4. B is again tilling the ground in the manner already familiar to us.
Under him lies his own head with the Imix-Kan sign, denoting food and
drink, as a superfix. The first hieroglyph is the sign of the eighteenth
month Cumhu, _i.e._, of the end of the year. The third is a Kin-Akbal, the
fifth a Kan-Imix, the sixth is not finished, and the fourth may be intended
for the head without the lower jaw, but it is carelessly drawn.
5. Page 43. The solicited rain begins. The goddess with the serpent on her
head is pouring streams of water from her vessel.
The first hieroglyph repeats the month Cumhu, denoting the beginning of
rain, before the close of the year; the third is the sign of the goddess
met with on page 39b, here also with the sign for the west as a prefix; the
fifth is her determinative, the serpent, and the fourth is Kan-Imix.
If the first sign in the first group is not regarded as the sign of the
year, but as that of the sixteenth month (Pax) resembling it, and the fact
is taken into consideration that there is an interval of 34 days between
the second and fourth groups and of 40 days between the second and fifth,
this would be found to correspond with the interval between the months Pax
and Cumhu.
Pages 43b--44b.
This is the fourth and last series of the first part of the Manuscript; the
first is on page 24, the second on pages 31a to 32a, and the third on page
45a. The first series is quite by itself, but the second and third are
similar in form to this fourth, though their initial days are different
from those of the latter:--XIII Akbal, XIII Oc and III Lamat. All three
begin with differences which are divisible by 13:--91, 104 and 78, equal to
7, 8, and 6 × 13. All three aim and arrive at numbers which are common
factors of 260, 104 and 364, and therefore also of 3640, which last number
is written out in the other two series, while in this series it can only
appear later on and then, increased by multiplication.
Since this series has the difference 78, the week day numbers remain the
same, while those of the month days must advance by 18 each, that is, from
the hidden starting-point III Lamat they go on to III Cimi, III Kan, III
Ik, III Ahau, etc., until the tenth member of the series is 10 × 78,
_i.e._, 3 × 260 and thus comes again to the day III Lamat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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