The first, fifth and sixth hieroglyphs are also unfinished; the third is Imix with its meaning intensified by the prefixed Yax (the luxuriantly growing grain?).
4. B is again tilling the ground in the manner already familiar to us. Under him lies his own head with the Imix-Kan sign, denoting food and drink, as a superfix. The first hieroglyph is the sign of the eighteenth month Cumhu, i.e., of the end of the year. The third is a Kin-Akbal, the fifth a Kan-Imix, the sixth is not finished, and the fourth may be intended for the head without the lower jaw, but it is carelessly drawn.
5. Page 43. The solicited rain begins. The goddess with the serpent on her head is pouring streams of water from her vessel.
The first hieroglyph repeats the month Cumhu, denoting the beginning of rain, before the close of the year; the third is the sign of the goddess met with on page 39b, here also with the sign for the west as a prefix; the fifth is her determinative, the serpent, and the fourth is Kan-Imix.
If the first sign in the first group is not regarded as the sign of the year, but as that of the sixteenth month (Pax) resembling
it, and the fact is taken into consideration that there is an interval of 34 days between the second and fourth groups and of 40 days between the second and fifth, this would be found to correspond with the interval between the months Pax and Cumhu.
Pages 43b—44b.
This is the fourth and last series of the first part of the Manuscript; the first is on page 24, the second on pages 31a to 32a, and the third on page 45a. The first series is quite by itself, but the second and third are similar in form to this fourth, though their initial days are different from those of the latter:—XIII Akbal, XIII Oc and III Lamat. All three begin with differences which are divisible by 13:—91, 104 and 78, equal to 7, 8, and 6 × 13. All three aim and arrive at numbers which are common factors of 260, 104 and 364, and therefore also of 3640, which last number is written out in the other two series, while in this series it can only appear later on and then, increased by multiplication.
Since this series has the difference 78, the week day numbers remain the same, while those of the month days must advance by 18 each, that is, from the hidden starting-point III Lamat they go on to III Cimi, III Kan, III Ik, III Ahau, etc., until the tenth member of the series is 10 × 78, i.e., 3 × 260 and thus comes again to the day III Lamat.
From 780 onward this number is itself always the difference of the higher terms of the present series. At the same time 780 days are the duration of the apparent revolution of Mars, which is here supplementary, as it were, since page 24 treated of the revolutions of the sun and of Venus, and also of those of the moon and of Mercury. Hence in the present passage we find the numbers 1560, 2340, 3120 and 3900, always accompanied by the day III Lamat. The larger numbers require a few corrections; I read them 13,260 (17 × 780), 15,600 (20 × 780), 31,200 (40 × 780), 62,400 (80 × 780) and 72,540 (93 × 780). The very largest again are correctly set down; first 109,200 equal to 140 × 780, but here also equal to 1050 × 104 and 300 × 364, so that in this series the goal aimed at is not reached until later than it is in