SEI.KK] THP: MEXICAN CHRONOLOGY 27 



made to liai-monize with Landa's theory of the l>eginnino- of the year. 

 He therefore says that S Cuuiku is to be understood as '' the eve of a 

 festival", the day which is followed by the eio-hth day of the month 

 Cumku. The ingeniousness of this explanation certainly satisHed Mr 

 Forstemann less than an3^one. 1 hold that 8 Cumku can not well be 

 anything else than the eighth da}^ of the month Cumku. And if a dav 

 4 Ahau (-1: XX) was the eighth day of the month C'umku, then tiie Hrst 

 da}' of that month must be a day 10 Been (io XI 11) and the year must 

 also have begun with Been, the thirteenth day sign, the Mexican sign 

 Acatl. According to this, therefore, the signs of the first days of the 

 years were not the fourth, ninth, fourteenth, nineteenth day signs 

 (Kan, Muluc, Ix, Cauac), ])ut the thirteenth, eighteenth, third, eighth 

 day signs. Been, Ezanab, Akbal, Lamat, or in Mexican, Acatl, Tecpatl, 

 Calli, Tochtli. That this is actually the case in the Dresden mamiscript 

 is also confirmed elsewhere. 



Not unlike the Mexicans in their custom stated a1)ove, the Mavas also 

 assigned the successive years of the c^^cle to the four cardinal points. The 

 books of Chilan Balam, acop}^ of which, prepared by the late lamented 

 Doctor Berendt, 1 had occasion to use in Doctor Brinton's li])rarv. unani- 

 mously ascribe the Kan years to the east, the Muluc years to the north, 

 the Ix years .to the west, and the Cauac years to the south. To be 

 sure, Landa contradicts this. Still the same relation follows from his 

 assertions. For the Kan 3^ears, which he assigns to the south, were 

 the years in the days preceding which, according to his statements, 

 the spirit of evil dominating the Kan years was ])rought into the vil- 

 lage from a southerly direction, and then borne out of the village on 

 the eastern side, that is, in the direction jjrobably significant of the new 

 year. And so, too, with the other 3^ears: ''"The Chac-uuayayab of the 

 Muluc years is taken out toward the north, the Zac-uuayayal)of thclx 

 years toward the west, and the Ek-uuayayai) of the Cauac years toward 

 the south." 



Now, what years and what cardinal points are connected in the manu- 

 scripts ? There is no lack of hieroglyphs for the four and the five cardi- 

 nal points, respectively, in the manuscripts. We know distinctly that 

 (( to d in figure 1 represent the four cardinal points, and that e to r/ are 

 probably variants of a hieroglyph for the fifth cardinal point, the direc- 

 tion upward from l)elow, or downward from above. It was, however, 

 still doubtful how a to </, figure 1, are to be referred to the four cardinal 

 points. Schultz-Sellack (Zeitschrif t f iir Ethnologic, volume 9, page 22 1 , 

 1879) and Leon de Rosny were of the opinion that a to d, respectively, 

 denote the east, north, west, and south. Cyrus Thomas, in his Study of 

 the Manuscript Troano, exchanges a and c and asserts that the former 

 represents the west, the latter the east. In his recent work, published 

 in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, he reverses 

 the entire order and states that a to d, figure 1, correspond respectively 



