“The ordinary dress of the common people among the Chaldeans,” says Canon Rawlison, in his work, the Five Great Monarchies, “seems to have consisted of a single garment, a short tunic tied round the waist, and reaching thence to the knees. To this may sometimes have been added an _abba_, or cloak, thrown over the shoulders; the material of the former we may perhaps presume to have been linen.” The mural paintings at Chichen show that the Mayas sometimes used the same costume; and that dress is used to-day by the aborigines of Yucatan, and the inhabitants of the _Tierra de Guerra_. They were also bare-footed, and wore on the head a band of cloth, highly ornamented with mother-of-pearl instead of camel’s hair, as the Chaldee. This band is to be seen in bas-relief at Chichen-Itza, inthe[TN-18] mural paintings, and on the head of the statue of Chaacmol. The higher classes wore a long robe extending from the neck to the feet, sometimes adorned with a fringe; it appears not to have been fastened to the waist, but kept in place by passing over one shoulder, a slit or hole being made for the arm on one side of the dress only. In some cases the upper part of the dress seems to have been detached from the lower, and to form a sort of jacket which reached about to the hips. We again see this identical dress portrayed in the mural paintings. The same description of ornaments were affected by the Chaldees and the Mayas--bracelets, earrings, armlets, anklets, made of the materials they could procure. The Mayas at times, as can be seen from the slab discovered by Bresseur[TN-19] in Mayapan (an exact fac-simile of which cast, from a mould made by myself, is now in the rooms of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.), as the primitive Chaldee, in their writings, made use of characters composed of straight lines only, inclosed in square or oblong figures; as we see from the inscriptions in what has been called hieratic form of writing found at Warka and Mugheir and the slab from Mayapan and others. The Chaldees are said to have made use of three kinds of characters that Canon Rawlinson calls _letters proper_, _monograms_ and _determinative_. The Maya also, as we see from the monumental inscriptions, employed three kinds of characters--_letters proper_, _monograms_ and _pictorial_.