There can be no possible doubt that different races or rather
nations practicing distinct religious rites inhabited the country
at different epochs and destroyed each other by war. So at the time
of the arrival of the Spaniards the monuments of Chichen-Itza were
in ruins and were looked upon with awe, wonder and respect, by the
inhabitants of the country, when the city of Uxmal was thickly
peopled. There cannot be any reasonable doubt that the Nahuas, the
invaders and destroyers of the Itza metropolis, introduced the
phallic worship into Yucatan. The monuments of Uxmal do not date
from so remote an antiquity as those of Chichen, notwithstanding
that Uxmal was a large city when Chichen was at the height of its
glory. Some of its most ancient edifices have been enclosed with
new walls and ornamentation to suit the taste and fancy of the
conquerors. These inner edifices belong to a very ancient period,
and among the débris I have found the head of a bear exquisitely
sculptured out of a block of marble. It is in an unfinished state.
When did bears inhabit the peninsula? Strange to say, the Maya does
not furnish the name for the bear. Yet one-third of this tongue is
pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? Or who
took to Greece that of the Mayas? Greek is the offspring of
Sanscrit. Is Maya? or are they coeval? A clue for ethnologists to
follow the migrations of the human family on this old continent.
Did the bearded men whose portraits are carved on the massive
pillars of the fortress at Chichen-Itza, belong to the Mayan
nations? The Maya language is not devoid of words from the
Assyrian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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