The FACTS gathered from the monuments do not sustain the theory advanced by many, that the inhabitants of tropical America received their civilization from Egypt and Asia Minor. On the contrary. It is true that I have shown that many of the customs and attainments of the Egyptians were identical to those of the Mayas; but these had many religious rites and habits unknown to the Egyptians; who, as we know, always pointed towards the West as the birthplaces of their ancestors, and worshiped as gods and goddesses personages who had lived, and whose remains are still in Mayab. Besides, the monuments themselves prove the respective antiquity of the two nations.
According to the best authorities the most ancient monuments raised by the Egyptians do not date further back than about 2,500 years B. C. Well, in Aké, a city about twenty-five miles from Merida, there exists still a monument sustaining thirty-six columns of katuns. Each of these columns indicate a lapse of one hundred and sixty years in the life of the nation. They then would show that 5,760 years has intervened between the time when the first stone was placed on the east corner of the uppermost of the three immense superposed platforms that compose the structure, and the placing of the last capping stone on the top of the thirty-sixth column. How long did that event occur before the Spanish conquest it is impossible to surmise. Supposing, however, it did take place at that time; this would give us a lapse of at least 6,100 years since, among the rejoicings of the people this sacred monument being finished, the first stone that was to serve as record of the age of the nation, was laid by the high priest, where we see it to-day. I will remark that the name Aké is one of the Egyptians’ divinities, the third person of the triad of Esneh; always represented as a child, holding his finger to his mouth. Aké also means a reed. To-day the meaning of the word is lost in Yucatan.
Cogolludo, in his history of Yucatan, speaking of the manner in which they computed time, says:
“They counted their ages and eras, which they inscribed in their books every twenty years, in lustrums of four years. * * * When five of these lustrums were completed, they called the lapse of twenty years katun, which means to place a stone down upon another. * * * In certain sacred buildings and in the houses of the priests every twenty years they place a hewn stone upon those already there. When seven of these stones have thus been piled one over the other began the Ahau katun. Then after the first lustrum of four years they placed a small stone on the top of the big one, commencing at the east corner; then after four years more they placed another small stone on the west corner; then the next at the north; and the fourth at the south. At the end of the twenty years they put a big stone on the top of the small ones: and the column, thus finished, indicated a lapse of one hundred and sixty years.”
There are other methods for determining the approximate age of the monuments of Mayab:
1st. By means of their actual orientation; starting from the fact that their builders always placed either the faces or angles of the edifices fronting the cardinal points.
2d. By determining the epoch when the mastodon became extinct. For, since Can or his ancestors adopted the head of that animal as symbol of deity, it is evident they must have known it; hence, must have been contemporary with it.
3d. By determining when, through some great cataclysm, the lands became separated, and all communications between the inhabitants of Mayab and their colonies were consequently interrupted. If we are to credit what Psenophis and Sonchis, priests of Heliopolis and Saïs, said to Solon “that nine thousand years before, the visit to them of the Athenian legislator, in consequence of great earthquakes and inundations, the lands of the West disappeared in one day and a fatal night,” then we may be able to form an idea of the antiquity of the ruined cities of America and their builders.
Reader, I have brought before you, without comments, some of the FACTS, that after ten years of research, the paintings on the walls of Chaacmol’s funeral chamber, the sculptured inscriptions carved on the stones of the crumbling monuments of Yucatan, and a comparative study of the vernacular of the aborigines of that country, have revealed to us. I have no theory to offer. Many years of further patient investigations, the full interpretation of the monumental inscriptions, and, above all, the possession of the libraries of the learned men of Mayab, are the sine qua non to form an uncontrovertible one, free from the speculations which invalidate all books published on the subject heretofore.
If by reading these pages you have learned something new, your time has not been lost; nor mine in writing them.