FAÇADE OF BUILDING AT KABAH.
The paintings in all the ruins are fast crumbling away, and to-day a gentle tap upon the walls will show that the layers of paint are losing those adhesive qualities which have held them in position for centuries.
How were such arts of writing and painting attained? The latter question is easily answered. The knowledge of painting in elementary colours has often been found among the most inartistic peoples; but as we have said before, the mural paintings of the monuments of Central America are so similar in design to those of the early Buddhist temples that if we are to believe a migration to America took place in the early Middle Ages the suggestion that the emigrants brought the art of painting into Central America with them is almost irresistible. But it is not so easy with the glyphs. The paper on which the early codices were written and the way in which they are folded bear a striking resemblance to the early manuscripts of the Malay Peninsula, but as yet no counterparts of the characters which form the hieroglyphics on the monuments of Central America have been found in any other part of the world.
Most writers would have us believe, as in the case of the architecture, that it is indigenous to the American continent. It is possible that the invention of this writing is the work of the indigenes, but we are inclined to believe that the Mayan hieroglyphics, if they are ever deciphered, will prove to be a combination writing—partly pictographic and indigenous and partly of a foreign character. In Java and the neighbouring islands have been discovered inscriptions in an ancient form of Sunda writing. These have never been deciphered, and they are in certain particulars reminiscent of some of the markings on the glyphs.
But it may be that for the foreign element, if there be one, students would have to look even further east. Archæology is as yet but a new science. There is much work to be done in the Malay Peninsula and the Eastern Archipelago before the monuments of Cambodia and Indo-China have been explained. Archæologically this region has been little touched. The unsettled condition of the Independent Malay States, the indolence of the natives, the unhealthiness of the kampongs or villages, and the hostility of the tribes of the interior as well as the difficulties of transport have helped to keep the explorer away. But these difficulties are gradually disappearing, and in the near future some enthusiast who has the time and money will perhaps turn his attention to this field, when his name may once and for all become immortal in the annals of science as the discoverer of the cradle-land of the American Indian calculiform writing, at the same time linking the Old World for ever with the New.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Bishop Landa, first bishop of Yucatan, according to the evidence of a Jesuit chronicler, had everything appertaining to the Mayan religion, upon which he could lay his hands, destroyed. Five thousand idols, 13 large and 22 smaller stone altars, 27 manuscripts on deerskins, and 197 other manuscripts are catalogued as thus perishing.
[15] The word is said to be derived from kat, to ask, and tun, stone: i.e. the stone which when asked gives account, in allusion to the fact that at each katun a stone was set up to memorialize the date.