Besides the columns mentioned in connection with doorways, many others are found whose use in most cases is not understood. They are both round and square, and usually, if not always, composed of several pieces placed one upon another. Among them may be mentioned the row of round columns on the terrace of the Governor's House at Uxmal, sixteen columns at Xul from the ruins of Nohcacab, thirty-six square columns on the summit platform of the pyramid at Aké, three hundred and eighty short pillars, also square, arranged round a square at Chichen, eight round pillars on the terrace of the round house at Mayapan, the reported line of square columns originally supporting a gallery at Mérida, and finally the monoliths of Sijoh, which latter may have been idols.
I now come to the interior and exterior decorations of the Yucatan buildings. In some apartments, particularly at Uxmal, the walls and ceilings present only the plain surface of the hewn blocks of stone. Most, however, are covered with a coating of fine white plaster, and in many this plastered surface is wholly or partially covered with paintings in bright colors. The paintings are much damaged in every case, but seem to have been executed with much care and skill. They are, apparently, never purely ornamental, but represent some definite objects, oftener than otherwise human beings in various attitudes and employments, battles, processions, and dances. In one or two localities, as at Kewick, a single stone is decorated with painting, while the rest of the surface is left plain. Niches in the walls of a room at Chichen, benches along the sides and ends at Tuloom, and a reported inner cornice at Zayi vary the usual interior monotony of the Maya apartments.
Interior sculptured decorations are of comparatively rare occurrence. A few of the lintels and jambs in each of the cities are covered with carvings; the steps leading up to the raised inner room at Kabah, together with the base of the walls at their sides, are sculptured; small circles are cut on the walls of the Casa del Adivino at Uxmal; a tablet of hieroglyphics stretches over the inner doorways of a corridor at Chichen; and a sculptured procession covers the wall and ceiling of a room on the Gymnasium wall at the same city. Hieroglyphic inscriptions are not very numerous, but are apparently identical in character with those we have seen at Copan. The only instance noted of interior decoration in stucco is that of the stucco birds in a room at Kabah, and a few stuccoed columns.
The exterior walls have almost invariably a cornice extending over the doorways round the whole circumference, and another near the roof. Several buildings have one or two additional cornices. Besides the cornices a very few fronts are plain; most are so below the lower cornice, but are decorated in their upper portions, as several are from top to bottom, with a mass of complicated sculptured designs, of which the reader has formed a clear idea by the drawings that have been presented. These ornaments, or the separate parts of each, are carved on the faces of cubical or rectangular blocks which are built into the face of the wall, each carved piece fitting most accurately into its place as part of a most elaborate whole. Some parts of the decoration are also joined to the walls by means of long tenons. In the human faces represented in profile among the ornamental carvings the flattened forehead, or contracted facial angle, is the most important feature noticed, and this is not as strongly marked as in many other regions of America. Excepting the phallus, which is prominent in many of the decorations, and which was probably a religious symbol, no ornaments of an obscene nature are noticed. Instead of stone, stucco is employed at Labphak in exterior decorations, and to a slight extent at Tuloom also. Over the front wall of some buildings, and from the centre of the roof of others, rises a lofty wall, sometimes in peaks, or turrets, apparently intended only as a basis for ornamentation. At Kabah this supplementary wall is plain and resembles from a distance a second story; on the Nunnery at Uxmal the ornamentation is in stone; but in other cases stucco is employed. Only one exterior wall, at Chunhuhu, is plastered; but all the exterior decorations are supposed to have been originally painted, traces of bright colors still remaining in sheltered positions.[V-106]
MAYA IDOLS.
The scarcity of idols among the Maya antiquities must be regarded as extraordinary. The double-headed animal and the statue of the Old Woman at Uxmal; the nude figure carved on a long flat stone and the small statue in two pieces, at Nohpat; the idol at Zayi reported as in use for a fountain; the rude unsculptured monoliths of Sijoh; the scattered and vaguely mentioned idols on the plains of Mayapan; and the figures in terra cotta collected by Norman at Campeche, complete the list; and many of these may have been originally merely decorations for buildings. That the inhabitants of Yucatan were idolators there is no possible doubt, and in connection with the magnificent shrines and temples erected by them, stone representatives of their deities carved with all their aboriginal art and rivaling or excelling the grand obelisks of Copan, might naturally be sought for. But in view of the facts it must be concluded that the Maya idols were small, and that such as escaped the destructive hands of the Spanish ecclesiastics, were buried by the natives, as the only means of preventing their desecration. Altars are as rare as idols; indeed, only at Tuloom are such relics definitely reported, and then they are of small size and of simple construction, merely hewn blocks on which copal was burned.
The almost complete lack of pottery, implements, and weapons is no less remarkable. Earthen relics, so abundant over nearly the whole surface of the Pacific States, even in the territory of the wildest tribes, where no ruined edifices are to be seen, are rarely met with in Yucatan and Chiapa, where the grandest ruins indicate the highest civilization. No trace of any metal has been found in Yucatan, although there is some historical evidence that copper implements were used by the Mayas to a slight extent in the sixteenth century, the material for which must have been brought from other parts of the country. Besides spear and arrow heads of flint or obsidian which have been found in small numbers in different parts of the state, and the implements included in the Camacho collection at Campeche already mentioned, there remains to be noticed "a collection of stone implements, gathered by Dr. J. W. Veile, in Yucatan," spoken of by Mr Foster as resembling in many respects similar relics from the Mississippi Valley. "The material employed is porphyry. Some of them are less than two inches in length, and the edges are polished as if from use. At the first glance it would be said that many of these implements were too small for practical purposes, but when we reflect that the material out of which the ancient inhabitants of that region cut their basso-relievos, was a soft coralline limestone, I find, by experiment, that such a tool is almost as effective as one of steel. Some of the implements, however, are cylindrical in shape, with the convex surface brought to an edge, and the opposite side ground out like a gouge."[V-107] There can be little doubt that the Maya sculpture was executed with tools of stone, although with such implements the complicated carvings on hard zapote lintels must have presented great difficulties even to aboriginal patience and skill.
THE MAYAS AS ARTISTS.
With respect to the artistic merit of the monuments of Yucatan, and the degree of civilization which they imply on the behalf of their builders, I leave the reader to form his own conclusion from the information which I have collected and presented as clearly as possible in the preceding pages. That they bear, as a whole, no favorable comparison with the works of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians, and perhaps other old-world peoples must, I believe, be granted. Yet they are most wonderful when considered as the handiwork of a people since lapsed into a condition little above savagism. I append in a note some quotations designed to show the impression these monuments have made on explorers and students.[V-108]