110 DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. 



The figures repeated are as follows, viz : 



• • 4 times. >> 4 times. 



O '^ times. rjj 3 times. 



4 times. /\ 3 times. 



3 times. 



// 



y, 4 times. \/ 



You have already seen specimens of the written Runic and Bardic 

 characters. Your attention is now called to the letters of the Phoenician 

 alphabet, and it would require no exuberant fancy to see a resemblance 

 between some of these and some of the characters of the Davenport 

 Tablet. The identity, or at least strong resemblance, of several of these, 

 is shown in the cartoon. 



We do not know whether the ancient Peruvians had any written lan- 

 guage, as none has come down to us, or, indeed, if they possessed any 

 other means of recording events than the colored strings or quippos, 

 and these were merely mnemonic or a kind of artificial memory. 



The Mayas of Central America had picture writing, but whether they 

 had made any advances towards symbols for sounds I know not. The 

 Mayas had a peculiar way of noting or marking numbers, which has a 

 striking resemblance to the groups of dots in the Davenport inscription. 

 This similarity I remarked first when looking over the representations of 

 Maya sculpture given \n Bancroft's great work, and the impression was 

 confirmed by the perusal of a paper by M. Leon de llosny, on " The Num- 

 eration in the Language and in the Sacred Writing of the Ancient 

 Mayas," read at the Congress of Americanists, at Nancy, in 1875, and 

 published in the Compte-Rendu of that body (vol. 2, p. 439). This mode 

 of numeration, which was also used in the ancient Mexican writing, 

 though the language is altogether different, is as follows : •==!, • .=2, • • • 

 or . • ,=3, .... or : : =4, =5, then ' (5 and 1)=6, _J_^ (5 



and 2)=7, ^^^ (5 and 3)=8, ' ' ' (5 and 4, =9, — — — , and so on up to 

 = 23, which is the greater unit of the numeration, it counting on- 

 ward by 20's, and there being names for the square of 20 (20x20), etc. 

 This vigesimal system of counting, evidently founded on the whole number 

 of fingers and toes, seems to have been confined to the Mayas, Aztecs, 

 and allied nations ; elsewhere, in l>oth North and Soutli America, the dec- 

 imal system prevailed. 



But, according to Duponceau, the Indian tribes about the Great Lakes 

 and the neighboring ones, counted by fives, like the Mayas. 



The Mexicans had picture writing, as we know, but they had more, 

 Brantz Mayer says :* " The Mexican picture writing consisted of several 



*Smithsonian Contributions, Vol. IX, p. 13-. 



