66 MEXICO, CENTRAL AMEEICA, WEST INDIES. 



the present calendar is twelve days behind time. Like that of their Zapotec and 

 Michoacan neighbours, their year was divided into eighteen months of twenty 

 days, to which were added five supplementary days, often regarded as of bad 

 omen. But in order more completely to harmonize the conventional with the 

 astronomic year, after every cycle of fifty- two years a period either of twelve or 

 thirteen daj^s was intercalated according to the necessities of the calculations. 



The numeral system was vigesimal, that is, four times five, the days being also 

 grouped in fives, the fifth answering to our seventh, and possessing a certain 

 importance as set apart for feasts and markets. But the years were differently 

 divided, each tlalpilli, "knot" or "bundle," consisting of thirteen, and four of 

 these, that is, a series of fifty-two years, constituting the xiuhmolpiUi, or cycle. 

 In the eyes of the Mexicans this formed the chief period of time, and with it 

 were accordingly associated certain mystic ideas on the government of their daily 

 life and of society. To them the normal duration of human existence seemed to 

 coincide with the xiuhmolpilli, and from the few men to whom the gods granted 

 the privilege of living through two of these periods, the double cycle took the 

 name of Jmehuetilitztli, or "old age." According to a law — which, however, was 

 not always enforced — the Toltec chiefs should rule for exactly a cycle, and when a 

 chief died before completing the period, a council of elders assumed the government 

 in his name. On the other hand those who exceeded the term had to abdicate, 

 and their successors began their reign from the hour indicated in the calendar. 



As amongst the peoples of the Old World, the solar had been preceded by a 

 lunar year ; hence it was that the revolutions of the moon continued to regulate 

 the religious calendar of feasts and observances, which are always more faithful 

 to established usage. In the same way, in the various European religions the 

 great feast of Easter, which had originally been the feast of the spring-tide, 

 that is, of renewed nature, is still determined by the revolutions of the moon. 



Although the Mexicans had not invented a writing system in the strict sense 

 of the term, they were still able to perpetuate their records, to draw maps by 

 "painting in a natural way all the rivers and harbours," to establish their 

 genealogies, to publish their laws and edicts, to describe the industrial arts, the 

 occupations of the household, lastly, to transmit even abstract thought, by means 

 of hieroglyphical figures. Usually these figures, of square form v/ith rounded 

 angles, were painted in vivid colours on a kind of paper made from the fibres of 

 the maguey and anacahuite, the "paper tree " {cordia boissieri), or else on skins or 

 strips of cotton covered with varnish and bound together like a fan, forming an 

 amatJ, or book with wood boards for covers. The public buildings, and here and 

 there the face of the rocks, especially in the Western Sierra Madre, were also embel- 

 lished with hieroglyphics inscribed on the stone. 



A careful study of these documents shows that in the emj)loyment of such 

 characters the Mexicans had advanced beyond the purely figurative and symbolic 

 sense, in many combinations already using them as phonetic signs, so as to form a 

 kind of rebus ; in this way were written, for instance, the names of cities. From 

 the earliest historic times the Toltecs possessed extensive libraries of these painted 



