In the neighbourhood of Menché a further group of ruins, those of Piedras Negras, show abundant signs of the high level of culture which is associated with Palenque and Menché, as will be seen by the photograph which we are able to reproduce through the courtesy of the accomplished and indefatigable field-worker and scholar, Herr Teobert Maler, to whom, we believe, belongs the honour of being the first to make known the extent and treasures of this group.
What is abundantly proved by his, Mr. Maudslay's, and other students' researches in the Usumacinta district is that the whole country around is rich in ruins, and many more, besides those so far located, may possibly be discovered in the future. And here a further puzzle presents itself. Such evidence as exists in the Spanish records seems to point to the fact that all these cities were in a deserted, or at any rate a decadent, state on the arrival of the Spaniards. The evidence is not by any means conclusive, as little or no reliance can be placed on the Spanish chroniclers, who are silent upon so much else. But such as it is, it deserves weighing.
Granting for the moment, then, that Palenque and these other centres were ruins at the Conquest, why was this so? An explanation might be found in the supposition that the militant Aztecs had made extensive raids as far south as Honduras, and had proved themselves entirely superior to the Mayans, scattering and slaughtering them, and, possibly after a short occupation, had returned northward, leaving the conquered citizens too broken and fearful to attempt a restoration of their grand centres, dreading further raids. Dr. Gann, British Commissioner at Corosal, told us he found in Honduras wall paintings of undoubted Aztec origin; which discovery would seem to support this view. It certainly seems to us a more reasonable explanation than the one some students have adopted, viz. that the cities of the Usumacinta represent an age of culture between which and that of Northern and North-Eastern Yucatan stretches a gap of many centuries. Any Aztec raids Honduras-wards would certainly follow a route well south of Yucatan, and through the Usumacinta country.
Yet another explanation might be that the victories of Cortes had the result of driving large bodies of Aztecs southward; that these possessed themselves of many Mayan cities; and that later, on Cortes advancing south, they deserted them and took to the dense surrounding woods. It must also be remembered that even if the Spanish conqueror passed within eight or ten leagues of such a city as Palenque, and did not hear of its existence, it might yet well be that it was still inhabited, as none of the Indians met on the line of march would be likely to volunteer any information to the hated whites.
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE ANCIENT MAYANS
There is no field of inquiry in which the imagination of students could roam further or more uselessly than in the reconstruction of the life of a vanished people from their ruined monuments. In attempting, as we shall in this chapter, to place before the reader a concise sketch of the political, religious, and social life of the Mayans at the time of the Spanish invasion of Yucatan, we cannot too strongly emphasise our conviction that the marvellous buildings which we have described in the preceding pages are not monuments of a vanished people. The Mayan toiler to-day in the milpas or the henequen fields is, we are convinced, the lineal descendant of the Mayan architect who was capable of creating a Chichen or a Sayil.
The history of Yucatan is the history of Egypt save for one fact. When Europe first interested itself in the architectural wonders of the Land of the Pharaohs centuries of darkness had overwhelmed the Copts and the Fellaheen and the arts of their ancestors were entirely lost to them. But when the white man first set foot in Yucatan the civilisation of her people was an actual living civilisation, though the key to the origin of it has yet to be discovered. The half-century which elapsed between the first discovery of the Peninsula and the establishment of Spanish authority sufficed to render desolate the mighty cities which covered its surface, to scatter and decimate its vast populations, to extirpate and suppress the native religion, and by the substitution of a new creed, a new polity, and a new social organisation so completely to ring down the curtain upon the Mayan past that the Indian victims of Spanish brutality and bigotry seemed separated from their ancestors by a gulf which even the most remarkable archæological acumen would find it hard to bridge. But though much archæological acumen has been exercised and many writers have laboured to aggrandise the Ancient Mayans at the expense of their descendants, it has really been labour lost. The life which the Mayans were found by the Spaniards to be living was probably in its minutest detail the life which they had led for centuries before. And thus in presenting here a short account of their civilisation, pieced together from the haphazard writings of those Spaniards who were not entirely absorbed in the congenial task of massacring and destroying, we are safe in assuming that we are giving the reader a very fair and accurate idea of how the builders of even the oldest ruins lived and loved and died.
Politically Yucatan was divided into a number of provinces, each ruled by a cacique. These provinces at the time of the Spanish invasion appear to have numbered nineteen. The power of these caciques within their own territory was so absolute as to amount to a virtual monarchy; though kingship in its true constitutional sense would appear to have never existed in Yucatan. The caciqueship was hereditary, and passed from father to son. Females appear to have been excluded from succession. If a cacique died leaving a son who was a minor, his eldest or most capable brother succeeded as cacique, and actually held the position after the heir had reached full age; the nephew being obliged to wait until his uncle's death before he attempted to claim his heritage. If the cacique left no brother, the priests and chief elders elected a successor who held the government for his life, the rightful heir only acceding at his death.