This system is so elaborate that it could scarcely have been devised and adopted all at once. There must have been a time lasting some centuries, perhaps over a thousand years, previous to the Christian era, during which the first day count was being elaborated and perfected into the classical calendar of the early post-Christian Maya monuments.
This calendar did not exhaust the astronomical and mathematical accomplishments of the Mayas. They ascertained that eight solar years correspond almost exactly with five “years” or apparent revolutions (584 days) of the planet Venus, and that 65 Venus years of a total of 37,960 days coincide with two calendar rounds of 52 solar years. They knew that their 365-day year was a fraction of a day short of the true year, determined the error rather exactly, and, while they did not interpolate any leap days, they computed the necessary correction at 25 days in 104 years or two calendar rounds. This is greater accuracy than has been attained by any calendar other than our modern Gregorian one. As regards the moon, they brought its revolutions into accord with their day count with an error of only one day in 300 years. These are high attainments, and for a people without astronomical instruments involved accurate and protracted observations as well as calculatory ability.
Much less is known of South American calendars; but, like the dwindling away from Maya to Aztec to Pueblo and finally to the rudiments of the descriptive moon series of the backward tribes in the northern continent, so there is discernible a retardation of progress as the Maya focus is left behind toward the south. The most developed calendar in South America was that of the Chibchan peoples of Colombia. Beyond them, the Inca, in their greater empire, got along with a system intermediate in its degree of development between the Aztec and the Pueblo ones. In the Tropical Forest and Patagonian areas there do not seem to have been more than moon name series comparable to those of peripheral North America.
198. Writing
Related to calendar and mathematics in its origin was writing, which passed out of the stage of pictographs and simple ideograms only in the Mexican area. The Aztecs used the rebus method (§ [130]), but chiefly for proper names, as in tribute lists and the like. The Mayas had gone farther. Their glyphs are highly worn down or conventionalized pictures, true symbols; often indeed combinations of symbols. They mostly remain illegible to us, and while they appear to contain phonetic elements, these do not seem to be the dominant constituents. The Maya writing thus also did not go beyond the mixed or transitional stage. The Chibcha may have had a less advanced system of similar type, though the fact that no remains of it have survived argues against its having been of any considerable development. The Peruvians did not write at all. They scarcely even used simple pictography. Their records were wholly oral, fortified by mnemonic devices known as quipus, series of knotted strings. These were useful in keeping account of numbers, but could of course not be read by any one but the knotter of the strings: a given knot might stand equally for ten llamas, ten men, ten war clubs, or ten jars of maize. The remainder of South America used no quipus, and while occasional pictographs have been found on rocks, they seem to have been less developed, as something customary, than among the North American tribes. All such primitive carvings or paintings were rather expressions of emotion over some event, concrete or spiritual, intelligible to the maker of the carving and perhaps to his friends, than records intended to be understood by strangers or future generations.
Connected with the fact that the highest development of American writing took place in southern Mexico, is another: it was only there that books were produced. These were mostly ritualistic or astrological, and were painted on long folded strips of maguey fiber paper or deerskin. They were probably never numerous, and intelligible chiefly to certain priests or officials.
199. The Several Provincial Developments: Mexico
Since the calendrical and graphic achievements enumerated, together with temple sculpture, lie in the fields of science, knowledge, and art, and since they show a definite localization in southern Mexico, in fact point to an origin in the Maya area, they almost compel the recognition of this culture center as having constituted the peak of civilization in the New World.
This localization establishes at least some presumption that it was there rather than in South America that the beginnings of cultural progress, the emergence out of primitive uniformity, occurred. To be sure, it is conceivable that agriculture and other inventions grew up in Andean South America, were transported to Mexico, for some reason gained a more rapid development there, until, under the stimulus of this forward movement, further discoveries were made which the more steadily and slowly progressing Peruvian motherland of culture failed to equal. Conjectures of this sort cannot yet be confirmed or disproved. Civilization was sufficiently advanced in both Mexico and Peru to render it certain that these first beginnings now referred to, lay some thousands of years back. In the main, Mexican and Peruvian cultures were nearly on an equality, and in their fundamentals they were sufficiently alike, and sufficiently different from all Old World cultures, to necessitate the belief that they are, broadly, a common product.
Still, the superiority of the Mexicans in the sciences and arts carries a certain weight. If to this superiority are added the indications that maize and cotton were first cultivated in the south Mexican area, in other words, that the fundamentals of American agriculture and loom-weaving seem more likely to have been developed there than elsewhere; and if further the close association of pottery with agriculture throughout the western hemisphere is borne in mind, it seems likely that the seat of the first forward impetus out of the wholly primitive status of American culture is to be sought in the vicinity of southern Mexico.