CHAPTER IV. 
THE INSCRIPTIONS OF THE GREAT PERIOD. 
By the beginning of the Great Period, 9.15.0.0.0, Copan was entering 
upon the closing century of its occupation. The terraces surrounding the 
Great Plaza had been completed, and the center of building activity was very 
soon to shift some 200 meters farther south, where the Hieroglyphic Stair- 
way of Mound 26 already under construction and the magnificent temples 
surrounding the Eastern and Western Courts of the Acropolis were soon to 
be completed. 
The culture of this tribe or people was at its zenith. Wealth of a con- 
crete kind was doubtless at the disposal of the ruling caste, for only vast 
accumulations of stored-up capital, in the form of reserves of food, clothing, 
and implements, as well as a large and skilled artisan class, both the outcome 
of long-continued and wisely directed prosperity, could have made possible 
such truly remarkable achievements in architecture and sculpture. 
It is necessary, moreover, to assume that living conditions were easy, 
since it was possible to divert so much activity from the food-quest to purely 
esthetic pursuits. No warlike subjects, it should be remembered, are por- 
trayed on the stele and altars at Copan, and peace must have prevailed 
most, if not all, of the time. 
The surplus energy of a great people under the efficient direction of a 
highly organized ruling caste, probably priestly, was being applied to the 
embellishment of their capital. Industry was the order of the day, archi- 
tectural and artistic supremacy the goal. Thus passed the closing century 
of the city’s occupation; and then came the end. Some time toward the 
close of Cycle 9 or early in Cycle 10, without any apparent cause, at least 
one of sufficient importance to be reflected in the sculpture and architec- 
ture of the city, the monuments at Copan suddenly stop. Chronology and 
art, the latter without any intermediate stages of decline or decadence, all 
at once cease to be, and the city’s history becomes a blank. 
That some comparatively slow catastrophe, operating for at least a cen- 
tury, and culminating early in Cycle 10, must have overtaken the southern 
Maya becomes increasingly evident. Everywhere the story is the same— 
a sudden and final cessation of all dated monuments in the individual cities 
not later than 10.2.0.0.0, unaccompanied by any of the usual signs of social 
and political disintegration, but a gradual cessation over the Old Empire 
region as a whole.! 


1 See Chapter V, 442-462, for the discussion of this question, and also Morley, 19134, p. 65; 1915, pp. 3, 45 
and 19174, pp. 144, 145. 
219 
