402 THE INSCRIPTIONS AT COPAN. 
temporaneous dates of the monuments, and occasionally other associated 
dates which were astronomically or historically important at the time, and 
finally certain lunar and eclipse data pertaining thereto, in short, we have 
used up half of the signs in setting forth these few matters. 
The meaning of the remaining half of the inscriptions is largely a sealed 
book as yet, and here if anywhere we must look for the subject-matter of 
Maya history. Judging from the glyphs already deciphered, this would 
hardly seem to be a particularly promising field, but happily, with the above 
three numerical counts out of the way (the Initial, Supplementary, and 
Secondary Series), there appear to remain in the undeciphered glyphs very 
few of a numerical nature, and we may possibly look forward with some 
degree of confidence to finding, among the latter, place-names, personal- 
names, and signs of generalized meaning, by the aid of which we will event- 
ually be able to fill in the background of Maya history as successfully as 
we have already constructed its chronological framework. 
THE ORIGIN OF THE MAYA CIVILIZATION. 
As pointed out in Chapter I, the Maya have been variously derived by 
one authority or another from Egypt, Carthage, Java, and southern India, 
even the lost continent of Atlantis having competed at one time for the 
honor of their origin. Lord Kingsborough, in nine costly volumes, sought 
to trace their descent from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and Le Plongeon, 
reversing this at least usual order of procedure, tried to people the Old 
World from the New, believing Egypt to have been colonized from Yucatan 
more than 11,000 years ago.! Unfortunately, these highly improbable 
hypotheses have not entirely disappeared before the advance of the science, 
since the Egyptian connection has been revived recently by Smith on the 
basis of erroneous identifications and purely superficial similarities. (See 
note 4, page 28.) 
Happily, in all this maze of extravagant speculation and improbable 
conjecture, we are not without some trustworthy lines of direct evidence, 
linguistic as well as archezologic, which throw light upon this important ques- 
tion: [hese are: 
1. The provenance of the Tuxtla Statuette, upon which is inscribed the 
earliest date in the Maya hieroglyphic writing. 
2. The provenance of the Huasteca, the only Maya-speaking tribe or group 
which is not contiguous to the main body of the Maya linguistic family, being 
entirely surrounded by other linguistic stocks, chiefly Nahuatlan and Totonacan, 
and the only Maya group, moreover, which lives in a region showing no traces of 
typical Maya archeological remains. 
3. The provenance of the earliest dates in the region covered by the remains 
of the Maya civilization. 

1 Le Plongeon (1886, p. 113) says in this connection: “In my work The Monuments of Mayax I have shown 
how legends accompanying the images of several of the Egyptian deities, when interpreted by means of the Maya 
language, point directly to Mayax as the birthplace of the Egyptian civilization.” 
