614 THE INSCRIPTIONS AT COPAN. 
Weighing all the ethnographic and linguistic evidence at my disposal, the 
following conclusions appear permissible. The Old Maya Empire has now been 
placed beyond reasonable doubt as having enjoyed its bloom period from about 
the year 200 to 600 A. D. This was the period of the great buildings and the per- 
fection of the hieroglyphic writing, the Maya cultural apogee. At our first meeting 
in 1915, and arriving by largely different roads, Morley and I had both come to 
see this great culture as stretching across this “land of Tezulutlan,” north of the 
central Guatemalan Altos—the Petén region—that is, through a tierra caliente, 
a broken country—the land of the great rivers. Of these great cities of the Old 
Maya Empire, Copan appears to me to have been the chief exoteric religious 
center, Palenque the esoteric and most sacred religious center, and Tikal as a 
non-sacred city larger than either, possibly the mart. The chronological and 
cultural unity of these three sites is unmistakable, and the whole district exactly 
maps this Cholti field we have been considering, and which is properly outlined on 
Stoll’s map, plus what we now call Itza territory, which is now linguistically Yucate- 
can Maya. 
At this point a further element enters. About the year 600 (we can only say) 
something happened”’; the culture breaks, and even the large cities were entirely 
abandoned, much the same sort of thing as seems to have taken place in Yucatan 
eight centuries later after the fall of Mayapan, and there due to a mere defeat in 
war, and also just what happened at a stroke at Tayasal when Ursiia conquered 
that city in 1697. We know that after the fall of Mayapan the Itza abandoned 
their homes and went south to Petén, long before the Spanish period; and Morley’s 
idea here, that this was a return to an ancient homeland, seems to me most apt. 
What we do know and may count upon as certain is that with the break-up 
of the Old Empire the te¢hnique of the inscriptions failed somewhat, though 
the knowledge of the writing was not lost altogether. The thread is carried on 
for at least another 800 years of monuments, and then through chronicles and 
manuscripts—the codices—to past the time of the Spanish entry. Broadly speak- 
ing, Maya science did two things: it went north, and it deteriorated greatly, without, 
however, dying out entirely, even to this day. ‘The contents of the different Maya 
manuscripts, the medical lore, and traces of astronomical learning show this. This 
does not mean that much was not preserved in the south also; indeed much was, 
and I am satished learning of even a higher philosophical character than that of 
the north. The south has not yet yielded what it holds—has only glimpsed it to 
us. But the technique of the architecture and the inscriptions did go north, and 
the later southern cities were much inferior in type, not only to those of the Old 
Empire, but also to those of the New Empire in the north. 
Returning once more to our linguistic theme, perhaps the most marked point 
is the separateness structurally of the Quiché-Pokom, the highland Guatemalan 
branches from the others; and the cultural gap in that region, from say 600 A. D. 
to perhaps 1100 A. D., 1s also far greater than in the north. We go back through 
the Quiché manuscripts to origins, to mythology and cosmogony, no doubt, but 
with a cultural and historical gap. Balam Quiché, who united (new) Chiquimula 
to Utatlan, eleven generations before the Spanish Conquest, that is to say, about 
1200, was the “‘ninth”’ in the Quiché line and probably the first historical personage, 
since the one before him was Hunahpi, the divine youth, who was the hero of the 
Popol Vuh; and two reigns before Hunahpti was Acxopil, who reigned 200 years! 
All this agrees not only with the failure of Ordonez to include a Quiché realm in 
his four divisions of the Votanide empire, but also with the linguistic evidence. 
If by “Yucatan” in the citation from Palacio at the head of this Appendix, we 
ce 
