Fig. 39. Late Sculpture from Chichen Itza. The headdress resembles that worn by the rulers on the highlands of Mexico.
The earliest temples have narrow vaulted rooms, heavy walls, and a single doorway. The rooms increase in width, the walls decrease in thickness, the doorways multiply till the spaces between them become piers and finally columns. The support for the heavy roof comb taxed the structural ingenuity of the Mayan architects. The solving of this problem is marked by successive advances and since mechanical science goes forward rather than backward the relative order of structures is fairly certain. Moreover, many buildings are closely associated with dated monuments, tablets, lintels, or stelæ. Still another evidence of architectural sequence is seen in structures that have been enlarged by the addition of wings or by the enclosing of the old parts under new masonry.
Books of Chilam Balam.
We now turn to a very different kind of history, the digests of ancient chronicles in the Mayan language but in Spanish script which managed to survive in the so-called Books of Chilam Balam along with other texts, ceremonial and medical. There are five chronicles, the two longest covering 68 katuns before the coming of the Spaniards in 1517. We now know that these katuns were time units consisting of 7200 days, or nearly 20 years, and that they were designated by their final day which was always a day called Ahau associated with a number, 1 and 13, in a peculiar sequence. A katun with the same designation returns in 13 × 7200 days or about 256 years. Such a completion, counted especially from a Katun 8 Ahau, was called the “doubling back of the katuns” or, as we would say, the completion of a cycle. The count of the katuns used in the chronicles was really part and parcel of a fuller count just as a year ’22 implies a position in one of the centuries of our Christian era.
The chronicles unfortunately give few names of chieftains and cities and few outstanding events. Chichen Itza is the city most fully concerned and an early occupation is recorded, then an abandonment for some two and a half centuries. After its re-establishment the Toltecs enter Yucatan and capture this capital. The first part of the chronicles has the atmosphere of myth rather than history, but a calendarial adjustment of some kind is mentioned in one place. This was an event which took place in 503 A. D. as we shall see in another place.
The first rough correlation between the time count on the ancient monuments and the time count in the chronicles was made on the theory that a dated lintel at Chichen Itza had to be placed in the first occupation of the city: when this was done the beginning of the chronicles was found to proceed from an important round number in the old day count while the abandonment of Chichen Itza coincided with the abandonment of all the cities of the Mayan First Empire. We must now turn attention to the famous calendar.
The Mayan Time Counts.
The passage of time, seen in finer and finer degree in the course of human life, the succession of summer and winter, the waxing and waning moons, the alternation of day and night, the upward and downward sloping of the sun, and the swinging dial of the stars, are phenomena that no human group has failed to notice. Longer periods than those included within the memory of the oldest men (presenting an imperfect reflection of the memory of men still older) are found only in those favored centers where a serviceable system of counting has been developed. Mythology has a content of history but hardly of chronology. Tradition, when organized by the priesthood, may be reasonably dependable for perhaps two hundred years.
The year and the month are the basis of all primitive time systems, the former depending on the recurring seasons, the latter on recurring moons. Both of these are expressed in days. Unfortunately, the day is not contained evenly in either the month or the year, nor do these larger time measures show any simple relation to each other as regards length. The history of the calendar is one of compromise and correction.
The Mayan calendars were made possible by: first, the knowledge of astronomical time periods; second, the possession of a suitable notation system; third, the discovery of a permutation system of names and numbers.