Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
The “Stone of the Giants” at Escamela near the city of Orizaba,
Mexico, has been the subject of much discussion. Father Damaso
Sotomayor sees in the inscribed figures a mystical allusion to the
coming of Christ to the Gentiles and to the occurrences supposed
in Hebrew myth to have taken place in the Garden of Eden. This
stone was examined by Capt. Dupaix in the year 1808 and is figured
in the illustrations to his voluminous narrative. The figure he
gives [now presented as B on Pl. _XIV_] is, however, so erroneous
that it yields but a faint idea of the real character and meaning
of the drawing. It omits the ornament on the breast and also the
lines along the right of the giant’s face, which as I shall show are
distinctive traits. It gives him a girdle where none is delineated,
and the relative size and proportions of all the three figures are
quite distorted.
The rock on which the inscription is found is roughly triangular
in shape, presenting a nearly straight border of 30 feet on each
side. It is hard and uniform in texture and of a dark color. The
length or height of the principal figure is 27 feet, and the incised
lines which designate the various objects are deeply and clearly cut.
I now approach the decipherment of the inscriptions. Any one
versed in the signs of the Mexican calendar will at once perceive
that it contains the date of a certain year and day. On the left of
the giant is seen a rabbit surrounded with ten circular depressions.
These depressions are the well-known Aztec marks for numerals, and
the rabbit represents one of the four astronomic signs by which
they adjusted their chronologic cycles of fifty-two years. The
stone bears a carefully dated record, with year and day clearly set
forth. The year is represented to the left of the figure and is that
numbered “ten” under the sign of the rabbit; the day of the year is
number “one” under the sign of the fish.
These precise dates recurred once, and only once, every
fifty-two years, and had recurred only once between the year of
our era, 1450, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519-’20.
Within the period named the year “ten rabbit” of the Aztec calendar
corresponded with the year 1502 of the Gregorian calendar. It is
more difficult to fix the day, but it is, I think, safe to say that,
according to the most probable computations, the day, “one fish,”
occurred in the first month of the year 1502, which month coincided
in whole or in part with our February.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account