'^Ei.F.R] ANTIQUITIES OF GUATEMALA 81 



northeast to the Rio Lacandon, called to the Spaniards in pure Maya: 

 Utz im pusical, "1113- heart is good" — that is, ''good friend, we are 

 harmless people ". '^ 



The Chols, on the other hand, who still dwelt in the niountain forests 

 at the source of the Rio de la Pasion as far as the Sarstun at the 

 beginning and at the end of the seventeenth century, having a numeri- 

 cal strength of 30,000 souls, were genuine Chols. To them Ix'longed 

 the Menche,'' the Axoye, and other lesser tribes; and the Mopan must 

 also have been very closely akin to them. These Chols not onlv had 

 the same name as the tribe still existing to-day in the north, in tlie 

 neighborhood of Palenque, but also proved their kinship by ci^rtain 

 peculiarities of language, especially the change of c to cli/ This 

 fact is the more important because it seems established accoixling to 

 the notes made l)y Doctor Sapper'' that the Choi-ti. the tribe whose 

 descendants are settled to-day in the neighborhood of Copan. likewise 

 b(>long to the same fanuly.' Thus, in fact, we have in that ancient 

 thoroughfare a broad zone of related tribes, into which the Ma^^as 

 wedged themselves oidy on one side, in the north, from Yucatan, 

 and on the other side, in the south, in the valley of the Rio (irande, or 

 Motagua river, the Mexican branch of the Pipils concjuered a i)lace for 

 themselves. Based on ethnologic conditions the kinship is apparent 

 in the architectural style of the magniticent structures at the beginning 

 and at the end of this great highwa}^ of nations — on the one hand, those 

 of Palenque, and. on the other, those of Quirigua and Copan, to which 

 in the intermediate region are joined the ruins of Menchc Tinamit and 

 some others less well known. Maudslay, in a short paper which he 

 wrote for Nature in 1892, calls attention to the fact that the colossal 

 figures on the stel» of Copan represent female deities exclusively, in 

 contrast to the Yucatec reliefs, on which male and warlike forms pre- 

 dominate. In this connection I would like to point out that the prin- 

 cipal deity worshiped in the territory of Acalan was likewise a female; 

 that the next largest city, which stood farther down on the Usumacinta, 

 bears the name Ciuatecpan (Zagoatezpan, Ciguatepecad), "palace of 

 the woman (the goddess)"; that, likewise, the mightiest city in the 

 center of Tabasco, which Cortes and Bernal Diaz call Zagoatan, 

 Zaguatan, is actually called ©iuatlan, ' ' the city of the woman (the 



n Villagutierre y Sotomayor, v. 4, p. 262. 



hMenche was actually only a certain village at the foot of the nortli side of tlu' liuly mountain 

 Vatunchu, and on the left bank of the river Cacuen; but Remesal mentions all the villages under the 

 collective name of Mench(?, which later in Villagutierre are called villages of the Chols. 



'•This change of c into ch appears in different names, for example, Vattni-Chu = idolo derecho, 

 where Chu stands for Maya Ku; and also in a specimen of the language transmitted to us in Vil- 

 lagutierre, v. 3, chap. 2, Chamay tzam bucana xaguil Jesu Christo tut Santa Cruz umenel ca tanal, 

 muri6,estendido en su cara de este palo que se 11am la Santa Cruz Nue.stra Senor .1. C. por luiefltros 

 pecados. 



f' Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen, 1893, p. ti. 



pThe word Chorti itself only means "the language of the Chols' , a.« the 1 of the Choi f)ecomfs r 

 in Chorti. 



7238— No. 28—05 6 



