If we look back through the vista of ages to the dawn of civilized life in the countries known as the old world, we find this number SEVEN among the Asiatic nations as well as in Egypt and Mayab. Effectively, in Babylon, the celebrated temple of the seven lights was made of seven stages or platforms. In the hierarchy of Mazdeism, the seven marouts, or genii of the winds, the seven amschaspands; then among the Aryans and their descendants, the seven horses that drew the chariot of the sun, the seven apris or shape of the flame, the seven rays of Agni, the seven manons or criators of the Vedas; among the Hebrews, the seven days of the creation, the seven lamps of the ark and of Zacharias’s vision, the seven branches of the golden candlestick, the seven days of the feast of the dedication of the temple of Solomon, the seven years of plenty, the seven years of famine; in the Christian dispensation, the seven churches with the seven angels at their head, the seven golden candlesticks, the seven seals of the book, the seven trumpets of the angels, the seven heads of the beast that rose from the sea, the seven vials full of the wrath of God, the seven last plagues of the Apocalypse; in the Greek mythology, the seven heads of the hydra, killed by Hercules, etc.
The origin of the prevalence of that number SEVEN amongst all the nations of earth, even the most remote from each other, has never been satisfactorily explained, each separate people giving it a different interpretation, according to their belief and to the tenets of their religious creeds. As far as the Mayas are concerned, I think to have found that it originated with the seven members of Can’s family, who were the founders of the principal cities of Mayab, and to each of whom was dedicated a mound in Uxmal and a turret in their palace. Their names, according to the inscriptions carved on the monuments raised by them at Uxmal and Chichen, were—Can (serpent) and ɔoz (bat), his wife, from whom were born Cay (fish), the pontiff; Aak (turtle), who became the governor of Uxmal; Chaacmol (leopard), the warrior, who became the husband of his sister Moó (macaw), the Queen of Chichen, worshiped after her death at Izamal; and Nicté (flower), the priestess who, under the name of Zuhuy-Kuk, became the goddess of the maidens.
The Egyptians, in expressing their ideas in writing, used three different kinds of characters—phonetic, ideographic and symbolic—placed either in vertical columns or in horizontal lines, to be read from right to left, from left to right, as indicated by the position of the figures of men or animals. So, also, the Mayas in their writings employed phonetic, symbolic and ideographic signs, combining these often, forming monograms as we do to-day, placing them in such a manner as best suited the arrangement of the ornamentation of the façade of the edifices. At present we can only speak with certainty of the monumental inscriptions, the books that fell in the hands of the ecclesiastics at the time of the conquest having been destroyed. No truly genuine written monuments of the Mayas are known to exist, except those inclosed within the sealed apartments, where the priests and learned men of Mayab hid them from the Nahualt or Toltec invaders.
As the Egyptians, they wrote in vertical columns and horizontal lines, to be read generally from right to left. The space of this small essay does not allow me to enter in more details; they belong naturally to a work of different nature. Let it therefore suffice, for the present purpose, to state that the comparative study of the language of the Mayas led us to suspect that, as it contains words belonging to nearly all the known languages of antiquity, and with exactly the same meaning, in their mode of writing might be found letters or characters or signs used in those tongues. Studying with attention the photographs made by us of the inscriptions of Uxmal and Chichen, we were not long in discovering that our surmises were indeed correct. The inscriptions, written in squares or parallelograms, that might well have served as models for the ancient hieratic Chaldeans, of the time of King Uruck, seem to contain ancient Chaldee, Egyptian and Etruscan characters, together with others that seem to be purely Mayab.
Applying these known characters to the decipherment of the inscriptions, giving them their accepted value, we soon found that the language in which they are written is, in the main, the vernacular of the aborigines of Yucatan and other parts of Central America to-day. Of course, the original mother tongue having suffered some alterations, in consequence of changes in customs induced by time, invasions, intercourse with other nations, and the many other natural causes that are known to affect man’s speech.
The Mayas and the Egyptians had many signs and characters identical; possessing the same alphabetical and symbolical value in both nations. Among the symbolical, I may cite a few: water, country or region, king, Lord, offerings, splendor, the various emblems of the sun and many others. Among the alphabetical, a very large number of the so-called Demotic, by Egyptologists, are found even in the inscription of the Akabɔib at Chichen; and not a few of the most ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the mural inscriptions at Uxmal. In these I have been able to discover the Egyptian characters corresponding to our own.
A a, B, C, CH or K, D, T, I, L, M, N, H, P, TZ, PP, U, OO, X, having the same sound and value as in the Spanish language, with the exception of the K, TZ, PP and X, which are pronounced in a way peculiar to the Mayas. The inscriptions also contain these letters, A, I, X and PP identical to the corresponding in the Etruscan alphabet. The finding of the value of these characters has enabled me to decipher, among other things, the names of the founders of the city of Uxmal; as that of the city itself. This is written apparently in two different ways: whilst, in fact, the sculptors have simply made use of two homophone signs, notwithstanding dissimilar, of the letter M. As to the name of the founders, not only are they written in alphabetical characters, but also in ideographic, since they are accompanied in many instances by the totems of the personages: e. g for Aak, which means turtle, is the image of a turtle; for Cay (fish), the image of a fish; for Chaacmol (leopard) the image of a leopard; and so on, precluding the possibility of misinterpretation.
Having found that the language of the inscriptions was Maya, of course I had no difficulty in giving to each letter its proper phonetic value, since, as I have already said, Maya is still the vernacular of the people.
I consider that the few facts brought together will suffice at present to show, if nothing else, a strange similarity in the workings of the mind in these two nations. But if these remarkable coincidences are not merely freaks of hazard, we will be compelled to admit that one people must have learned it from the other. Then will naturally arise the questions, Which the teacher? Which the pupil? The answer will not only solve an ethnological problem, but decide the question of priority.
I will now briefly refer to the myth of Osiris, the son of Seb and Nut, the brother of Aroeris, the elder Horus, of Typho, of Isis, and of Nephthis, named also Niké. The authors have given numerous explanations, result of fancy; of the mythological history of that god, famous throughout Egypt. They made him a personification of the inundations of the Nile; Isis, his wife and sister, that of the irrigated portion of the land of Egypt; their sister, Nephthis, that of the barren edge of the desert occasionally fertilized by the waters of the Nile; his brother and murderer Tipho, that of the sea which swallows up the Nile.