Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts: Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881-82, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1884, pages 3-66Thomas, Cyrus
History
Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts: Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881-82, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1884, pages 3-66
Thomas, Cyrus
Calendar -- Mexico; Maya calendar
The chief character of the hieroglyphic, 15 R. (Rau's scheme), of the
Palenque Tablet is a serpent's head (shown correctly only on the stone
in the Smithsonian Museum and in Dr. Rau's photograph), and nearly the
same as the symbol for the same Mexican day. The method of representing
a house in the Maya manuscripts is substantially the same as the Mexican
symbol for _Calli_ (House). The cross on the Palenque Tablet has so many
features in common with those in the blue and red loops of the Fejervary
Codex as to induce the belief that they were derived from the same type.
We see in that of the Tablet the reptile head as at the base of the
cross in the blue loop, the nodes, and probably the bird of that in the
red loop, and the two human figures.
What is perhaps still more significant, is the fact that in this plate
of the Fejervery[TN-19] Codex, and elsewhere in the same Codex, we see
evidences of a transition from pictorial symbols to conventional
characters; for example, the yellow heart-shaped symbol in the lower
left-hand corner of the Fejervary plate which is there used to denote
the day _Ocelotl_ (Tiger). On the other hand we find in the manuscript
Troano for example, on plate III, one of the symbols used in the
_Tonalamatl_ of the Vatican Codex B and in other Mexican codices to
signify water. On Plate XXV* of the same manuscript, under the four
symbols of the cardinal points, we see four figures, one a sitting
figure similar to the middle one with black head, on the left side of
the Cortesian plate; one a spotted dog sitting on what is apparently
part of the carapace of a tortoise; one a monkey, and the other a bird
with a hooked bill. Is it not possible that we have here an indication
of the four days--Dragon, Death, Monkey, Vulture, with which the Mexican
years began?
In all the Maya manuscripts we find the custom of using heads as
symbols, almost, if not quite, as often as in the Mexican codices. Not
only so, but in the former, even in the purely conventional characters,
we see evidences of a desire to turn every one possible into the figure
of a head, a fact still more apparent in the monumental inscriptions.
Turning to the ruins of Copan as represented by Stephens and others, we
find on the altars and elsewhere the same death's-head with huge
incisors so common in Mexico, and on the statues the snake-skin so often
repeated on those of Mexico. Here we find the _Cipactli_ as a huge
crocodile head,[52] also the monkey's head used as a hieroglyphic.[53]
The pendant lip or lolling tongue, which ever it be, of the central
figure of the Mexican calendar stone is found also in the central figure
of the sun tablet of Palenque[54] and a dozen times over in the
inscriptions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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