64 CUP SHAPED AND OTHER LAPIDAEIAN SCULPTURES. 



without meaning. There are hundreds of them so ornamented, showing 

 that the place has long been the resort of the Indians for this purpose; for 

 there seems to be nothing else to attract them here. Many of the inscrip- 

 tions, like those before described, bear the stamp of great age ; others 

 having been made over them repeatedly, render it impossible to trace out 

 either the early or the later markings. 1 do not attempt any explana- 

 tion of these rude figures, but must leave the reader to exercise his own 

 ingenuity in finding out their meaning, if an3^"* 



Mr. Bartlett presents delineations of eleven of these blocks, thus enabling 

 the reader to become acquainted with the chfiracter of the sculptures upon 

 them. I hardly can imagine that the latter should be absolutely without 

 some meaning, though they ma}' not express anything like a definite I'ecord, 

 I lay no great> stress on the presence of a Mahadeo-like carving on the 

 boulder represented by Fig. 52 ; but I thought it proper to draw attention 

 to it. 



A similar motive induces me to pi'esent in Fig. 53 the design of a por- 

 tion of a group carved on a cliff" in the San Pete Valley, at the city of 

 Manti, Utah. A line drawn horizontally through the middle of the parallel 

 lines connecting the concentric circles would divide the figure into two 

 halves, each bearing a close resemblance to Professor Simpson's fifth type 

 in Fig. 1 of this treatise. A copy of the group in question was made and 

 published by the ill-fated Lieutenant J. W. Gunnison, who also informs us 

 that the Mormon leaders made this aboriginal inscription subservient to 

 their religious hocus-pocus by giving the following translation of it: "I, 

 Mahanti, the second King of the Lamanites, in five valleys in the mount- 

 ains, make this recox'd in the twelve-hundredth year since we came out of 

 Jerusalem — And I have three sons gone to the south country to live by 

 hunting antelope and deer.''t Truly, mundiis vult decipi! Schoolcraft 

 attempts (Vol. Ill, p. 494) something like an interpretation, which apj)ears 

 to me fanciful and unsatisfactory. 



* Bartlett : Personal Narrative, etc. ; Vol. II, pp. 195, 206. 



t Gunnison: The Mormons or Latter-Day Saints, etc. ; Philadelphia, 1853, p. 63. — The illustration 

 is taken from Bancroft's "Native Races" (Vol. IV, p. 717). I have changed, however, in accordance 

 with Lieutenant Gunnison's design, the position of the grotesque human figure to the left of the con- 

 centric circles. 



