Prof. Daniel G. Brinton (a), gives an account of the illustration here produced on Pl. XIV A, which may be thus condensed:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY TENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XIV
THE STONE OF THE GIANTS, MEXICO.
The “Stone of the Giants” at Escamela near the city of Orizaba, Mexico, has been the subject of much discussion. Father Damaso Sotomayor sees in the inscribed figures a mystical allusion to the coming of Christ to the Gentiles and to the occurrences supposed in Hebrew myth to have taken place in the Garden of Eden. This stone was examined by Capt. Dupaix in the year 1808 and is figured in the illustrations to his voluminous narrative. The figure he gives [now presented as B on Pl. XIV] is, however, so erroneous that it yields but a faint idea of the real character and meaning of the drawing. It omits the ornament on the breast and also the lines along the right of the giant’s face, which as I shall show are distinctive traits. It gives him a girdle where none is delineated, and the relative size and proportions of all the three figures are quite distorted.
The rock on which the inscription is found is roughly triangular in shape, presenting a nearly straight border of 30 feet on each side. It is hard and uniform in texture and of a dark color. The length or height of the principal figure is 27 feet, and the incised lines which designate the various objects are deeply and clearly cut.
I now approach the decipherment of the inscriptions. Any one versed in the signs of the Mexican calendar will at once perceive that it contains the date of a certain year and day. On the left of the giant is seen a rabbit surrounded with ten circular depressions. These depressions are the well-known Aztec marks for numerals, and the rabbit represents one of the four astronomic signs by which they adjusted their chronologic cycles of fifty-two years. The stone bears a carefully dated record, with year and day clearly set forth. The year is represented to the left of the figure and is that numbered “ten” under the sign of the rabbit; the day of the year is number “one” under the sign of the fish.
These precise dates recurred once, and only once, every fifty-two years, and had recurred only once between the year of our era, 1450, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519-’20. Within the period named the year “ten rabbit” of the Aztec calendar corresponded with the year 1502 of the Gregorian calendar. It is more difficult to fix the day, but it is, I think, safe to say that, according to the most probable computations, the day, “one fish,” occurred in the first month of the year 1502, which month coincided in whole or in part with our February.
Such is the date on the inscription. Now, what is intimated to have occurred on that date? The clew to this is furnished by the figure of the giant. It represents an ogre of horrid mien with a death’s-head grin and formidable teeth, his hair wild and long, the locks falling down upon the neck. Suspended on the breast as an ornament is the bone of a human lower jaw, with its incisor teeth. The left leg is thrown forward as in the act of walking, and the arms are uplifted, the hands open, and the fingers extended as at the moment of seizing the prey or the victim. The lines about the umbilicus represent the knot of the girdle which supported the maxtli or breechcloth.
There is no doubt as to which personage of the Aztec pantheon this fear-inspiring figure represents. It is Tzontemoc Mictlantecutli, “the Lord of the Realm of the Dead, He of the Falling Hair,” the dread god of death and the dead. His distinctive marks are there, the death’s-head, the falling hair, the jaw bone, the terrible aspect, the giant size.
We possess several chronicles of the empire before Cortes destroyed it, written in the hieroglyphs which the inventive genius of the natives had devised. Taking two of these chronicles, one known as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, the other as the Codex Vaticanus, I turn to the year numbered “ten” under the sign of the rabbit and I find that both present the same record which I copy in the following figure.