a second temple or a palace was put up, and thus to-day you naturally have mere heaps of stone close to buildings still intact.

In most places we were able to determine the relative ages of the buildings. On many sites there were traces of the earliest erections marked by fallen mounds. There was often a middle period between these and that represented by the buildings still standing. At Chichen there were, as we have said, two distinct periods, but these were obviously far apart in date. Those of the first period were probably in building within a century of the arrival of the foreign architects; and fell probably at or about the time the second set of buildings were put up.

Structures built in the manner of those standing at Chichen to-day could not by any possibility remain intact in a climate like Yucatan's, if indeed anywhere, for a period longer than about six hundred years. Thus, if they were built about the eighth or ninth century they would be far advanced in ruin at the Conquest.

After a most careful survey, we think that the ruins of Chichen standing to-day were built at or about the fall of Mayapan (1426 or 1462). There was no doubt a great recrudescence of building throughout Yucatan after this event. History affords many examples of the fact that a great victory is celebrated by the conquerors, on their return to their centres, setting up temples and palaces commemorative of their success.

The dissensions and intrigues leading up to the overthrow of the powerful cacique of Mayapan had probably for some years before that event checked building enterprise throughout the Peninsula. At the conclusion of the war an impulse to city-beautifying was experienced.

Probably the next greatest chief of Yucatan, after the vanquished lord of Mayapan, was the cacique of the Itzas of Chichen, and on the success of the confederation, of which it may be presumed he was an important member, he built himself a new city on the site of his already decaying one. At about the same time the group of cities of the south, Uxmal, Kabah, Labna and Sayil, were restored or rebuilt. The building zeal during the century previous to the Conquest seems to have reached a high pitch. The outlying ruins in Yucatan such as El Meco, Tuloom, those on Isla de Mujeres, and those which we discovered on the islands of Cozumel and Cancun, represented an outer ring of Mayan civilisation. Their builders had evidently never learnt the art of the finest carving. The ruins are peculiarly devoid of ornamentation, and the whole style is uncouth and suggests crudity. In a like manner a rough knowledge of building spread far into the south. Thus to-day, between big ruined centres such as Copan, Piedras Negras, and Palenque, we find smaller towns some of the buildings of which are still intact.

What happened in Mexico? The knowledge of building had spread over the whole of the plateau within the few centuries succeeding the founding of Copan. There would only be the one period, the one wave of building which would wash into Mexico before news of the wonderful art reached the ears of the ever-warlike Aztecs, to whom such accounts would suggest much wealth and a country worth pillaging. They may have found the wealth of Mexico in its then undeveloped state disappointing, but they evidently quickly grasped the advantage stone houses had over skin wigwams always needing repair and always draughty. Conquering the Mayans and christening them Toltecs, they set them to work to build cities.

Aztec deities were, for the most part, subst.i.tuted for the Mayan G.o.ds.

Such blood-loving G.o.ds as Huitzilopochtli, in whose honour the historians a.s.sert tens of thousands of human beings were sacrificed, were purely of Aztec origin. The serpent-wors.h.i.+p so dear to the Aztecs'

forefathers, the Shoshonees, was much more in evidence than it had ever been among the Mayans. Very speedily the influence of the warlike Aztecs spread over the country southward until, as some historians say, they reached Mayapan in Yucatan. Certainty they must have reached Honduras, where Dr. Gann, British Commissioner at Corosal, told us he had found distinct traces of Aztec culture. But this was at a period not many years before the coming of the Spaniards. It may even have been so late that Cortes, who was destined to be the conqueror of these conquering upstarts, the Aztecs, had already heard of wonderful Yucatan, which had been termed "Isla Rica," and which, a few years later, formed the stepping-stone to his complete, if inglorious, conquest of Mexico.

Summarising, then, the arguments of this chapter, we would venture to say that the building civilisation of Central America flourished between the eighth century and the coming of the Spaniards in 1517. The sequence of cities, as near as can be judged, would be as follows:

1. Copan and Quirigua, the first, or among the first, erected during the eighth century.

2. Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan, with possibly some undiscovered, follow closely in date.

