1894-95.] ABORIGINAL AMERICAN INSCRIPTIONS. 61 



twenty years, futachi, now changed to hatachi, and the one, ten and two- 

 units explain themselves. Maka-Wala must thus have been put to 

 death two years after the burning of his daughter Shipoku and his son- 

 in-law Furi, unless the four years of Furi's refusal to surrender be taken 

 into account. At any rate, the date of Maka-Wala's overthrow is 1272 

 after Buddha, or 793 A.D., and that of his death is 795 A.D. It may be 

 that Furi and Shipoku were murdered and their bodies burned in 797. 

 This for America is a great antiquity, and carries us back to the begin- 

 ings of Mexican history. Maka-Wala was a contemporary of Charle- 

 magne, and represents the earliest band of Mound Builders that, landing 

 in Vancouver, found their eastern way through our North-west to Lake 

 Superior, and thence, down the Mississippi, to Iowa. 



I have no time here to comment on these seven inscriptions. A full 

 commentary, connecting them with the Siberian series and with frag- 

 ments of native tradition, will be found in my Hittite Track in the East, 

 whenever that book may be published. Four dated tablets, extending 

 from 793 to 1 26 1 A.D. are more than the most sanguine explorer of 

 American antiquities ever hoped for, yet they may be only the first fruits 

 of an abundant historical harvest. At any rate, the publishing of the 

 foregoing seven documents will enable students to intelligently read any 

 similar relics that may come in their way, whether engraved on prepared 

 stones or on rock faces. That many such will yet reward the labour of 

 explorers I cannot doubt. Should what has been written encourage the 

 disingenuous to forgery, the fraud will not long deceive, unless its perpe- 

 trator be a consummate master of archaic Japanese. But no such scholar 

 would stoop to the meanness of archaeological deception. 



