Mexican Maize Fields 29 



placency that has moved many races to create God in the 

 image and likeness of man, the Maya appropriated Kukulkan 

 as an ancestor, the founder of the nation, who had promised 

 his children this magnificent destiny. 



But through their pride ran an ever-present appreciation of 

 that which was the foundation of their wealth and greatness 

 the corn. A beautifully carved, but broken, stela found at 

 Yaxchilan depicts a kneeling figure whose reverent face is 

 uplifted toward a pair of hands universal symbol of the crea- 

 tive power. The hands hold out the sign @) KAN. This is 

 the sign for the first day of the Mayan month, and stands 

 for maize. 



So clearly the wise men of Maya taught that: "In the begin- 

 ning was Corn; and from corn came enlightenment, learning, 

 civilization, power. . . ." 



It is scarcely to be believed that a people as vigorous as 

 the Maya did not venture out on the sea to discover and trade 

 with other tribes. In later years, when the strength of the 

 nation was nearing exhaustion, they lived in dread of the can- 

 nibal blacks of the islands, and built massive sea-walls against 

 their raids. But earlier, the long canoes of the Maya must have 

 threaded the Gulf to the shores of Florida and Mississippi. 

 There is a legend that the Suwannee River gets its name from 

 "Water Beloved of the Sun-God" in the Maya tongue; and 

 that a colony from Yucatan was found in the great Okefenokee 

 Swamp in southeastern Georgia, where large earth mounds 

 have given up remnants of prehistoric civilization. 



If up the Suwannee, then why not up the Mississippi? And 

 once they had penetrated this wide waterway, might they not 

 have entered the Ohio and the Missouri? Scattered through 

 the midwest are thousands of earth mounds, once the dwelling 

 places of men who planted maize and ate it, and left the 

 charred cobs with heaps of broken potsherds, arrow heads and 

 stone axes, to mark where once they lived. In Adams County, 

 Ohio, is a gigantic effigy mound of earth built up from the 



