This deservedly celebrated historiographer and antiquarian has devoted a hundred pages and more of his octavo work, entitled “Researches in America,” in describing the similarity which exists between its representations of astrology, astronomy, and the divisions of time, and those of a great multitude of the nations of Asia—Chinese, Japanese, Calmucks, Mongols, Mantchaus, and other Tartar nations; the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and ancient Celtic nations of Europe. (See the American edition by Helen Maria Williams, vol. i.) The size of this stone was very great, being a fraction over twelve feet square, three feet in thickness, weighing twenty-four tons. It is of the kind of stone denominated trappean porphyry, of the blackish gray color.
The place where it was found was more than thirty miles from any quarry of the kind; from which we discover the ability of the ancient inhabitants not only to transport stones of great size, as well as the ancient Egyptians, in building their cities and temples of marble, but also to cut and engrave on stone, equal with the present age.
It was discovered in the vale of Mexico, in A. D. 1791, in the spot where Cortez ordered it to be buried, when, with his ferocious Spaniards, that country was devastated. That Spaniard universally broke to pieces all images of stone which came in his way, except such as were too large and strong to be quickly and easily thus affected. Such he buried, among which this sculptured stone was one. This was done to hide them from the sight of the natives, whose strong attachment, whenever they saw them, counteracted their conversion to the Roman Catholic religion.
The sculptured work on this stone is in circles; the outer one of all is a trifle over twenty-seven feet in circumference—from which the reader can have a tolerable notion of its size and appearance. The whole stone is intensely crowded with representations and hieroglyphics, arranged, however, in order and harmony, every way equal with any astronomical calendar of the present day. It is further described by Baron Humboldt, who saw and examined it on the spot:—
“The concentric circles, the numerous divisions and subdivisions engraven on this stone, are traced with mathematical precision. The more minutely the detail of this sculpture is examined, the greater the taste we find in the repetition of the same forms. In the centre of the stone is sculptured the celebrated sign nahuiolin-Tonatiuh, the Sun, which is surrounded by eight triangular radii. The god Tonatiuh, or the sun, is figured on this stone, opening his large mouth, armed with teeth, with the tongue protruded to a great length. This yawning mouth and protruded tongue is like the image of Kala, or, in another word, Time—a divinity of Hindostan. Its dreadful mouth, armed with teeth, is meant to show that the god Tonatiuh, or Time, swallows the world, opening a fiery mouth, devouring the years, months, and days, as fast as they come into being. The same image we find under the name of Moloch among the Phœnicians, some of the ancient inhabitants on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, from which very country there can be but little doubt America received a portion of its earliest inhabitants.” Hence a knowledge of the arts to great perfection, as found among the Mexicans, was thus derived. Humboldt says the Mexicans have evidently followed the Persians in the division of time, as represented on this stone. The Persians flourished one thousand years before Christ.
“The structure of the Mexican aqueducts leads the imagination at once to the shores of the Mediterranean.”—(Thomas’s Travels, p. 293.) The size, grandeur, and riches of the tumuli on the European and Asiatic sides of the Cimmerian strait (which unites the Black sea with the Archipelago, a part of the Mediterranean, the region of ancient Greece, where the capital of Turkey in Europe now stands, called Constantinople), “excite astonishing ideas of the wealth and power of the people by whom they were constructed.”
But whatever power, wealth, genius, magnitude of tumuli, mounds and pyramids are found about the Mediterranean—where the Egyptian, the Phœnician, the Persian, and the Greek, have displayed the monuments of this most ancient sort of antiquities—all, all is realized in North and South America, and doubtless under the influence of the same superstition and eras of time,— having crossed over, as before argued; and among the various aboriginal nations of South and North America, but especially the former, are undoubtedly found the descendants of the fierce Medes and Persians, and other warlike nations of the old world.
The discoveries of travellers in that country show, even at the present time, that the ancient customs in relation to securing their habitations with a wall still prevail. Towns in the interior of Africa, on the river Niger, of great extent, are found to be surrounded by walls of earth, in the same manner as those of the West in North America.
See the account as given by Richard Lander: “On the 4th of May, we entered a town of prodigious extent, fortified with three walls of little less than twenty miles in circuit, with ditches or moats between. This town, called Boo-hoo, is in the latitude of about eight degrees forty-three minutes north, and longitude five degrees and ten minutes east. On the 17th, we came to Roossa, which is a cluster of huts walled with earth.”
This traveller states that there is a kingdom in Africa called Yaorie, which is large, powerful, and flourishing, containing a city of prodigious extent. The wall surrounding it is of clay, very high, and in circuit between twenty and thirty miles. He mentions several other places, similarly enclosed by earth walls.