3. The ruins of Palenque, probably contemporaneous with the last-mentioned groups, was a city from the earliest building period, but its palace was restored or rebuilt at a much later date.

4. The mounds of fallen debris found throughout Yucatan represent the first buildings in that country, and date from about the ninth to the eleventh century.

5. Those buildings that have more recently fallen represent the middle age of the building civilisation, dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries.

6. Those buildings standing to-day belong to the latter day period, and date from the beginning of the fifteenth century until the coming of the Spaniards in 1517.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] It might be worth while here to note that Stephens declared he found at Copan the remains of two circular towers with stairs.

CHAPTER XVIII

HIEROGLYPHICS AND PAINTINGS

Throughout that part of Central America which from time immemorial has been inhabited by the Mayans, in their ruined cities, on the stelae, on the door-posts, on the wooden and stone lintels, on altar-slabs, and on special tablets are hieroglyphics. Wherever the Mayan Linguistic Stock is found, in Yucatan, in Guatemala, in Chiapas, in Tabasco, and in Honduras we find them, the only exception being among the Huastecas, the Mayan tribe living on the Panuco River, Mexico. Considering the extent of the Mayan ruins, these hieroglyphics are few in number; but the Spanish vandals are known to have burnt countless ma.n.u.scripts written on bark[14] and leaf. And thus, if the carved inscriptions are spa.r.s.e, there is good ground for believing that the art of writing was practised for some centuries before the Conquest. Four ma.n.u.scripts only survive, and these we describe later. The hieroglyphics, whether carved or written, and no matter what their position or what the material upon which they are inscribed, are invariably of the same nature, though it is noticeable that those on some monuments are finer cut, more intricate, and display a higher art than others.

In Mexico writing never reached such a high degree of perfection as in Yucatan and the other southern territories of the Mayan tribes. Thus it would seem that at the time of the Aztec invasion the Mayans of the Mexican plateau were only acquainted with the merest outline of the art which their kinsmen of the south had so far perfected. This is entirely consonant with the theories we have earlier advanced as to the comparatively crude stage of civilisation to which the Mexican Mayans, the Toltecs of the Aztec traditions, had attained at the coming of the warlike northern tribes. In most cases the Mexican writings are pictographic rather than hieroglyphic, though Mayan glyphs do occur. The best collection of these pictographs is that made by Alexander von Humboldt and presented by him to the Royal Library of Berlin in January, 1806. Some of these are described in his _Vues des Cordilleres et Monuments des Peuples indigenes de l'Amerique_; while others are reproduced in Lord Kingsborough's _Antiquities of Mexico_. Up to the present all efforts to find an undeniable "key" to the decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphics have failed. The most resolute and intelligent work has been done by Americans and Germans. Among the former the most famous are Professor Cyrus W. Thomas, T. Goodman, S. Holden, and in past years the late Dr. D. G. Brinton. Among the latter those most prominent are Professors E. Forstemann, Eduard Seler, and Paul Sch.e.l.lhas. France has been represented by Abbe Bra.s.seur de Bourbourg, Professor Leon de Rosny, Count de Charencey, and M. A. Pousse; while England, alas! has been practically unrepresented in this important work, for Mr. A. P.

Maudslay, the only British student in this field, has chiefly devoted himself to photographing rather than attempting to decipher the glyphs.

Much might reasonably have been expected from the labours of all these scholars, but practically nothing has resulted but a series of theories, over the exact value and application of which there is endless bickering. Attempts have been made from time to time to compose an alphabet by which the glyphs could be read phonetically. The first great stir in this direction was made by Abbe de Bourbourg in 1864, when he announced that he had discovered a year before in Madrid a ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled, _Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan_, by Diego de Landa, Bishop of Merida from 1573 to 1579. In this ma.n.u.script was included an alphabet of the Mayan glyphs with their equivalents in Spanish. For the moment this "find" was regarded as a Central American "Rosetta Stone," and every one believed the glyphs would offer no further difficulties. But the archaeological world was doomed to disappointment, for on an attempt being made to use the alphabet, it broke down and was declared by all to be an invention of Landa. But the Abbe did not give it up; and, a.s.sisted by Leon de Rosny, he defined twenty-nine letters with numerous variants, and published his report in 1869 in the introduction to the _Codex Troano_; while the result of de Rosny's labours were printed in his _Essai sur le Dechiffrement de l'ecriture hieratique de l'Amerique Centrale_ in 1876.

