410 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



to lunations or lunations to years. Among the Pueblo Indians 

 calendric records are inconspicuous or absent, though there is a 

 much more definite calendric system which is fixed and per- 

 petuated by religious ceremonies ; while among some of the 

 Mexican tribes there are elaborate calendric systems combined 

 with complete calendric records. The perfection of the calendar 

 among the Maya and Nahua Indians is indicated by the fact that 

 not only were 365 days reckoned as a year, but the bissextile was 

 recognized 1 ." 



In another important respect the superiority of the Maya- 

 Quiche peoples over the northern Nahuans is 

 shoshones* 1 incontestable. When their religious systems are 

 compared, it is at once seen that at the time of 

 the discovery the Mexican Aztecs were little better than ruthless 

 barbarians newly clothed in the borrowed robes of an advanced 

 culture, to which they had not time to properly adapt themselves, 



1 \6th Ann. Report, p. xcvi. In "The Maya Year" (1894) Dr Cyrus 

 Thomas shows that "the year recorded in the Dresden codex consisted of 

 18 months of 20 days each, with 5 supplemental days, or of 365 days" (ib.). 

 Those who have persistently appealed to these Maya- Aztec calendric systems 

 as convincing proofs of Asiatic influences in the evolution of American cultures 

 will now have to show where these influences come in. As a matter of fact 

 the systems are fundamentally distinct, the American showing the clearest indi- 

 cations of local development, as seen in the mere fact, proved by Dr Thomas, 

 that the day characters of the Maya codices were phonetic, i.e. largely rebuses 

 explicable only in the Maya language, which has no affinities out of America. 

 The Aztec month of 20 days is also clearly indicated by the 20 corresponding 

 signs on the great Calendar Stone made by king Axayacatl in 1479 and now 

 fixed in the wall of the Cathedral tower of Mexico. The best account of this 

 basalt stone, which weighs 25 tons and has a diameter of n feet, is that given 

 in the Anales del Mnseo National de Mexico by Seflor Alfredo Chavero, who 

 ascribes the astronomic system here perpetuated to the unaided efforts of the 

 American aborigines, so profoundly does it differ from the Babylonian, Egyptian, 

 and all other Old World systems. Or, he says, if indeed derived from an Asiatic 

 source, then only from such data as might have been brought over by rude 

 tribes from lands or islands now covered by the Pacific Ocean. See an excel- 

 lent reproduction of the Calendar Stone in T. U. Brocklehurst's Mexico To-Day, 

 1883, p. 1 86 ; also Zelia Nutall's study of the "Mexican Calendar System," 

 Tenth Internal. Congress of Americanists, Stockholm, 1894. "The regular 

 rotation of market-days and the day of enforced rest every 20 days were the 

 prominent and permanent features of the civil solar year" (//>.). 



