16 



ARCHAEOLOGY. (ASSYRIAN). 



burial prevailed more or less extensively. The 

 large flat-topped mounds in the southern dis- 

 tricts are thought to have been occupied, as a 

 general rule, by the council-houses and the resi- 

 dences of the chiefs and principal personages 

 of the tribes ; and it seems to have been a com- 

 mon custom when deaths occurred in dwellings 

 standing on low mounds, to bury in the floors 

 of the dwellings, burn the houses, and heap 

 mounds over them before they were entirely 

 consumed or while the embers were yet smold- 

 ering. The links that have been discovered 

 connecting the Indians and mound-builders are 

 held to be numerous and well established. The 

 statements of the early navigators and explor- 

 ers concerning the habits, customs, circum- 

 stances, etc., of the Indians when first visited 

 by Europeans are largely confirmed by what 

 has been discovered in these works. This is 

 declared to be especially true as to Arkansas, 

 Georgia, and other Southern States, where 

 the discoveries made by the assistants of the 

 bureau bear out even to details the statements 

 of the chroniclers of De Soto's expedition 

 and of the early French explorers. The 

 testimony of the mounds is regarded as de- 

 cidedly against the theory that the mound- 

 builders were Mayas or Mexicans who were 

 afterward driven south, and as equally against 

 Morgan's theory that relates them to the Pueb- 

 los of New Mexico. From evidences of con- 

 tact with European civilization, which have 

 been already referred to, which can not be at- 

 tributed to intrusive burial, it is believed that a 

 goodly number of the mounds were built sub- 

 sequently to the discovery of the continent by 

 Europeans. 



Fnncral Rites of Certain Mound-Builders. In the 

 explorations in the valley ot the Little Miami 

 river, Ohio, by F. W. Putnam, in behalf of the 

 Peabody Museum of American Archeeology 

 and Ethnology, two mounds in Brown County 

 bore evidence in their interior of fire having 

 been kept up on the spot for a long time. 

 Marks of post-holes around the ash-beds in both 

 of these mounds showed that structures had been 

 erected over them, and the charcoal contained 

 in the post-holes of one of the mounds indi- 

 cated that the posts had been burned. Dr. Put- 

 nam offers as an interpretation of the history 

 of this mound : "Apparently there was original- 

 ly here a wooden structure which was burned, 

 and this was followed by a long-continued fire 

 until the immense bed of compact ashes had 

 been formed. On this, in some places, clay 

 had been placed and burned hard. Over this 

 bed of ashes clay mixed with ashes, either from 

 the edges of the bed or from some other fire, 

 had been placed, and over all the thick layer of 

 clay, making a mound of at least 60 feet in di- 

 ameter by at least 8 in height." For the origin 

 of the mounds and the fires, the explanation is 

 offered that they commemorated ceremonies 

 connected with the dead. In the search among 

 the burial-places near Madisonville, a consider- 

 able number of graves were opened which had 



been carefully constructed of stones, and in 

 which the skeletons lay at full length on the 

 back. In many of these graves the bones of 

 the hand held spool-shaped ornaments made of 

 hammered copper, which the explorations had 

 proved to be ear-ornaments. Such ornaments 

 had previously been found in various parts of 

 Ohio and west to the Mississippi in Illinois and 

 Tennessee, but not in the stone-graves of the 

 Cumberland valley, or among the graves asso- 

 ciated with the ash-pits in the cemeteries of 

 the Little Miami valley, or with the skeletons 

 buried in the stone-mounds or in the simple 

 burial-mounds of Ohio. They seemed to be 

 particularly associated with a people with whom 

 cremation of the dead, while a rite, was not 

 general, and who built the great earthworks of 

 the Miami valley. Cremation and inhumation 

 were everywhere found to have been connected 

 with the mortuary rites of the people whose 

 graves these were. 



Decipherment of Mexican Manuscripts. Mrs. Ze- 

 lia Nuttall, who is familiar with the Nahuatl 

 language of Mexico, has found, by a translation 

 into that language of the phonetic symbols of 

 the ancient Mexican documents known as the 

 Vienna Codex and the Selden and Bodleian 

 manuscripts, that these entire codices are com- 

 posed of signs representing parts of speech form- 

 ing in combination words and sentences, and 

 has discovered determinative signs making the 

 interpretation of the writing certain. She is 

 satisfied that the documents in question are rec- 

 ords of lands, tributes, tithes, and taxes ; and 

 she is convinced by a partial decipherment of 

 portions of them, that the Borgian, Vatican, 

 and Fejeroary codices do not relate, as has 

 been supposed and maintained, to astrological 

 and exclusively religious matters, but deal with 

 the details of a commercial form of govern- 

 ment. 



Assyrian and Babylonian Antiquity of the Cunei- 

 form Characters. Mr. A. H. Sayce has called 

 attention to the fact, as presented by a com- 

 parison of the older and the later cuneiform 

 inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia, which 

 are particularly illustrated in the "Tableau 

 compare^ des Ecritures Babylonienne et Assyri- 

 enne " of Messrs. A. Amiand and L. Mechineau, 

 that "in most instances the oldest form of a 

 character which we know is as widely different 

 from the original picture represented by it, as 

 are the latest forms met with in Babylonian 

 and Assyrian texts. Not only is the character 

 already cuneiform, the primitive curves and 

 connected lines having become angular and 

 broken, but it is generally impossible to tell 

 any longer what is the object intended to be 

 depicted. The hieratic characters of Egypt have 

 departed less widely from their primitive pic- 

 torial forms than have the earliest specimens of 

 cuneiform writing with which we are acquaint- 

 ed. And yet the monuments of Telloh ( see 

 "Annual Cyclopa3dift" for 1882), upon which 

 these degenerated hieroglyphs occur, go back to 

 the fourth millennium before our era, ard still 