The next "alphabet" was that propounded in _The Scientific American_ for January, 1885, by Dr. Le Plongeon, who, in an article ent.i.tled "Ancient Maya Hieratic Alphabet according to Mural Inscription," declared it to contain twenty-three letters with the usual numerous variants. But this, like Landa's, was strangled almost at its birth by remorseless scholars.

Next came forward Dr. Hilborne T. Cresson, who at meetings of the American a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science in 1892 and 1894, advanced the theory that the characters were purely phonetic; but his untimely death cut short his researches. Professor Cyrus W. Thomas, in a paper in _The American Anthropologist_ for July, 1893, ent.i.tled "Are the Maya Hieroglyphics Phonetic?" rather follows Cresson, but in recent years has reconsidered this view and now would seem to hold that some, at least, are ideographs.

Thus there may be said to be the two schools of decipherers: those who believe the Mayan writing to be phonetic and those who hold it to be ideographic. For the latter stand the German school (Forstemann, Seler and Sch.e.l.lhas); for the former the Abbe, de Rosny and de Charencey. The American students have been for the most part willing to follow the lead of Cyrus Thomas and declare it to be a mixture of phonetics and ideographs. After years of careful study of the glyphs Professor Forstemann has come to the general conclusion that they are largely composed of numerals made up of astronomical ideographs. He was the first to discover what are now generally accepted as the various numeral signs. His first achievement was his alleged identification of one of the glyphs with our nought in April, 1885. From this start he went slowly up the numeral scale until he a.s.serted he had deciphered the signs for the numbers up to twenty. These are now generally accepted as correct and are composed as shown on opposite page. Thus it would seem, if Professor Forstemann is right, that the highest number to which they counted by means of these dots and dashes was 19. No greater number than this has ever been found in any of the codices or on the monuments.

a.s.suming this as true, it is obvious that the number 20 must be looked for in a new form.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Professor Forstemann's idea is that the 20 glyph changed according to its meaning and surroundings. In some cases it was represented [Symbol]; while in others [Symbol] or its variant [Symbol]. He holds that 20 was the highest number in use among the Mayans. This he tries to show was natural enough, for, writing in _The Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 28_, p. 499, he says: "Nature suggested this ... because these they could count on their fingers and toes, in four divisions of five each." From the early historians we learn that the Mayan month consisted of twenty days (_kin_), which was known as one _chuen_ (month). Any number over twenty was thus known as one _chuen_ so many _kin_, or one month so many days. The Mayan year was composed of eighteen months, forming a period of 360 days known as an _ahau_. The month-names were (1) _Pop_, (2) _Uo_, (3) _Zip_, (4) _Zes_, (5) _Zeec_, (6) _Xul_, (7) _Zo-yaxkin_, (8) _Mol_, (9) _Chen_, (10) _Yaax_, (11) _Zac_, (12) _Ceh_, (13) _Mac_, (14) _Kankin_, (15) _Moan_, (16) _Pax_, (17) _Kayab_, (18) _Cunku_. The numbering of the years, too, was never carried beyond twenty, when it became known as a _katun_.[15] Thus the following table of time has been worked out:

20 kin (days) = 1 chuen (month).

18 chuen.. = 1 ahau (year) 360 days.

20 ahaus.. = 1 katun (20 years or 7,200 days).

20 katuns.. = 1 cycle (400 years or 144,000 days).

13 cycles.. = 1 great cycle (5,200 years or 1,872,000 days).

73 great cycles = 1 era.