In Yucatan these mounds are generally composed of seven superposed platforms, the one above being smaller than that immediately below; the temple or sanctuary containing invariably two chambers, the inner one, the Sanctum Sanctorum, being the smallest.
In Babylon, the supposed tower of Babel—the Birs-i-nimrud—the temple of the seven lights, was made of seven stages or platforms.
The roofs of these buildings in both countries were flat; the walls of vast thickness; the chambers long and narrow, with outer doors opening into them directly; the rooms ordinarily let into one another: squared recesses were common in the rooms. Mr. Loftus is of opinion that the chambers of the Chaldean buildings were usually arched with bricks, in which opinion Mr. Taylor concurs. We know that the ceilings of the chambers in all the monuments of Yucatan, without exception, form triangular arches. To describe their construction I will quote from the description by Herodotus, of some ceilings in Egyptian buildings and Scythian tombs, that resemble that of the brick vaults found at Mugheir. “The side walls slope outward as they ascend, the arch is formed by each successive layer of brick from the point where the arch begins, a little overlapping the last, till the two sides of the roof are brought so near together, that the aperture may be closed by a single brick.”
Some of the sepulchers found in Yucatan are very similar to the jar tombs common at Mugheir. These consist of two large open-mouthed jars, united with bitumen after the body has been deposited in them, with the usual accompaniments of dishes, vases and ornaments, having an air hole bored at one extremity. Those found at Progreso were stone urns about three feet square, cemented in pairs, mouth to mouth, and having also an air hole bored in the bottom. Extensive mounds, made artificially of a vast number of coffins, arranged side by side, divided by thin walls of masonry crossing each other at right angles, to separate the coffins, have been found in the lower plains of Chaldea—such as exist along the coast of Peru, and in Yucatan. At Izamal many human remains, contained in urns, have been found in the mounds.
“The ordinary dress of the common people among the Chaldeans,” says Canon Rawlison, in his work, the Five Great Monarchies, “seems to have consisted of a single garment, a short tunic tied round the waist, and reaching thence to the knees. To this may sometimes have been added an abba, or cloak, thrown over the shoulders; the material of the former we may perhaps presume to have been linen.” The mural paintings at Chichen show that the Mayas sometimes used the same costume; and that dress is used to-day by the aborigines of Yucatan, and the inhabitants of the Tierra de Guerra. They were also bare-footed, and wore on the head a band of cloth, highly ornamented with mother-of-pearl instead of camel’s hair, as the Chaldee. This band is to be seen in bas-relief at Chichen-Itza, inthe mural paintings, and on the head of the statue of Chaacmol. The higher classes wore a long robe extending from the neck to the feet, sometimes adorned with a fringe; it appears not to have been fastened to the waist, but kept in place by passing over one shoulder, a slit or hole being made for the arm on one side of the dress only. In some cases the upper part of the dress seems to have been detached from the lower, and to form a sort of jacket which reached about to the hips. We again see this identical dress portrayed in the mural paintings. The same description of ornaments were affected by the Chaldees and the Mayas—bracelets, earrings, armlets, anklets, made of the materials they could procure.
The Mayas at times, as can be seen from the slab discovered by Bresseur in Mayapan (an exact fac-simile of which cast, from a mould made by myself, is now in the rooms of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.), as the primitive Chaldee, in their writings, made use of characters composed of straight lines only, inclosed in square or oblong figures; as we see from the inscriptions in what has been called hieratic form of writing found at Warka and Mugheir and the slab from Mayapan and others.
The Chaldees are said to have made use of three kinds of characters that Canon Rawlinson calls letters proper, monograms and determinative. The Maya also, as we see from the monumental inscriptions, employed three kinds of characters—letters proper, monograms and pictorial.
It may be said of the religion of the Mayas, as I have had occasion to remark, what the learned author of the Five Great Monarchies says of that of the primitive Chaldees: “The religion of the Chaldeans, from the very earliest times to which the monuments carry us back, was, in its outward aspect, a polytheism of a very elaborate character. It is quite possible that there may have been esoteric explanations, known to the priests and the more learned; which, resolving the personages of the Pantheon into the powers of nature, reconcile the apparent multiplicity of Gods with monotheism.” I will now consider the names of the Chaldean deities in their turn of rotation as given us by the author above mentioned, and show you that the language of the American Mayas gives us an etymology of the whole of them, quite in accordance with their particular attributes.
RA.
The learned author places ‘Ra’ at the head of the Pantheon, stating that the meaning of the word is simply God, or the God emphatically. We know that Ra was the Sun among the Egyptians, and that the hieroglyph, a circle, representation of that God was the same in Babylon as in Egypt. It formed an element in the native name of Babylon. Which was ka-ra.