408 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Hence the inference that such names were mainly introduced by 

 the Spaniards and their Mexican troops during the conquest of 

 those lands, say, up to about 1535, and do not appear in Yucatan 

 which was not conquered from Mexico. Forstermann reluctantly 

 accepts this view, advanced by Sapper, having nothing better to 

 suggest. 



The higher Maya culture had not fully spread from Guatemala 

 to Yucatan, when its further development was arrested in the 

 south by the Spaniards ; nor had it lasted very long if the hypo- 

 thesis that the memorial columns of Copan were not erected 

 before the i5th century be right. 



On this theory, which certainly harmonises best with most of 

 the conditions, the Mayas would appear to have stood on a higher 

 plane of culture than their Aztec rivals, and the same conclusion 

 may be drawn from their respective writing systems. Of all the 

 aborigines these two alone had developed what may fairly be 

 called a script in the strict sense of the term, although neither of 

 them had reached the same level of efficiency as the Babylonian 

 cuneiforms, the Chinese or the Egyptian hieroglyphs, not to speak 

 of the syllabic and alphabetic systems of the Old World. Some 

 even of the barbaric peoples, such as most of the prairie Indians, 

 had reached the stage of graphic symbolism, and were thus on the 

 threshold of writing at the discovery. " The art was rudimentary 

 and limited to crude pictography. The pictographs were painted 

 or sculptured on cliff-faces, boulders, the walls of caverns, and 

 even on trees, as well as on skins, bark, and various artificial 

 objects. Among certain Mexican tribes, also, autographic records 

 were in use, and some of them were much better 

 ivit^scripts differentiated than any within the present area of 

 the United States. The records were not only 

 painted and sculptured on stone and moulded in stucco, but were 

 inscribed in books or codices of native parchment and paper: 

 while the characters were measurably arbitrary, i.e. ideographic 

 rather than pictographic 1 ." 



Perhaps the difference between the Aztec and Maya methods 

 is best denned by stating that the former is more purely pictorial 



1 \6th Ann. Report, p. xcv. 



